This is what language specialist Ann M. Johns says about what she calls “Disciplinary Practices Interviews”: Johns recommends that university students cast themselves as “researchers.” Students, she says, need to go outside the classroom “to observe, to question, and to develop hypotheses” about the way disciplines work. “One productive way for students to test their hypotheses about texts, roles, and contexts, and about writers’ purposes, is to interview DS [discipline specific] faculty.”

Ann M. Johns, Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies, Cambridge UP, 1997.

Try to develop your own questions about the ways writing works in the disciplines. Here’s a few to get you started:

The Disciplinary Practices Interview

Seek out a few willing professors from different fields and ask them the following questions:

  • Why did you choose your discipline as a field of study?
  • What was the subject of your dissertation? Could you describe the methodology you used?
  • What is the hallmark of good writing in your field? Can you show me an example?
  • Did you receive any especially important advice on becoming a writer in your field?
  • Do researchers in your field use language in a specialized manner? Can you show me examples of words or phrases particular to your discipline?
  • How do you know when you’ve got a good topic? Where do you go to find evidence for such a topic?
  • Do writers in your field have a typical approach to such topics? Where do you start researching and writing?
  • What are the important topics in your field?
  • Have these topics, or the emphasis on these topics, changed over time?
  • How do you know what to look for? How did you learn when you were an undergraduate?
  • How do you organize your findings?
  • Can you recommend a particular style guide or handbook that you’ve found useful?
  • How does the kind of writing practiced in your field differ from that practiced in other fields?

One of the key purposes of this site is to encourage integrative learning–to understand how disciplinary perspectives and world views differ and why they differ. And, if we allow that there are questions so complex that no one discipline can answer them fully, we will need a way to integrate multiple perspectives. Focusing on the writing conventions and assumptions representing the disciplines can give us extraordinary insight into not only the way the disciplines work but also how we might combine the work of those disciplines.

Compare two or more of your Disciplinary Practice Interviews, and try to identify where the writing in those disciplines differs and where the writing has elements in common. Look for shared concepts, assumptions, and theories. Look for the ways different disciplines focus on different aspects of the same issue. Ask yourself and those interviewed how a clash of disciplinary views might lead to innovative ideas and solutions that would not be possible within a single discipline. You might ask, for example, what constitutes “evidence” in each discipline? How the topic is defined differently by different disciplines? Why a discipline like English Studies insists on quoting directly, while other disciplines prefer paraphrasing?

While differences are important, proponents of  interdisciplinary and integrative studies argue that we can learn the most by focusing on what the disciplines have in common, with the aim of creating a common ground. For a concise discussion of how this might be done, see Utrecht University’s “Integrating Multi-Disciplinary Insights by Creating Common Ground.”

For other ideas, or to compare notes, go to The Interviews recorded on this site, where students ask experienced faculty to reflect on their writing assumptions, conventions, and practices.

Once you’ve gathered your Disciplinary Practice data, you might want to represent it visually as, say, a Venn Diagram. For an elaborate example of how to represent disciplinary writing, go to the Charting the Disciplines page of this website.

The Rhetoric of the Quiz

You might also wonder about why we’ve included so many quizzes on this site. The quiz, says language scholar Michael Jarrett, “requires readers to access specialized knowledge.” He sees quizzes as “messages to the already confirmed,” as a way of reinforcing membership in a group or discipline. We hope that working through some of these quizzes will reinforce key principles about writing in specific disciplines; and we encourage you to share them with others, to extend further the number of those “already confirmed.”

Try your hand at creating your own quiz, using the models presented for the Humanities, the Sciences, the Social Sciences, and for Business and Professional Writing.