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?

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

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.