Writing in the Disciplines
What is Writing in the Disciplines (WID)?
Writing in the Disciplines (WID) is an approach to helping students grow as writers while at the same time using writing as a means for helping students understand the ideas, theories and ways of knowing intrinsic to a course and its discipline. WID grew out of the recognition that while there are practices and expectations of writing across academic fields (e.g., that claims are appropriately supported, that sources are properly cited), there are differences in epistemology, form, and rhetorical conventions that make teaching academic writing in a generic manner problematic (or perhaps impossible). That means that if our students are to become better writers, and if they are to learn how to better employ writing as a learning tool, they will need to be instructed from within particular disciplines.
Goals of Duke's WID Courses
While a WID course should help students become more proficient writers in a general sense, it should also help them understand how writing works in the discipline--what writing does. This might include helping students understand the purpose, mechanics and conventions of a particular form (e.g., the scientific research report, the history review, or the business case study), what scholars in the field consider legitimate evidence (e.g., government documents, literary quotations, or geologic core samples), or how scholars select or create problems to write about.
What you can expect of your students
All Duke students take Writing 20 (Academic Writing) during their first year here. You can expect students that have completed this course to come to you with
• Strategies for both revising and proofreading their work (and an understanding of the differences between them)
• Experience responding to the written work of classmates
• General knowledge of academic citation practices
• An understanding that claims need to be clearly articulated and adequately supported
• An understanding of plagiarism and how to avoid it
While you cannot expect your students' writing to be error-free, you can expect them to know what constitutes reasonably correct prose. Although you may choose to help individual students with recurring errors, you should not feel that "teaching grammar" is your responsibility.
For more on what to expect from your students and ideas on how to help them transfer what they learned in Writing 20 to your class, see Building on Writing 20.
What you can expect from us
The University Writing program offers a variety of services for WID instructors and their students. For instructors we offer both special workshops tailored to the needs of your department and individual conferences. We can assist you with
• designing an effective WID course that integrates the writing tasks with the work of the course
• crafting writing assignments that will encourage students to do the work you want them to
• setting up in-class workshopping of papers to help students give each other effective feedback
• reducing plagiarism and helping students understand citation practices in your field
• grading and responding to student writing including ways to get students to attend to your comments while saving you time marking papers
For your students, we have tutors available at our Writing Studio. Students can get help with all phases of writing--from getting started on an assignment through revising to proofreading and editing. They can also get help with sentence-level problems including grammar and punctuation.
To set up an individual appointment or a group workshop, or for general guidance in helping students with their writing, contact Cary Moskovitz at cmosk@duke.edu.