Reading and Writing about the Disciplines

Reading and Writing about the Disciplines focuses on developing first-year college students academic literacy, a set of reading, thinking, writing, and researching skills required of an expert or a professional, by introducing them to the rhetorical conventions of academic writing in and beyond the discipline they wish to explore as their major. Behind this approach is a conviction, or a philosophy, that if some of the critical thinking and writing skills we teach in our disciplines hold cross-curricular values, then we are able to transfer our expertise to the teaching of the basic skill set embodied in academic literacy and required by expert performance in other disciplines. Reading and Writing about the Disciplines, therefore, guides writing instructors to transfer their expertise to reading discourses in different disciplines and teaching students how to analyze them rhetorically. By doing so, writing instructors make the transferability and relevance of reading and writing skills to other disciplines obvious to students immediately in their first college year, instead of waiting for them to transfer the skills to writing for their disciplines on their own in later semesters.