Assignment 3: A Guide to Researching & Writing in Your Discipline
Dates:
First Draft Due: Friday October 19th
Second Draft Due: Monday October 22nd
Polished Draft Due: Friday October 26th
The Assignment:
Congratulations! The Writing Center was so happy with your previous article in which you
compared 3 disciplines that they would now like you to do a follow-up article. This time
they would like you to explain to new undergraduates researching and writing in your
particular discipline.
Therefore, you will explain
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What kinds of topics people in your discipline research
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The most important databases they use when they want to conduct secondary
research
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How they make knowledge in that discipline (that is, what kinds of things they
research and whether they do primary and or secondary research),
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The interpretive features of that discipline (how they interpret their research),
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The types of journals they publish in and the most important journals in the discipline
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The types of papers they write and for whom
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The stylistic features of the writing that is done in that discipline
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The appropriate style manual for the discipline
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You might also want to explain how writing on the undergraduate level differs from
the kind of writing professors in the discipline do.
Therefore to do this effectively, you will explore the knowledge making strategies or
methods of inquiry in your discipline, the interpretive conventions, and the stylistic
conventions in writing. You will use quotations from the interview with the professor that
you conducted and the articles you found to illustrate your ideas. You will also draw on
your descriptions of the databases researchers use and the journals you found. You may
also draw on your 215 textbook or textbooks that you use in your particular discipline.
Purpose:
First, you will learn how and what professionals in your major field research and write
about. You will again engage the steps of creating a researched essay using interviews,
professional journals, and databases as sources. And you will develop your skills of writing
an informative argument.
Format:

Typed, double-spaced with one inch margins
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
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Put your name on each page and number pages
Give your work a title
Include a Works Cited or Reference page depending on whether MLA, APA, or some
other style manual is appropriate for your discipline
Helpful Invention Steps:
1. Conduct your interview with a professor to find out about the discipline, the topics
that people research, the types of research they do, the kinds of papers they write
and where they publish them, key journals in the discipline, and helpful databases and
so on.
2. Next, write a description of your discipline, thinking about the different areas the
discipline entails. Are there divisions within the discipline for example? Do people
specialize in one particular area? Look at your textbook to see how Ann Merle Feldman
writes introductions to each discipline to give you an idea of how you might do this.
3. Make a list of the 3 or 4 of the most important scholarly (academic) journals that
someone in your discipline would read. Then explain what electronic databases people
working in that field use to conduct their research on what others in the discipline
have written.
4. Go and look at 2 of the journals in the library and write a description of one journal in
which you discuss the type of publication this is, how people submit to the journal,
whether it is peer reviewed. Note how often it comes out, who seems to be the
audience, and the kinds of articles the journal publishes. Note also whether the
journal also publishes book reviews, letters, and so on? . When you have done this, you
will be able to identify features of these journals. Then look at several articles in
some journals. You should then be able to answer the following questions:
What kinds of questions interest scholars in my major field?
What do scholars in my major field write about?
How do they go about researching the topics?
How do they present their findings to other scholars and/or to the public?
5. Now make copies of at least two articles that you found in the journals. These articles
should be representative of discipline, but you should be able to read them. It would
be sensible to pick articles on a topic in your discipline that you find interesting and
that you might be able to use in the research paper (assignment 4) that you will write.