Original content by Bethany Cole

Generally, WID assignments are reserved for upper level students and happen within major-specific courses. However, second semester composition students will be prepared to successfully complete WID assignments oriented towards their field of interest. Having spent an entire semester on learning how to read in the disciplines, students are now ready to apply in their own writing what has already been modeled for them. They will come to the task knowledgeable of genres, mechanics, and styles as they apply within specific disciplines, prepared to produce the kinds of writing they have spent so much time reading.

In “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines,” Michael Carter breaks down the why and the how in regard to teaching students WID. Generally, professors learned to write in an apprenticeship situation rather than through explicit instruction; because of this, they are not immediately aware of the ways writing is specific to their discipline (Carter, 385). To compensate for this, Carter proposes that faculty begin by looking at disciplines as “active ways of knowing” rather than “repositories and delivery systems for relatively static content knowledge” (387). This will lead to a conception of writing as a way of knowing within a particular discipline, a way of “both recovering knowledge and generating new knowledge” (386).

Most of the foundational work for WID will have already been covered in the previous semester. Having spent time learning how to read various kinds of texts, students will already be primed to see genres as ways of knowing, as unique processes used by a discipline. Instruction in the second semester should continue to emphasize that these forms of writing are “grounded in the disciplines themselves” (388). This will shift their thinking away from the view that writing is a generalized, one-size-fits-all activity towards an understanding of writing as a link between doing and knowing within a field (388). Thus, students will see writing as a way of “giving shape to particular ways of knowing in the disciplines” (390).

In terms of structuring the curriculum, the end goal of the semester would be for the student to produce a piece of writing within one of four “metagenres” identified by Carter. These metagenres broadly represent the ways that writing may speak to a particular rhetorical situation, ways that simultaneously define and are defined by that situation (394). Below are Carter’s four metagenres as well as specific genres he places within each category:

• business plans
• feasibility reports
• management plans
• marketing plans
• reports to management
• project reports
• project proposals
• technical memoranda
• technical reports

• laboratory report
• poster
• poster presentation
• research proposal
• research report
• scientific article
• scientific presentation

• Research paper

• Artefacts
• Performances
• Portfolio
• critique

At the outset of the course, students would be assigned to write a particular genre relative to their intended major (or, if they are undeclared, they may choose one based on their interests). In class-wide discussions, the emphasis would be on the general principles of rhetoric and writing that apply across the metagenres. Group would be more focused, tailored for clusters of students writing within the same metagenre. By the end of the semester, they will each have the skills necessary to produce a well-written example of a discipline-specific genre.

When you combine the two semesters, one on RID and the other on WID, the outcome will be students who will enter their disciplines armed with the tools of knowledge-making relative to that discipline. Even if a student goes on to change their major after the first year, they will have spent an entire semester learning how to read texts from every metagenre. Not only that, they will have also learned to implement general rules and practices that are applicable across genres. By devoting a year to RID and WID, students will be capable of more than rote imitation of writing forms. They will have both observed and applied they ways that writing is knowledge-making in the disciplines.

Carter, Michael. “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” College Composition and Communication 58, no. 3 (2007): 385-418. Accessed October 6, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20456952