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A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across the curriculum.
Given the current emphasis on disciplinary discourses, it's not surprising that so little recent attention has been devoted to identifying conventions that are universal in academic discourse. In this essay, I argue that there are shared features that unite academic writing, and that by introducing these features to first-year students we provide them with knowledge they can apply and refine in each new discipline they encounter.
Some scholars believe that making generalizations about academic writing is impossible. Just as there is "no autonomous, generalizable skill called ball using or ball handling that can be learned and then applied to all ball games," David Russell argues, there is no "autonomous, generalizable skill or set of skills called 'writing' that can be learned and then applied to all genres or activities" (57, 59). Because there are no "general" skills that students can learn and transfer to all writing situations, some suggest that students would benefit more from learning about the ways writing conventions vary across academic disciplines and discourse communities (Wardle 784).
Others (such as Berkenkotter and Huckin; Freedman) believe that writing conventions can't be taught and that trying to teach them "assumes that one can learn to write academic genres by adhering to a definite rule-set" (Lynch-Biniek). But linguistic scholars (including Swales; MacDonald; Bazerman; Biber) have demonstrated that patterns and formulas prevail in academic writing, and many have described the benefits of teaching writing conventions to students (see, for example, Williams and Colomb). By teaching conventional ways to introduce topics, identify sources, and organize arguments, for instance, we provide "a valuable tool for clarifying academic mysteries to large numbers of students" (Birkenstein and Graff). In fact, Wilder and Wolfe found that students who were explicitly taught language conventions in a literature course wrote better essays and reported comparable or higher levels of enjoyment in the course than those receiving no instruction in writing conventions (170).
As Hassel and Giordano noted in a recent TETYC article, the need for explicit instruction in writing conventions is particularly acute at open-admission two-year colleges, where many students, including those testing into college-level...