Michael Carter Ways of Knowing , Doing , and Writing in the Disciplines

CCC 58:3 / FEBRUARY 2007 Those of us who work in writing in the disciplines (WID) are aware of a disjunction between the way we conceive the relationship between writing and knowing in the disciplines and the way so many faculty across our colleges and universities conceive that relationship. This disjunction may be quickly summed up as the division between writing in the disciplines and writing outside the disciplines. According to David R. Russell, writing outside the disciplines may be explained in part by the seeming “transparency” of writing: because professors typically learn to write in their disciplines not by any direct instruction but by a process of slow acculturation through various apprenticeship discourses, they are unable to see that writing itself is specific to the discipline. Consequently, faculty in the disciplines continue to conceive of writing as generalizable to all disciplines and therefore distinct from disciplinary knowledge, to be learned as a general skill outside the disciplines (Writing 14–20, “Writing Across” 55–56). Michael Carter