Academic Communities/Disciplinary Conventions

ACADEMIC COMMUNITIES/DISCIPLINARY CONVENTIONS is a reader that revolutionizes writing across the curriculum texts by arranging readings around topics rather than disciplines. Each of the text's chapters is organized around a shared topic, such as Gender and Sexuality or Capital Economies, then divided into Science, Social Science, and Humanities section that address the chapter's topic from the discipline's perspective. Additionally, the text contains an array of assignments—all with clear contexts set up for the students.

With over 55 readings, the text represents a wide variety of disciplines, and offers more cutting-edge topics including ethnic studies, evolutionary psychology, and social ecology.

Among its features are:

• Readings that range from journalistic essays featured in popular periodicals to scientific reports and other pieces written for academics and specialists.
• Apparatus accompanying the readings which include critical reading, class discussion, and directed freewrite questions.
• An introduction that outlines a model writing process, and introduces students to important issues of purpose and audience.
• An MLA/APA documentation section.

Unique in approach, this book explores the similarities and differences in various discipline-specific epistemologic and rhetorical conventions—and how the two are related. Each chapter is organized around a shared content topic, then divided into Science, Social Science and Humanities sections, and then two specific disciplinary units—each of which addresses the chapter's topic from the discipline's perspective.

Features essays that span a range of genres, audiences, and levels of difficulty, and that explore timely and engaging topics—within such broad areas as identity and consciousness, gender and sexuality, capital economics, and the environment—from the perspectives of the more traditional fields, such as sociology, literary studies, biochemistry, and others, as well as relatively new and exciting fields, such as evolutionary psychology, computer science, genetics, ethnic studies, lesbian and gay studies, social ecology, and cultural studies. Articles range from those written in a "popular" and reader-friendly journalistic tone, to more difficult, scholarly pieces. Includes the scientific report format as well as the academic essay typically produced by humanists. Rhetorical modes and skills are discussed as they arise within writing assignments so that their specificity in different contexts is clear.

For anyone interested in the similarities and differences of the techniques and conventions of academic writing in the different disciplines.