WAC Consultant Dennis Bohr and University Writing Center Consultants contributed to the creation of these files. Bohr also solicited feedback from professors in the respective disciplines to ensure the accuracy of the guidelines. To understand how to read and use the Writing About Guide (WAG) for your disciplines, read our Anatomy of a WAG.
When you document one of the guidelines, we recommend the following citation:
MLA
"Title of the Guideline." University Writing Center/ Writing Across the Curriculum. Appalachian State University, 2021, <https://wac.appstate.edu/resources-teaching-writing/writing-about-guidelines-wags>.
APA
Title of guideline. (2021). University Writing Center/ Writing Across the Curriculum. Appalachian State University. Retrieved from https://wac.appstate.edu/resources-teaching-writing/writing-about-guidelines-wags
Each Writing About Guideline follows the same structure to provide basic information about the conventions and expectations of writing in the field named in the title. The following “anatomy” explains the purpose that each section serves and suggests how you might find it useful if you’re new to the DISCOURSE COMMUNITY.
This section offers a broad statement about the field’s purposes with a particular focus on the types of things members of the community study, how they study, and who their most common audiences are. For instance, someone working in computer science may spend most of their time writing computer code that will be read by computers and other programmers, while someone working in philosophy may produce texts for everyone from other philosophers to the general public, but who they are writing to will impact how they write.
This section lists the most common types of writing (also known as genres) in the field. There is often wide variety in this section because the types of writing will depend on the type of work you do. Moreover, we have tried to include the types of writing required of students in the major. Although not everyone will write in all of the forms listed here, as someone entering the field’s discourse community as a novice, understanding what the most common types of writing are and who writes them will increase your expertise.
This section introduces you to the types of evidence that are most commonly accepted by members of the field’s discourse community. As with other sections, this list is not exhaustive but focused on what you are most likely to encounter as a new member of the field. For instance, the results of your experiment in a biology lab would not be appropriate evidence in a history class, while, in contrast, the journal of a Civil Rights activist would be a powerful primary source for a history class but not a biology class
This section introduces you to the commonly shared writing conventions in your field. For instance, passive voice is a common practice for constructing sentences in lab reports, but it is frowned upon in the humanities (literature, philosophy, etc.) and increasingly in the social sciences (sociology, psychology, etc.), where active voice is considered to be more direct and ethical. While these are typically recognized conventions, it is always important that you check with your individual instructors when completing an assignment, as there are nuances in sub-fields and interdisciplinary work that are not within the scope of our guide.
This section might be the most limited in our guides because all disciplines and fields have extensive terminology specific to their areas of study (enough to create their own dictionaries or lexicons). For instance, our WAC Glossary offers an example of how the word “analysis” is defined in several different disciplines and fields. The terms listed in our WAGs are those identified by faculty at AppState as being the most relevant for the students in their major; thus, they are very context-dependent.
This section lists the standard citation styles used in the field. Although there are standard styles for most fields, the more interdisciplinary your area of study, the more likely that you might be expected to use different styles for different courses or writing purposes. For instance, if you are studying chemistry to be a chemist, you will probably follow the American Chemical Society (ACS) style, but if you are studying chemistry to work in fermentation sciences, you may also need to be somewhat familiar with APA, AP, and others, depending on your courses and area of focus.
This section lists the sources consulted in the creation of the Writing About Guide (WAG).