English 215 Project Three:
A Guide to Researching & Writing in Your Discipline

Composing Schedule:
Drafts Due: T 11/2, Th 11/4
Polished Draft Due: T 11/9

Project Links

The Assignment:
For the previous projects you were asked to summarize and to analyze the discipline-specific features of a publication in the social sciences and to write an overview of the three broad disciplines in the university: the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences and a synthesis essay of four to seven pages that analyzes the similarities and differences you discovered about how the three major these disciplines in the university work with and write about the issue of gender difference.

For this project, you will build on the work you’ve done in the two previous projects and this time your purpose is to explain to new undergraduates researching and writing in your particular discipline. Consider this: You have been asked to contribute to a new campus publication designed to give students a thorough introduction to writing and researching in the various majors to help them understand how each major is a discourse community with its own set of practices.

Therefore, you will explain

• What kinds of topics people in your discipline research
• The most important databases they use when they want to conduct secondary research
• How they make knowledge in that discipline (that is, what kinds of things they research and whether they do primary and or secondary research),
• The interpretive features of that discipline (how they interpret their research),
• The types of journals they publish in and the most important journals in the discipline
• The types of papers they write and for whom
• The stylistic features of the writing that is done in that discipline
• The appropriate style manual for the discipline
• You might also want to explain how writing on the undergraduate level differs from the kind of writing professors in the discipline do.

To do this effectively, you will explore the knowledge making strategies or methods of inquiry in your major, the interpretive conventions, and the stylistic conventions in writing. You will use quotations from the interview with the professor that you conducted and the articles you found to illustrate your ideas. You will also draw on your descriptions of the databases researchers use and the journals you found. You may also draw on your textbooks that you use in your particular discipline.

Purpose:
First, you will learn how and what professionals in your major field research and write about. You will again engage the steps of creating a researched essay using interviews, professional journals, and databases as sources. And you will develop your skills of writing an informative argument.

Format:

• Typed, double-spaced with one inch margins
• Put your name on each page and number pages
• Give your work a title
• Include a Works Cited or Reference page depending on whether MLA, APA, or some other style manual is appropriate for your discipline

Heuristics

1. Conduct your interview with a professor to find out about the discipline, the topics that people research, the types of research they do, the kinds of papers they write and where they publish them, key journals in the discipline, and helpful databases and so on. Ask your professor about his or her speciality in the field. What kinds of research and papers do graduate students produce? What kinds of papers and what types of research does he or she assign undergraduates? Then type up your notes and include a description of your major, explaining the different areas the major entails. Are there divisions within the major for example? Do people specialize in one particular area?
   
2. Based on your interview and the work we did in class on researching in the various disciplines, choose two library databases that someone in your major would use. Make sure that at least one is specific to your field (so both cannot be general indexes). Now write a description of each database, explaining what it is, what it indexes, years it covers, types of journals it indexes, whether full text articles are included, and how to do a search and retrieve an article.
   
3. Make a list of the 3 or 4 of the most important scholarly (academic) journals that someone in your major would read. You should know which journals are important based on what your professor said and you can also look in ulrichs database http://0-www.ulrichsweb.com.library.lib.asu.edu/ulrichsweb/ available through ASU’s eletronic indexes—type in ulrichs in the “name” box. Then go to the library and look at 2 of the journals in the library to see what they look like in print. Now write a description of each journal in which you discuss the type of publication this is, how people submit to the journal, whether it is peer reviewed. Note how often it comes out, who seems to be the audience, and the kinds of articles the journal publishes. Note also whether the journal also publishes book reviews, letters, and so on? When you have done this, you will be able to identify features of these journals.
   
4. Then look at several articles in some journals and answer the following questions:
   
   o What kinds of questions interest scholars in my major field?
   o What do scholars in my major field write about?
   o How do they go about researching the topics?
   o How do they present their findings to other scholars and/or to the public?
   
5. Now make copies of at least two articles that you found in the journals. These articles should be representative of the major, but you should be able to read them. It would be sensible to pick articles on a topic in your major that you find interesting and that you might be able to use in the research paper (assignment 4) that you will write. Then after you have skimmed through the articles, make a list of writing features that you feel are typical.