Writing in the Disciplines A Reader for Writers

TO OUR READERS IN APPRECIATION In preparing the fifth edition ofWriting in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writers,we listened closely to the suggestions of students and instructors who had used the fourth edition. Since everyone was satisfied with the first part of the book, for the most part we left Part One, "Reading and Writing in the Academic Disciplines," unchanged. As requested, we reworked the second half of the book. A number of the readings are new, and in Chapters 11 and 12, we have introduced new topics. To the readers who suggested these changes, we say "thank you" for helping us strengthen this book. ORGANIZATION AND APPROACH Writing in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writersserves two functions. It explains how to use reading sources as idea banks for college papers, and it teaches fundamental academic writing strategies: reading, paraphrasing, summarizing, quoting, organizing, drafting, revising, editing, synthesizing, analyzing, researching, and developing arguments. It also provides an anthology of readings in the humanities, the natural sciences and technology, and the social sciences, with articles representing various rhetorical approaches across academic disciplines. These articles, along with the accompanying instructional apparatus, help develop students' abilities to think critically and reason cogently as they read, compose, and revise. The activities and questions that accompany each reading encourage students to approach academic writing as a process: to preview the source, set reading goals, and ponder the general topic before reading; to annotate the text and think critically while reading; and to reflect on the source and identify information content, form, organization, expository and stylistic features, and rhetorical elements after reading. Students are also shown how to draw on annotations, notes, and preliminary writing to produce first drafts of academic essays and how to revise essays at the drafting stage as well as later in the writing process. Additional activities help students to use ideas from different sources to produce synthesis essays and research papers. Chapter 1 presents active reading strategies that help students engage the ideas in academic texts and incorporate them in their own writing by paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting. Chapter 2 presents the writing process, including analyzing the assignment, planning, organizing, drafting, revising, and editing. In addition, Chapter 2 examines essay structures, from the introduction and thesis statement through the body of the essay to its conclusion, and teaches students to write essays of response to a source. Chapter 3 focuses on essays that draw on two or more sources, including compare-and-contrast essays and synthesis. Chapter 4 covers essays of argumentation, analysis, and evaluation, with special attention to literary analysis; and Chapter 5 focuses on library research strategies and writing research papers. In the eight succeeding chapters, we provide fifty-three reading selections. We have organized the anthology in Chapters 6 through 13 by dividing the academic curriculum into three major fields: the natural sciences and technology, the social sciences, and the humanities. Each chapter inWriting in the Disciplinesdeals with a topic that is widely studied in the field. For example, the social sciences section has chapters on redefining the American family and on social class and inequality. The reading selections help students view each topic from a range of perspectives, and they provide diverse views from experts within the discipline and from journalists and specialists in other academic fields. Most of the articles are written for nonspecialized readers, not for majors in particular fields. We believe these articles, derived from popular as well as scholarly sources, represent the types of readings many professors assign in introductory and lower-level courses. PsychKennedy, Mary Lynch is the author of 'Writing in the Disciplines A Reader for Writers', published 2003 under ISBN 9780131823822 and ISBN 0131823825.