Learning to Write in the Social Sciences

Now that programs to infuse writing across the curriculum are in place at many colleges and universities, we can begin to distinguish programs in terms of their organization and curriculum. Two general approaches stand out, distinguished primarily by who is charged with teaching writing. In the first approach, all or nearly all departments teach writing. Schools that have adopted such programs typically require freshman English and at least one course having a significant writing component in the student's major discipline. The second approach is essentially an extension of freshman English instruction, where writing is taught by an English department or a faculty charged with teaching writing. Typically, a writing course is offered at the junior year in variations suited for particular disciplines or groups of disciplines. At the University of Texas at Austin, for example, four variants are proposed-Fine Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Technologies, and Business. Such courses have precedents in the business and technical writing courses that English departments have offered for many years. What is new is that departments charged with teaching writing across the curriculum have had to devise discipline-specific courses that challenge the old formalist assumption that "good writing" is monolithic. One troublesome group of disciplines for such courses is the social sciences. The social sciences present a complex array of writing. In anthroplogy, for example, physical anthropologists write articles that resemble those of natural scientists while cultural anthropologists sometimes write essays that resemble those of literary scholars. Further complicating the situation at Texas is that students in the traditional social science disciplines-psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and economics-are relatively few in number in comparison to students majoring in communication and education, which are lumped together with the social sciences.