Students in the Faculty of Arts can take WRDS 350 to satisfy the writing component of the Writing and Research Requirement in the Faculty of Arts.
WRDS 350 Knowledge-Making in the Disciplines is an advanced scholarly research and writing course. WRDS 350 allows students to build on what they already know about academic research and writing, specifically by studying specific features of scholarly writing that are relevant to their own research interests or academic disciplines.
This course is an advanced writing course ideal for upper-level transfer students in the Faculty of Arts who need to complete the writing component of the Arts Writing and Research Requirement.
Course overview
Welcome to WRDS 350. This course provides you with a unique opportunity to engage in the study of your discipline’s knowledge-making practices and the uses of language that both represent and enact these practices. What does this mean? First and foremost, this is an advanced scholarly writing course. In it, you will learn about and produce a range of research genres that represent the university’s ways of using language (e.g. research proposal, research paper). So, yes, you will learn how to produce scholarly texts. But, more importantly and perhaps more interestingly, this course invites you to consider why we produce texts in the ways that we do, to consider questions about the contexts that shape researchers’ motives for communicating and for communicating in specific ways. Why do philosophers write the way they do, and why is this writing so different from the way political scientists and anthropologists write? Why does ‘argument’ seem to mean different things in art history and economics? Why do writers in psychology use fewer integral citations than writers in sociology?
This course recognizes that, while you are not a newcomer to scholarly practice, you may not be familiar with your discipline’s practices as discursive practices, as ways of knowing, thinking, speaking, writing, and of being. So, to answer questions such as the ones posed above, we will draw on current theories of and methods for analyzing scholarly communication: discourse theory, new rhetorical genre theory, and corpus-supported applied linguistics. The aim of this course is to introduce you to the analytic frameworks that researchers, interested in the examination of disciplinary discourses, use.
In short, this course invites you to see yourself as an anthropologist of sorts, one who examines scholarly texts as cultural artifacts that can tell you something about the contexts that inform textual production in the disciplines.
By the end of the course, engaged learners will be able to:
- Analyze the roles that disciplinary cultures, identities, and politics play in how knowledge is made and research genres are written and circulate.
- Distinguish between and critically compare different disciplinary discourses and practices.
- Design and carry out a theoretically-informed research project on the research writing that exists in your discipline(s).
- Write and present in a variety of research genres, including a research proposal, research presentation, and research paper.
- Engage in scholarly practices with integrity and in the spirit of fostering a community, one defined by principles of inclusion and scholarly collaboration.