Writing in the Research University: A Darwinian Study of WID with Cases from Civil Engineering (Research and Teaching in Rhetoric and Composition)

How do engineers learn to think and write like engineers? How do art historians learn to think and write like art historians? How do journalists or biologists learn to think and write like the professionals that they become? Do we learn to think and write primarily by enculturation-or can we be taught how to write in various disciplines? If anything can be taught, what practices stand out as best practices? Needed to address these questions is a cohesive theory of writing in the disciplines (WID), one that accounts for both discipline-specific features of writing and features that cut across many disciplines. To that end, this book re-examines contemporary sociohistoric theories of writing from an evolutionary perspective. An evolutionary perspective of WID suggests that disciplines (complexes of academic arguments) not only change, but they evolve much like species do via a dual process of variation and selection in forums of competition. An Evolutionary perspective puts a spotlight on what endures as well as what changes in complexes of academic arguments.