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 journalists or biologists learn to think and write like the professionals they become? Do we learn to think and write primarily by enculturation-or can be 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