Journal of Business and Technical Communication

In a profound sense, the teaching of business and technical communication (BTC) is always already the teaching of writing in the disciplines (WID). Yet the WID dimension of BTC is often hard to see. The question this article addresses is, How might the North American tradition of BTC communication courses be more consciously—and effectively—articulated with the disciplines? The article reviews some of the research literature concerning the value of articulating BTC with WID in undergraduate education and program descriptions of such efforts to examine what BTC has done, is doing, and might do in the future to strengthen WID in BTC.

The traditional distinction between writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines (WID) as writing to learn versus learning to write understates WID's focus on learning in the disciplines. Advocates of WID have described learning as socialization, but little research addresses how writing disciplinary discourses in disciplinary settings encourages socialization into the disciplines. Data from interviews with students who wrote lab reports in a biology lab suggest five ways in which writing promotes learning in scientific disciplines. Drawing on theories of situated learning, the authors argue that apprenticeship genres can encourage socialization into disciplinary communities.

This article explores the nature of epideictic rhetoric in science through a close textual analysis of three Nobel lectures. It examines the effects of the genre shift from original research reports to ceremonial speeches, revealing significant differences from Fahnestock's analysis of the genre shift from forensic research reports to epideictic articles in the popular press, especially a move toward greater candidness about the research process. Epideictic scientific rhetoric, therefore, can be said to celebrate the scientific method in general as much as it does the particular line of research at hand.