Subject Matter Knowledge

What do you believe Beaufort means by subject matter knowledge when it comes to writing? Why is this a knowledge domain for writing? Perhaps you’re thinking of the subject matter as the topic or content—what you as the writer are writing about in the project—such as the information you gathered from reading texts (discussed in Chapter 3) possibly found through primary and secondary source research (discussed in Chapter 4). Certainly, this it true; as writers we need to have some kind of information, some content to write about.

Perhaps you’re also thinking about how in particular fields of study—for your major, for example—there is just certain information that you are expected to know. For example, a physicist has to know the laws of physics, a biologist has to know how cells reproduce, and a philosopher has to know the works of Plato. Each field of study has a fundamental base of knowledge—background information—that all writers in that field understand.

Remember in Beaufort’s graphic that subject matter knowledge is one of the four smaller circles inside the larger discourse community circle. In a discourse community, subject matter knowledge goes beyond content, topics, and background information; it includes critical thinking. What this means is that as a writer entering a workplace or scholarly conversation about a specific topic in a given discourse community, your task is not just to find and share information but to first learn the existing arguments, the kinds of questions to ask, and how to find answers to them.

For example, you may be familiar with the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. The author is a journalist, and the book is about how our daily food choices drive agriculture in the United States, framed as responding to the question, “What should we have for dinner?” We could consider the book part of—a central text in—the foodie discourse community, but when it comes to subject matter knowledge, in the introduction Pollan explains the academic disciplines through which he is examining the topic: “What I try to do in this book is approach the dinner question as a naturalist might, using the long lenses of ecology and anthropology. . .” (6). This means he is not researching food and agriculture by focusing on discourse communities of nutrition, business, culinary arts, or health; he’s not writing about the topic the way academics and professionals in each of those fields do. Rather like an ecologist-anthropologist he focuses on the environment and U.S. food chains, and he identifies three: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer (7). Yet, because the book is for a public audience—not academics—as a good journalist Pollan explains the technical jargon of the sources he uses from those academic disciplines for us lay-person readers.

TRY THIS to understand subject matter knowledge. The following passages from three different texts each discuss the concept of scale when it comes to companies, meaning size or degree (e.g. small-scale, large-scale, etc.). In addition, the passages each reflect an approach to the subject from the lens of a different academic discipline: business, physics, and philosophy. Read each passage and in your notes match it to each of the three disciplines. Then, click on each to check your answers.

Passage 1 "Given our previous revelations concerning the rank and size frequency distributions of personal incomes (Pareto’s law) and cities (Zipf’s law), it will come as no great surprise to learn that this lopsidedness is a reflection of a similar power law distribution for the ranking of companies in terms of their market capitalization or annual sales” (West 379).

Passage 2 “Another way to rephrase the general distinction is as follows: Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted. . .This framework, showing that Extremistan is where most of the Black Swan action is, is only a rough approximation—please do not Platonify it; don’t simplify it beyond what’s necessary” (Taleb 35-37).

Passage 3 “If greater size simply reflects greater profitability, it is possible that the survival benefits of size per se might be overstated. A second, and perhaps more intriguing, concern is the failure to disaggregate the independent effects of scale and scope—which reflect different elements of organizational capital—underlying the size-survival relationship” (Bercivitz and Mitchell 61).