Applying Subject Matter Knowledge to Writing
What does it mean to have subject matter knowledge? Knowledge of the discourse community’s
- specific topics of study
- central concepts
- frames of analysis
- skills in critical thinking to apply and use for research and communication (Beaufort 221)
Why as a writer should you care about subject matter knowledge? When writing for a specific discourse community, subject matter is not just about the topic or the content; it’s not just about information or what is considered “the facts.” Remember that discourse communities have goals, values, and beliefs—they have an ideology, a way of viewing the world—so subject matter knowledge for writers includes knowing what questions about those topics to even ask and then how to research and answer them.
Composition researchers have pointed out challenges first-year college students—and even upper-division students—face when it comes to subject matter knowledge when writing assignments in college. Elizabeth Wardle uses one example where a composition instructor, as an outsider to the biology academic discourse community, learned that biological arguments “were very subtle, and an outsider’s eye would see them only as a collection of facts” (780). This instructor found that understanding arguments in biology—understanding what’s expected and how to write them—depends “on being familiar with other work in biology” (Wardle 780). Therefore, students, who are essentially outsiders to most of the academic discourse communities, especially in their first couple terms of college, are not only trying to learn the content of each course, but also how that knowledge is made and written about—for example, not just what biology is but how to think like a biologist, let alone write like one.
Prewriting for Subject Matter Knowledge
- What do I know about this subject and how?
- What can I assume people in this discourse community already know about this subject?
- What do people in this discourse community want to know—what kinds of questions do they ask and research do they conduct?
- What are the arguments and debates about this topic in this discourse community?
When subject matter knowledge gets messy. . . Have you ever noticed how clean and neat some ideas look in, well, textbooks, but in practice they get messy? Subject matter, as a knowledge domain for writing, can be messy for you as a college student. You write in college for two general purposes: to communicate and to learn.
Examples of writing to communicate would be the projects you are assigned to write for classes, like a case analysis or a research report. In most writing-to-communicate assignments, you have learned some information possibly through research, gained some insights, conducted some analysis, and you compose the writing project for others to read, in order to communicate what you learned or found out to others. In writing-to-learn assignments, however, you use writing as a tool, a method, to help you learn the content of a course; writing is an active learning strategy to help you better understand concepts, raise questions, make connections, etc. (Emig). Therefore, in writing-to-learn assignments, you probably don’t need, drawing from Wardle’s example discussed earlier, to write like a biologist, but you can practice thinking like one; you can write for yourself, an individual student using writing to learn.
In any given class there may be different expectations for writing assignments that ask you to communicate or to learn, so if it’s not clear to you, you’ll want to ask your various instructors which of these purposes the assignment serves.