Writing in Academic Contexts

Now that you understand knowledge domains of writing and how to read and research as an academic, I hope that you feel more confident sitting down to write that assignment for class you are working on. You are ready to write.

As you now know there is no such thing as writing in general. Writing any text is always specific to a particular situation, and writing an effective text depends on the discourse community, genre, and the rhetorical situation. For any text you need to write—for college or beyond—you’ll be applying the knowledge domains of writing and making choices as a writer within or against opportunities and constraints of discourse communities.

As different as writing situations may be for various texts, they also share some general features, which is the focus of this final chapter—concepts of writing across contexts. Of course, it gets messy though. Read about the messiness of writing—and why your instructor won’t just tell you what to write—in Open English @ SLCC.