Written Communication Certificate · Module 3 of 3
Discipline-Specific Writing Instruction
This module covers how a discipline's writing conventions carry its ways of knowing, how genre theory helps you name those conventions for students, and how the DAPOE framework (Gogan et al. 2022) helps you write assignment prompts that state what students need to know. It closes with the certificate capstone. Plan on 4 to 6 hours for the module (about 3 on the activities, the rest reading) and 4 to 6 more for the capstone.
What this module asks you to do
- Analyze a genre central to your discipline by connecting each formal feature to a social purpose. (Sections 1 and 2, Activity 1)
- Name the knowledge expert writers in your field bring to the genre and students do not yet hold. (Activity 1, prompt 4)
- Diagnose an assignment you have used with the DAPOE framework. (Section 3, Activity 2)
- Revise one element of the assignment prompt to address a gap your diagnosis found. (Activity 2, prompt 4)
- Design a new DAPOE assignment with a scaffolding sequence of two or three stages. (Section 4, Activity 3)
- Assign the new sequence in a course and report what students produced at each stage. (Activity 3, your commitment, and a short follow-up from CWSP near the end of the term)
Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing
Michael Carter (2007) showed that disciplinary writing conventions express how a discipline produces, validates, and communicates knowledge. The lab report, the case brief, the ethnographic field note, and the philosophical argument each do different work. Each carries a theory of how evidence works, who counts as an authority, what counts as sound reasoning, and which claims a writer in that field is able to make.
If you want students to write well in your discipline, name these conventions for them. Practitioners learn their field's writing norms over years, and they stop noticing them. Ask yourself what makes a strong argument in your field. The answer often contains assumptions you hold and have never put into words, and students will not infer them from model texts alone.
A useful starting question for planning: what do writers in my discipline do? Consider what questions they ask, what evidence they gather, and how they position a claim against prior work. Then ask how you will make that work visible and teachable. Framed this way, writing instruction becomes an apprenticeship in the discipline.
Genre as Social Action
In a 1984 essay, Carolyn Miller defined genre as social action: a typified response to a recurring social situation. Her definition moves attention from the formal features of a text to the purposes it serves. Writing teachers have built on it ever since. A research article takes its shape from the work it does. It stakes a claim, positions that claim against prior work, presents evidence that meets the field's standards, and invites critique from peers who share those standards.
Genre theory gives you better questions to ask of your own writing and your students'. What is this document trying to do? Whom does it address? Does it do that work well? Students carry these questions from one assignment, course, and discipline to the next, which a format checklist does not allow.
Genre knowledge travels
A student who knows what a genre is for (who knows, for instance, that a literature review positions a study within prior work) has a way to analyze an unfamiliar genre and work out what readers expect from it. A student who knows genre only as format reproduces familiar patterns and struggles when the task is new.
The DAPOE Framework
Gogan, Singleterry, Caulfield, and Mallamo (2022) treat the assignment prompt as a genre with five essential components: directions, audience, purpose, objectives, and evaluation. They built DAPOE from four decades of research on assignment prompts, and they use it two ways. Instructors write prompts with it. Researchers read prompts with it to see which components a course or program leaves unstated.
Read as a diagnostic, the framework explains why some assignments produce weak writing. A prompt with clear directions and no named audience leaves students writing to the instructor, the reader they know. A prompt without stated objectives gives students no way to judge which parts of the task matter most. Each missing component produces its own pattern of problems, so the analysis points to the revision.
Using DAPOE in feedback
The same five terms give you language for response. In place of "your argument is weak," a comment can return the student to the prompt: "The assignment asks you to write for city council members. What would they need from your second section that a classmate would not?" Evaluation criteria stated on the prompt give writer and reader a shared vocabulary, which Gogan and colleagues, following Formo and Neary (2020), identify as one of the component's main benefits.
Scaffolding Complex Writing Tasks
To scaffold a writing task, you break it into a sequence of smaller components. Writing teachers rely on this practice widely. A proposal comes before the research paper, an annotated bibliography before the literature review, a draft introduction before the full document. Each step gives students a finished piece of the larger task to build on.
Scaffolding does several jobs at once. It spreads the cognitive load across weeks, so students do not face a blank page for a high-stakes assignment with no prior work on the topic. It creates checkpoints where students receive feedback before the stakes are highest. It makes the process of disciplinary writing visible, and that visibility teaches. It also keeps students working on the assignment across the term. Most faculty suspect the alternative is a 48-hour push before the deadline.
Build each scaffold from the logic of the assignment itself. In a well-scaffolded assignment, every component does real work. The proposal requires a research question. The annotated bibliography requires students to read and assess sources. The draft introduction requires an argument. Components that exist only to enforce a timeline add work for everyone and teach little.
Teaching Genre Awareness
Genre awareness is the metacognitive capacity to analyze the genre demands of a new writing situation and adapt to them. Students use it in every course that follows yours. Teach students to read genres analytically, to understand what each is designed to do, and to make informed choices about when to meet a genre's expectations and when to depart from them with purpose. Producing one specific genre well is a narrower goal.
Start by giving students strong examples to analyze before they write. Many faculty assign a genre without showing students what a good instance looks like. Analysis questions build the reading skills that writing in a genre depends on. How does this document introduce its argument? Whom does the author assume is reading? What kinds of evidence appear, and which are absent?
Backward design from model texts works well here. Collect three strong examples of the genre you assign, such as three research papers, three lab reports, or three policy briefs, and ask students to work out what makes them succeed. What do all three do? What do the strong examples do that weaker ones skip? When the class arrives at criteria together, students understand them because they built them.
Activity 1
Genre Analysis in Your Discipline
Choose one genre central to writing in your discipline: the research article, the case brief, the clinical note, the proposal, the technical report, the policy brief, or another form. Analyze it with the questions below.
What a complete response does
- Names one genre and states why writers in your field produce it.
- Connects each formal feature you list to the purpose it serves for readers or writers.
- Names at least two things an expert brings to the genre and a novice does not, in terms specific enough to teach.
- Draws one change to your teaching from the analysis.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the capstone.
Contribute to the repository
Genre analyses from specific disciplines help colleagues in other fields see how writing works across the curriculum. They also give students a model for analyzing unfamiliar genres.
Activity 2
Assignment Reverse-Engineering
Choose one writing assignment from your course, ideally one you have used before and whose results you have seen. Use the DAPOE framework to diagnose what the assignment asks students to do and where it confuses them or invites weak writing.
What a complete response does
- Describes the assignment with its course level, length, and method of evaluation.
- Answers all five DAPOE elements for the assignment as written.
- Ties at least one predictable weakness in student writing to a gap the DAPOE analysis shows.
- Sets the original and revised wording of one prompt element side by side.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the capstone.
Contribute to the repository
A revised assignment with a short rationale shows other faculty what changed and why. Your revised prompt with DAPOE annotations will help colleagues who are designing similar assignments.
Activity 3
DAPOE Assignment Design Workshop
Design a new writing assignment with the DAPOE framework. Make it specific to your discipline, draw on your genre analysis from Activity 1, and build in scaffolding. This assignment becomes the center of your capstone.
What a complete response does
- States the directions as students will read them, with length, format, and due dates.
- Names a reader other than the instructor, or explains why the instructor is the reader.
- Ties two to four learning objectives to course goals.
- States evaluation criteria in language students will see on the prompt.
- Sequences two or three preliminary stages, each with a due date, before the final submission.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the capstone.
Near the end of that term, CWSP will email you one question about what students produced at each stage. Your answer completes objective 6.
Contribute to the repository
A complete DAPOE assignment, especially from a STEM or professional discipline, gives colleagues a model to adapt. Share the full assignment, or share the design framework with a note on your course context.
Key readings and resources
The three marked ★ are essential. Start with Carter's article, which supplies the theoretical foundation for the whole Written Communication certificate.
- ★ Carter, M. (2007). Ways of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines. College Composition and Communication, 58(3), 385–418.
- ★ Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151–167.
- ★ Beaufort, A. (2007). College writing and beyond: A new framework for university writing instruction. Utah State University Press. (Chapters 3–5)
- Wardle, E. (2009). "Mutt genres" and the goal of FYC: Can we help students write the genres of the university? College Composition and Communication, 60(4), 765–789.
- Paretti, M. C. (2008). Teaching communication in capstone design: The role of the instructor in situated learning. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(4), 491–503.
- Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.
- Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. University of Michigan Press.
Four questions about this module
Your answers here go to CWSP without your name or email, apart from your capstone. CWSP reads them to revise the module. They are optional, and they send when you submit the capstone.
Complete Module 3
When you have completed the three activities, submit your responses below. Your work is saved in your browser, and this submission sends a copy to CWSP. Submitting Module 3 does not submit your capstone, which has its own page.