Tradition And Adaptations: Writing in the Disciplines

By Dean Ward

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559344601
• ISBN13: 9781559344609
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 0.9" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A Balanced Approach

If you're looking for a writing text to put several disciplines into perspective, Ward's is a good one. These are thorny issues he tackles: how writing in the social sciences differs from humanities writing; why natural scientists write the way they do; the philosophical underpinnings of each discipline that show up in its writing. While using Tradition and Adaptation to teach social science writing, I have noticed that my students appreciate Ward's multi-discipline approach to writing across the curriculum. To explain why social scientists use an IMRAD format in their papers, for instance, it helps to understand how their assumptions about their work differ from the assumptions of, say, natural scientists. This kind of understanding allows students to move beyond the usual English department literary style and fully into the style of their own disciplines. This is, of course, a specialized text, with a limited audience, namely those interested in exploring writing styles in different academic disciplines. But for that limited audience, Ward's book perfoms well.