Teaching Writing in All Disciplines. 572 Herrington, Anne, and Charles Moran, eds. Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines. Writing across the curriculum responds to concerns about declining literacy and reasserts the importance of rhetoric in the liberal arts curriculum. In the first kind of program, the teacher is an expert in the discipline and knows its vocabulary and genres.
Students can thus use highly technical language and discipline-specific forms of writing.
But such programs reinforce disciplinary isolation and create a heavy burden of writing instruction for teachers untrained in composition. In the second kind of program, esoteric material, technical vocabulary, subtle methodology, and distinctiveness may be sacrificed, but with gains in writing expertise and an opportunity to open a large academic conversation and perhaps, ultimately, an educated public discourse. 574 Kirscht, Judy, Rhonda Levine, and John Reiff. WAC proponents are deeply divided along these lines. Disciplinary forms and conventions are not separated from the writing process but are presented as communally accepted ways of looking at a particular subject matter, forms that can then be analyzed to determine how they shape the knowledge they produce.