Andrew blog post #10

 I'm usually fairly confident working with writers outside my discipline. I think part of that has to do with my own experience as an undergraduate, where I switched majors from political science to literature to philosophy then, finally, to psychology. To my mind, basic critical thinking skills--the kind that I teach my students in my rhetoric classes--apply just as much to qualitative analyses as they do to quantitative/empirical analyses. Questions of audience and purpose factor into effective writing and communication--approaching any paper, regardless of the class that it's for, I always push writers to ask themselves how much information is necessary for them to provide to contextualize an argument, and remind them that each item of evidence they introduce has to be accompanied by an explanation of its relevance to their overarching thesis.

One of my writing center students' first assignment for his rhetoric class was to write a paper about his major (bio-medical engineering) and how he intends to apply his studies professionally (dentistry). I told him to do some research on various professional associations related to dentistry, and what debates those professionals are having among themselves at the current moment. I also told him to think through disciplinary overlap between dentistry and other fields of study--such as forensic science, biology, and anthropology--and then think how studying bio-medical engineering figures into approaching research questions within those areas of overlap. 

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