Initiating Students into the Genres of Discipline-Based Reading and Writing

I believe that mastering an academic genre, that is reading and writing with some degree of self-assurance and satisfaction in a particular academic field, is integrally linked with being a member of an active community of learners in that field. (195)

Our ability to participate with others, to take on appropriate roles in writing to them, and to foresee what they need to know is a social competence that we learn for specific groups of people, and not in general. Our ability to reconstruct probable meaning and tone of what others have written is similarly social and specific. Both depend on our awareness of the tacit meanings available in a group, and our ability to respond to the demands of a specific audience and situation. That is, both depend upon a participant's experience of a social milieu. (Douglas and Dorothy Barnes, qtd in. Dias p. 195)