How do engineers learn to think and write like engineers? How do art historians learn to think and write like art historians? How do journalists or biologists learn to think and write like the professionals that they become? Do we learn to think and write primarily by enculturation—or can we be taught how to write in various disciplines? If anything can be taught, what practices stand out as best practices?

Needed to address these questions is a cohesive theory of writing-in-the-disciplines (WID), one that accounts for both discipline-specific features of writing and features that cut across many disciplines. To that end, this book re-examines contemporary sociohistoric theories of writing from an evolutionary perspective. An evolutionary perspective of WID suggests that disciplines not only change, but they evolve much like species do, via a dual process of variation and selection in forums of competition. An evolutionary perspective puts a spotlight on what endures as well as what changes in the complexes of academic arguments.

Needed as well are more situated studies of writing, particularly on the department level: situated studies in which the human organism is observed functioning in its disciplinary environment. This book examines just one discipline—civil engineering—via a series of interrelated case studies of undergraduates, graduate students, tutors, faculty, and alumni, not practicing engineers in industry.