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TRANSLATION AND TRANSFER:

INTERDISCIPLINARY WRITING AND COMMUNICATION

Denise COMER

Thompson Writing Program, Duke University

Durham, North Carolina, 27708, USA

ABSTRACT

As institutions of higher learning make growing numbers

of interdisciplinary faculty hires, establish ever more

interdisciplinary units, develop interdisciplinary curricula,

and pursue growth sectors such as global and online

education, the ability to write effectively across

disciplinary boundaries is becoming ever more vital, and

ever more complex. The rapidly changing and expanding

academic climate lends urgency for all students, faculty,

staff, and administrators not only to learn how to

communicate across disciplines, but also to reflect

meaningfully on why they might want to do so. Drawing

on David Russell’s activity theory and other scholarship on

writing transfer, this paper argues that scholars bear a

responsibility to honor and propagate their own

discipline’s discourse conventions even as they also must

develop strategies for effective interdisciplinary

communication through writing. 1

Keywords: Writing Transfer, Writing, Interdisciplinary

Communication.

1. INTRODUCTION

“Most public intellectuals as well as experts in future

studies would agree that the increasingly global society of

the first half of the twenty-first century will be

characterized by increasing connectivity, diversity, scale,

and rapidity of change…. [S]mall events on one part of the

planet and in one sphere of human existence can now end

up having large and relatively rapid effects on other parts

of the planet and in other spheres of human existence. …

Coping with this complexity will require a new way of

understanding—one that does not rely on having only a

single viewpoint.” [1]

One need not be involved in “future studies” or even

“interdisciplinary studies” to find ways in which

1 This paper is derived from a keynote address, “Academic Writing for

Inter-Disciplinary Communication,” that I delivered at the 2013

International Conference on Education and Information Systems,

Technologies and Applications (July 9-12, 2013; Orlando, Florida). I am grateful for the input of the audience at the address, as well as feedback

on a subsequent draft from participants in the August 2013 Duke

University Postdoctoral Summer Seminar in Teaching Writing.

interdisciplinary communication already impacts the work

of the academy.

As postsecondary institutions make growing numbers of

interdisciplinary faculty hires, establish more

interdisciplinary units, develop interdisciplinary curricula,

and pursue growth sectors such as global and online

education, the ability to write effectively across disciplinary

boundaries is becoming ever more vital, and ever more

complex. The rapidly changing and expanding academic

climate lends urgency for students, faculty, staff, and

administrators not only to learn how to communicate across

disciplines, but also to reflect meaningfully on why it can be

so challenging and what they stand to gain from doing so.

Learning how to be effective at interdisciplinary

communication is hard, in part because of the shifting

conventions and expectations for writing across disciplines.

Disciplinary context shapes and reflects the kinds of

questions academic writers ask, the values they embrace,

and the knowledge they create through writing. Students

have an especially difficult time navigating interdisciplinary

terrain. Faculty do too.

In this paper I will draw on David Russell’s activity theory

to discuss challenges of, strategies for, and benefits of

interdisciplinary communication through writing. The kind

of epistemological shift in thinking and writing demanded

by the rapidly shifting and highly connected realities of

twenty-first century literacy and discourse requires what is

known in the field of writing studies as writing transfer.

Writing transfer, though, does not purport to elide

disciplinary boundaries. On the contrary, being well versed

at writing transfer asks that scholars recognize explicitly the

disciplinary context within which they do produce

knowledge as a way of then considering whether and how

they may want to translate and apply those practices to other

writing occasions, for other imagined and real audiences.

My hope is that this paper will show how important it is to

honor and maintain disciplinary modes of knowledge

making, even as I also illustrate the dynamic and

interconnected nature of academic writing and inspire

faculty, staff, students, and others associated with academia

to share knowledge, practices, approaches, and skills in

interdisciplinary frames.

Again, adopting a habit of mind grounded on writing

transfer and being willing to engage in interdisciplinary

106 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 ISSN: 1690-4524

conversations does not demand that one relinquish

disciplinary situatedness. This kind of approach, which

values disciplinary and interdisciplinary communication

has the potential to have a spread of effect that can make

room for increasing collaboration and cross-fertilization of

ideas, embodying to an even greater degree the capacity of

academia to engage more broadly in transfer by applying

heterogeneous concepts and practices to new and different

problems and possibilities. By cultivating their awareness

of disciplinary perspectives alongside the rewards of

interdisciplinarity, scholars can more effectively learn to

transfer their knowledge, practices, goals, identities, and

ideas from one context to others. Engaging in

interdisciplinary communication, however, also has

somewhat unexpected potential to further strengthen

disciplinary awareness and enable scholars to

simultaneously hone their acumen at disciplinary

communication.

2. THE PARADOX OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Interdisciplinarity seems, on the surface, easy to define.

When I use the term, I refer quite literally to moments

when someone is communicating ideas to people outside

of his or her immediate discipline. What undergirds

interdisciplinary communication most prominently is the

ability to think across paradigms, to reframe perspective in

a way that is both within and outside of one’s inherited

epistemology. Interdisciplinary communication involves,

essentially, a new approach to thinking, grounded,

paradoxically, on disciplinarity.

Interdisciplinary communication can occur horizontally,

where a scholar draws from and writes or communicates to

scholars in other disciplines (this branches into what is

termed Writing across the Curriculum (WAC)), or it can

occur vertically, where one writes to people at different

levels of an institution. But academic writing for

interdisciplinary communication occurs along other

vectors as well, including national and international

borders, and time. It also brushes up against other related

nomenclatures, such as “public scholarship,” whereby

academics communicate with larger public audiences.

Interdisciplinary communication can occur deliberately, or

in unanticipated and unexpected ways. And all of these

vectors are overlapping.

But: even as I begin to define interdisciplinarity, I find

myself facing a paradox. For, one of the problems inherent

in conversations about interdisciplinarity is that the term

by its very nature essentializes disciplines, insisting that

we must somehow first agree on what we understand to be

psychology, or mechanical engineering, or history for the

purpose of then deciding how they can intersect. The

paradox extends even farther as interdisciplinarity then

often moves ultimately to disrupt the very disciplinary

boundaries it initially created until notions of disciplines

again recede into nebulous fogginess.

Scholars in the late twentieth century must have felt anxiety

over a burgeoning disciplinary amorphism because it was in

this era that people brought renewed energy to attempts to

classify disciplines, defining and molding them, trying to

contain them at the very juncture when they seemed on the

brink of becoming indistinct.

One of the most influential of these models for disciplinary

classification is the Biglan model, introduced in 1973.

Biglan relies on binaries: hard (engineering, chemistry) or

soft (education, sociology); pure (mathematics, sociology)

or applied (finance); life (biology) or nonlife (geology and

computer science) [2] [3]. Other ways of arranging

disciplines include codification, paradigm development, and

consensus. [4]

Despite these real or imagined pressures to classify and

differentiate disciplines, however, those who engage in

knowledge production know on an instinctive level that

disciplines are not discrete, singular entities, but that they

intersect and overlap. Dawn Youngblood, for instance,

invokes John Donne to represent this interconnectivity, “No

discipline is an island.” [5] In one of my own papers in

progress I represent this interconnectivity by arguing that

the concept of deep time, with cladograms and branching

orders of cousinhood, is an apt metaphor for disciplines as it

shows how they are interwoven and recursive. [6]

Even if disciplines could be codified, one must also note

that they are created and sustained by human beings, and are

thereby inherently dynamic and have elements that are,

more or less, largely idiosyncratic. Humans create

knowledge, rethink approaches, change, and move

disciplines forward (or sometimes backward). Moreover,

academic writing within disciplines is shaped by individual

scholars’ dispositions, experiences, and approaches to

learning, thinking, and writing. For that reason, disciplinary

writing, by its nature, grows and changes as well. It is

dynamic rather than static.

Values, conventions, and expectations about writing shift

not only between disciplines and people, but often within

disciplines and across historical and cultural contexts as

well. Janice Walker, a scholar of writing studies, uses

citation to discuss just how variegated the landscape of

citation in academic writing is:

Strict attribution of sources has not always been

necessary, and indeed in many cultures and

contexts, it is still not (necessarily) required.

Ancient texts often did not follow any formal rules

of attribution, since it was assumed that the

audience would already be familiar with the body

of scholarly work. I[n some cultures today] the

words of others are used without attribution as a

way of honoring those whose words [are]

considered so important that they needed no

attribution. [7]

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Walker, herself an expert in writing studies and a highly

accomplished writer, ultimately exclaims: “I’m so

confused!”

The term interdisciplinary, then, paradoxically has the

impossible task of trying to create disciplinarity in order to

dismantle it.

Career-related data about disciplines reflect the interplay

and tension between disciplinary rigidity and porousness.

In the 2012 Report of the Job Information List of the

Modern Language Association, readers can find over 20

subspecialties within English: writing studies,

composition, rhetoric, different historical periods of

literature, different theoretical approaches. [8] English

Studies branches into linguistics, communication, creative

writing, literature, feminism, post-colonial studies,

comparative studies, and American studies. Scholars in

English write more for highly specialized audiences and

more public audiences. Scholars in English study virtually

every period where humans have existed, across the globe,

from antiquity to contemporary blogs. English Ph.D.s look

at prose, sound, poetry, cartoons, music, journalism, or

visual texts.

Granted, English Studies is a discipline with comparatively

less “consensus” than other disciplines. But even other

disciplines with higher consensus have subspecialties that

transverse disciplinary boundaries. The history of science,

environmental science, the history of technology,

neuropsychology …

In the same way as disciplines are, at heart, already

interdisciplinary, so too is it fair to say that scholars

already routinely communicate outside of the ivory tower.

Every discipline has more public forms of scholarship, be

they op eds, pamphlets, websites, or monographs that are

lucky enough to make it to the shelves of the local

bookstore. Search engines like Google Scholar and

databases like JStor, movements like Massive Open Online

Courses (MOOCs) make even the scholarship we might

specifically create for other scholars be likely to be read by

members of larger communities and publics. Within

institutions, many of us are likely also already accustomed

to writing for people outside of our fields or at different

levels, be it for tenure and promotion review, annual

reports, grant proposals, or letters of recommendation.

So all of this is to say that the good news is that, whether

we know it or not, twenty-first century scholars are already

accustomed to interdisciplinary communication.

And, yet, even as we might pat ourselves on our backs for

our prowess and vast experience with interdisciplinary

communication, we also all know that interdisciplinary

communication has challenges, and that, 20 subspecialties

or not, scholars in English tend to write and think

differently than scholars in, for instance. Computer

Science or Sociology. Moreover, this paper as it appears

here, geared toward an interdisciplinary readership, sounds

different than other versions of this paper I might produce

for a textbook, or to a business, or to peer faculty at a

campus in India or Brazil. The truth is, there are differences

among and between disciplines, vertically, horizontally, and

across international and linguistic borders. These

differences in approach, epistemology, and value make

interdisciplinary communication vital, even though difficult.

The next section outlines more specifically the challenges

involved in interdisciplinary communication.

3. MISFIRES, FAILURES, AND THE CHALLENGES

OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNICATION

Although I presented towards the outset of this paper the

notion that interdisciplinary communication offers an extra,

supplemental opportunity for cultivating conversations

across disciplines and frames, there are many times where

interdisciplinary communication is laden with an urgency

and mandate. The value of interdisciplinary communication,

whether voluntary or required, cannot and should not be

underestimated.

The following two anecdotes illustrate the importance of

effective interdisciplinary communication and the potential

consequences of failed attempts or misfires.

The first was told to me by my friend Edward M. White, a

national expert on curricular assessment through writing. A

few years ago, 2 Ed had been working as an assessment

consultant for an institution and was leading a group of

faculty who were rating student essays to determine learning

gains. One of the essays was a history thesis about Richard

II written by a senior; it contained beautifully written prose,

provided a well-structured argument, explicated evidence

from a strong range of scholarly sources, and made a

compelling argument about Richard II. Ed, from English,

rated it a 6, the highest possible rating.

Each essay was double blind scored, and the following day,

when reviewing inter-rater scores, the team discovered that

a professor of history had also rated that essay, yet he had

rated it a 1, the least effective score on the rubric.

Ed was astonished; how could that essay have possibly been

a 1? The historian was also astounded that it could be

anything but a 1: apparently, the student’s thesis was riddled

with inaccuracies in evidence, most egregiously being that

the student had identified Richard II as living in the 12 th

century instead of the 14 th

century.

Such an experience may seem to argue for the significance

of disciplinary expertise, or it might seem to reflect merely

an individual failure to either communicate across

disciplines or to read across disciplines. However, what I

2 Specifics have been altered to protect the identity of the

original participants.

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would like to highlight about this anecdote is how deeply

embedded disciplinary modes of reading and thinking are.

Even with the presence of a highly specific rubric that both

readers, the English professor and the History professor,

were using, disciplinarity infused their approaches to the

paper. Each faculty members’ training created a

predisposition for him to look for and prioritize particular

criteria for judging the essay, while neglecting other criteria. The anecdote also emphasizes the increased

responsibilities that attend interdisciplinary

communication. Writers in interdisciplinary contexts need

not only be wary of misrepresented facts or evidence, but

should also keep in mind that readers may not be aware of

certain facts or assumptions. Interdisciplinary

communication demands making those assumptions

explicit and visible.

The second anecdote also emphasizes the increased

responsibilities undergirding interdisciplinary

communication, as well as the immense consequences that

can attend poorly designed interdisciplinary

communication.

In 1979, Challenger engineers sent a memo to their

managers regarding their uncertainty with the O-rings.

While there were many causes of the Challenger

explosion, a breakdown in communication due to

interdisciplinary gaps is agreed by many to be among the

most prominent causes. Engineers knew that the O-rings

were not up to par for flight, and attempted to

communicate this to management. However, based on

shortcomings of interdisciplinary communication,

management was unable to understand how vital O-rings

were, and how risky the planned flight would be. The

memo never got passed to upper-division management.

Paul Dombrowski captures the failure of this

interdisciplinary communication: “Before the launch,

NASA officials construed information about O-ring

charring in socially contingent ways … [and] differing

methodological assumptions led them to different

conclusions and recommendations.” [9]

These anecdotes emphasize that disciplines enable certain

forms of knowledge while actively disabling us from other

forms. David Russell’s activity theory, described in the

following section, helps to further explain how and why

disciplinary priorities, epistemology, and conventions are

so rooted and engrained.

4. ACTIVITY THEORY AND

INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNICATION

David Russell’s influential work with activity theory offers

a way of understanding from whence these

interdisciplinary misfires emerge. Russell emphasizes that

writing (along with other modes of communication)

emerges from established and individualized networks of

human interactions:

Activity theory develops the metaphor of

interlocking, dynamic systems or networks. An

activity system is any ongoing, object-directed,

historically-conditioned, dialectically-structured,

tool-mediated human interaction: a family, a

religious organization, an advocacy group, a

political movement, a course of study, a school, a

discipline, a research laboratory, a profession, and

so on. These activity systems are mutually

(re)constructed by participants using certain tools

and not others (including discursive tools such as

speech sounds and inscriptions). [10]

Activity theory, then, suggests that each discipline—and

each discipline’s approach to writing—has a highly

contextualized and historically grounded set of practices,

motives, and approaches. As you can see from the image,

writing thus reflects, shapes, and is shaped by the particular

network from which it emerges:

Figure 1: From Russell, "Rethinking"

Scholars can advance knowledge within their disciplines in

part because, as activity theory demonstrates, they can build

on the work of others and carry forward long-term

conversations premised on shared knowledge and outcomes.

Those interested in activity theory and writing transfer, such

as Charles Bazerman, identify patterns across texts in order

to define these activity systems within disciplines. [11] In so

doing, we come to understand disciplines as what Michael

Carter terms, “ways of knowing.” [12] James Porter defines

these activity systems as discourse communities: “a local

and temporary constraining system, defined by a body of

texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a

common focus. A discourse community is a textual system

with stated and unstated conventions, a vital history,

mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies,

vested interests, and so on.” [13] Significantly, however,

these discourse communities not only enable these features

and attributes, but also disable and stultify others, rendering

the impact of activity theory a domain of both postive and

negative polarity.

The enablement and inhibition underscoring activity theory

and discourse communities not only helps us understand

how knowledge is advanced and why interdisciplinary

communication can be challenging, but also why writing,

and more broadly academic inquiry, can be so challenging

for undergraduates as they move between these activity

systems without the meta-awareness to recognize and

participate in them. Louis Menand identifies the problem as

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an overall silo-ing in the academy, paradoxically during a

time of increasing efforts toward interdisciplinarity across

many institutions. [14] Gerald Graff, similarly, decries

what he terms “a disconnected series of courses” that

students take during college. [15] Perhaps as with the mid-

twentieth century efforts to reinstantiate disciplinary

boundaries, some domains of the academy respond to

increasing interdisciplinarity by increasing efforts at

disciplinary division and retrenchment. Such a response is

understandable, but presumes that interdisciplinarity,

unchecked, will inevitably elide disciplinarity.

Writing-studies scholars such as Carter suggest that faculty

can be so immersed, perhaps willfully, in their particular

discipline’s activity systems that they are incapable of

noticing the situatedness of writing in their field, let alone

helping students understand these contexts. Carter writes,

‘[B]ecause professors typically learn to write in their

disciplines not by any direct instruction but by a process of

slow acculturation through various apprenticeship

discourses, they are unable to see that writing itself is

specific to the discipline.” [16]

Perhaps because of an unwitting or overt resistance to

interdisciplinarity—emerging from assumptions that

interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity cannot coexist—

moments of meta-awareness are often attended by

complex, sometimes negative emotions. Rebecca Nowacek

terms this “double binds”: “[T]hose uncomfortable and

perhaps inevitable situations in which individuals

experience contradictions within or between activity

systems (e.g., between the motives and tools within a

single activity system or between the motives of two

different activity systems) but cannot articulate any meta-

awareness of those contradictions.” [17]

5. WRITING TRANSFER AS A STRATEGY FOR

IMPROVING INTERDISCIPLINARY

COMMUNICATION

Scholars in writing studies who are interested in moving

toward interdisciplinary communication seek to work

against these kinds of challenges by cultivating deeper

understandings about how teachers, students, writers of all

kinds, can become better at writing transfer. Research into

transfer has a long history, reaching back at least as far as

Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the fourth century BCE [18].

Contemporary research about transfer often builds on and

invokes Russell’s discussions of activity theory. Much of it

focuses on how faculty can help students learn to be better

at transfer. From Anne Beaufort, for instance, we learn that

competing values in discourse communities can stymie

students’ abilities to effectively enact writing transfer. [19]

Elizabeth Wardle emphasizes the importance of reflection

and meta-awareness for writing transfer. [20] Even more

recent work by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells

draws on psychology to examine “the role of learners’

dispositions” in transfer. [21]

One of the most groundbreaking approaches to transfer of

late is by Rebecca Nowacek. She has resituated binary

conceptions of transfer (such as low-road (unconscious) or

high-road (deliberate); positive or negative) to unpack a

more matrixed approach: “four avenues of connection, four

resources that individuals employ as they draw connections

among various contexts: knowledge, ways of knowing,

identity, and goals” [22] Nowacek foregrounds the agency

involved with transfer among these four domains to

emphasize that students are not merely conduits moving

from context to context, but are instead “agents of

integration” who actively reconstruct knowledge and

practices as they enact transfer.

If undergraduates can be agents of transfer, so too can

faculty. Nor does this need to happen only in explicitly

interdisciplinary contexts. Fostering a culture that embraces

interdisciplinarity does not by necessity render disciplinarity

oblique. For twelve years now, I have been part of a

multidisciplinary faculty in Duke University’s Thompson

Writing Program (the TWP). In the TWP, we hire faculty

with doctorates across the sciences, social sciences, and

humanities to teach writing. The faculty in the TWP design

theme-based writing courses based on their disciplinary

expertise. We term our program “multidisciplinary,” rather

than interdisciplinary, as a way of honoring the disciplinary

perspectives each faculty member carries. Still, we also

foster interdisciplinary conversations within and between

these disciplinary frames.

The program is founded on the premise that cross-

disciplinary conversations about first-year writing improve

the teaching of writing and help first-year students learn

how to more effectively navigate the wide and varying

landscape of academic writing. But we also have a stake in

fostering these interdisciplinary exchanges among our

faculty, believing that writing transfer can enable scholars to

more effectively transfer knowledge, ideas, and practices to

other contexts, thereby increasing their growth as writers,

thinkers, and global citizens.

This process of foregrounding interdisciplinary

communication through writing begins in our Postdoctoral

Summer Seminar in the Teaching of Writing where we

spend three intensive weeks fostering interdisciplinary

communication among our faculty. As a way of

encouraging such insights, our teaching seminar for new

first-year writing faculty, which I co-teach with my

colleague Marcia Rego, mirrors a writing class as it offers

one of the most foundational moments for establishing

collaboration and relationships. Two activities in particular

have been especially valuable for encouraging

interdisciplinary communication and writing transfer:

“Translating Scholarship” and “Disciplining Writing.” 3

“Disciplining Writing” asks participants to locate and share

3 I discuss these two activities in another paper-in-progress of mine as well.

[23]

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writing from their disciplines. The text is not designed to

“represent” a discipline, but to raise questions or illustrate

moves of argument and writing that can introduce others to

that discipline. Based on these texts, we have

conversations about intersections and departures of

writing, thinking, and knowing across disciplines.

“Translating scholarship” asks participants to introduce

colleagues to their scholarship, much like what a job

candidate might do when speaking with administrators at a

prospective campus.

Activities such as these highlight the ways in which

interdisciplinary communication is possible even as

disciplinary perspectives retain some measure of

individuation. As disciplinary experts, our disciplinary norms are often not visible to us. They become visible,

though, through interdisciplinary conversations such as

these.

6. CONCLUSIONS

Becoming better at interdisciplinary communication

through writing, becoming better at writing transfer,

requires nuanced thinking: Identifying patterns about

writing that span disciplines and time and boundaries, as

well as unique features of writing within each context. It

also requires reflecting on your own approaches and values

to writing.

Academic writing is hard, even for those of us who are

purportedly experts at it. Our students deserve the chance

to actively interrogate the ways in which academic inquiry,

writing values, expectations, and conventions are shaped

by and reflected in the writing that exists within

disciplines. Faculty will no doubt learn from these

exchanges as well.

In my own experience, reading and discussing scholarship

from such disciplines as history, psychology,

anthropology, and biology has immeasurably enhanced the

ways in which I speak about academic writing with

students and faculty, and the ways in which I write.

Having this wider perspective enables scholars to more

effectively be “ambassadors” for their disciplines [24].

The evidence of these potential gains in thinking becomes

clear through such organizations as “Edge,” which poses

an annual question to scholars in numerous disciplines.

[25] The idea is that we can learn more by considering a

question from varying disciplinary perspectives.

But even if particular scholars are uninterested in

translating their ideas to interdisciplinary settings, it is

worth considering that interdisciplinarity can not only

coexist with disciplinarity, but actually strengthen and

embolden it. Interdisciplinarity helps us understand our

own disciplines, and helps us understand ourselves as

discipline-d. The act of considering interdisciplinarity

makes ones own discipline more transparent.

My goal for this paper is to make visible not only what

writing skills or practices can be transferred across

disciplinary boundaries, but how writers can more

effectively learn to transfer their knowledge, practices,

goals, identities, and ideas from one context to others.

Interdisciplinary communication involves, essentially, a

new approach to thinking. Gaining acumen in transfer—an

essential and complex habit of mind—will enable you to

strengthen your abilities in all sorts of domains (not only

writing), so you can transfer knowledge and learning more

generally and prepare yourself for the demands and

opportunities of the twenty-first century world to which

Newell refers.

7. REFERENCES

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[2] Biglan, Anthony. "The Characteristics of Subject Matter

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[3] Schommer-Aikins, Marlene, Orpha K. Duell, and Sue

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[4] “Academic Disciplines - Disciplines and the Structure of

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[8] Modern Language Association. “Percentage of Ads

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