This brief, cross-disciplinary rhetoric teaches students the importance of writing in college and beyond, using a unique conceptual framework that the author calls the “six ways of knowing.”

This writing guide enables students to write meaningfully not only in academic forms such as essays or lab reports, but in forms used outside the classroom such as brochures and oral histories. The text's underlying premise is that students’ writing acquires consequence not by mastering a set of skills but by exploring diverse ways of knowing and thinking about their subject.

Each chapter examines a different academic discipline and its way of considering and writing about the world via interviews with academics and case studies of student research writing projects in that field. These writing and research strategies are then applied to writing outside the classroom in more public arenas using real world genres.