Vol. 7 No. 1
Elisabeth van Stam is a Writing Advisor on the Graduate and Postdoctoral team and STEM Resource at the University of Waterloo’s Writing and Communication Centre (WCC). Trained as a professional biologist, she brings extensive experience conducting and communicating scientific research to her work supporting writers and colleagues at the WCC. Her pedagogical approach is student‑centered and genre‑aware, drawing on firsthand STEM writing experience to foreground global structure and meaning‑making while positioning students as experts in their disciplinary knowledge and communication goals.
Although STEM students frequently engage in diverse writing and communication tasks throughout their degree, feedback from instructors and supervisors primarily focuses on discipline‑specific content rather than the writing itself (Berdanier, 2019; Carter, 2007; Rollins et al., 2020; Russell, 1997; Zhu, 2004). As a result, many STEM students seek support at their university writing centre for guidance on STEM‑specific writing conventions. However, in writing centres that support students across disciplines, within the Canadian context, it seems that most writing centre staff come from Arts and Humanities backgrounds. This often means they have limited formal training in STEM writing conventions and little experience producing STEM‑specific writing. Subsequently, when a STEM student walks in with a lab report, it’s completely reasonable to feel unsure about how to navigate conversations and feedback around the organizational patterns of a genre that isn’t familiar.
However, supporting STEM writers does not mean writing centre staff must have STEM degrees or deep disciplinary expertise (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Soliday, 2005; Summers, 2016). What matters far more is having a working understanding of the structural conventions that govern how content is organized within STEM genres of communication (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Carter, 2007; Weissbach & Pflueger, 2018; Yeo, 2001). Put simply, effective STEM writing support doesn’t require mastery of scientific content—it requires recognition of how STEM genres work. When writing centre staff understand STEM genres, they can look past local sentence‑level issues to identify the organizational patterns shaping STEM writing, anticipate the recurring challenges STEM students encounter, and work with students to interpret the genres they’re using.
So, how do we strengthen our genre awareness to better support STEM students in the writing centre? To answer that question, I’ll draw on my background as a STEM researcher, communicator, and writing instructor and share how STEM genre knowledge has shaped the way I work with student writers. In this opening post, my goal is to highlight why genre awareness is foundational to supporting STEM writers and to introduce IMRaD—Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion—as a helpful framework for recognizing the structural patterns that underpin many of the STEM genres we encounter in the writing centre. This post also lays the groundwork for a series of subsequent posts, each exploring one major IMRaD section and offering practical, genre‑aware strategies that writing centre staff can use to support STEM writers with greater clarity and confidence.
From Intuition to STEM Genre Awareness
My background as a STEM researcher and communicator helps me build immediate trust with the STEM students who fill my writing centre appointment calendar. They often seek me out because they assume my disciplinary background means I am a subject expert who can follow their technical reasoning or that I “understand the statistics.” And while I am often familiar with their technical content and can follow their reasoning, my feedback is never about disciplinary knowledge or statistical tests. Still, students consistently leave appointments clearer on their writing goals and confident about next steps. Despite this consistent outcome, I couldn’t always articulate what, in my approach, makes my support so effective for STEM students.
That understanding began to take shape during an appointment with a student who arrived with a well‑structured Results section outline and wanted feedback on whether it was “good” before starting to write. At first glance, the outline appeared well-written and logical: writing centre staff unfamiliar with STEM writing might have asked about the student’s organizational choices—which the student could readily explain—and suggested a collaborative exploration of genre expectations—which the outline met. Instead, I asked to see their Methods section. Even without a shared disciplinary expertise, I knew that evaluating a Results outline requires comparing it to the research process described in the Methods. When the student and I reviewed the two sections side by side, we quickly identified missing content by noticing gaps between what the Methods promised and what the Results outline delivered. That comparison also revealed where the outline needed to be reorganized to create a clear, coherent narrative aligned with the described research process.
When the appointment ended, I felt briefly relieved—as if I had simply stumbled onto the right approach for supporting this student. But I quickly realized my support was not accidental. I had been supporting STEM students in this way for years, drawing on genre knowledge rather than disciplinary expertise. I was collaboratively establishing genre expectations, reading for structure, and assessing how well their writing aligned with the rhetorical patterns of academic STEM communication. Put simply, my guidance worked because I understood how genre shapes the presence, sequencing, and framing of information in STEM communication. This insight marked a turning point in my own understanding: genre awareness wasn’t new to me—it’s foundational to what we do in the writing centre—but this was the first time I could clearly articulate how that awareness functioned in STEM contexts.
Why STEM Genre Awareness Matters in Writing Support
Genre awareness plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of writing centre consultations (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Carter, 2007; Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Gordon, 2014; Hill, 2016). Specifically, without a clear understanding of how STEM genres of communication are organized, it can be hard to see when writing diverges from expected structural patterns or when a student is struggling with a global‑level issue they cannot yet name (Kiedaisch & Dinitz, 1993; Mackiewicz, 2004; Shamoon & Burns, 1995; Summers, 2016). Consequently, those of us who are less familiar with STEM writing may feel unqualified or overwhelmed when we encounter unfamiliar disciplinary writing conventions in student writing (Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Robinson & Hall, 2013). In these moments, it’s natural for us to focus on the writing features we can readily identify (Mackiewicz, 2004)—sentence‑level features such as whether to use first or third person or author‑vs. information‑prominent citations.
These sentence‑level features matter, but without STEM genre awareness it is easy to treat them as the defining characteristics of “STEM writing.” When local writing features take precedence over global features, we risk missing the deeper organizational challenges that most often affect students’ clarity, logic, and confidence in their writing (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Hill, 2016; Kiedaisch & Dinitz, 1993)
Developing a deeper understanding of STEM genres helps us shift our attention to the structural conventions that shape STEM communication. With this global‑level awareness, we can more easily recognize when student writing departs from disciplinary norms, identify underlying issues in logic or organization, and engage students in collaborative conversations that help them evaluate and strengthen their writing (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Mackiewicz, 2004; Rollins et al., 2020; Velez, 2022).
Not only does this global‑level awareness enable more effective guidance, but it also enhances writing centre staff confidence—something students notice immediately (Yeo, 2001). As our confidence grows, so does student willingness to participate in meaningful discussion and engage in the collaborative work of revision (Gordon, 2014; Velez, 2022). This creates a reinforcing cycle: as we apply our genre knowledge with confidence, students engage more deeply. In turn, increased student engagement opens space for more exploratory, student‑centered conversations—conversations where our core writing centre practices, such as asking curious questions, inquiring into disciplinary expectations, and positioning students as experts in their fields, become even more effective.
IMRaD as a Foundational Structure
One practical way to begin developing this STEM‑genre awareness is to start with the structural pattern post‑secondary writing instructors encounter most often: IMRaD. IMRaD is a foundational organizational pattern used in STEM communication (Mensh & Kording, 2017) and underpins a wide range of academic genres. Undergraduate STEM students—as emerging specialists—learn to report research using IMRaD as part of their disciplinary training. Graduate students use IMRaD—or a discipline‑specific iteration—to communicate their original research, extending these structural principles into advanced STEM writing.
STEM Writing is Not a Monolith
Before I go any further, I want to pause for a moment and clarify: STEM writing is not a monolith. Even though IMRaD plays a major role in STEM communication, not all STEM writing involves communicating research, and not all STEM disciplines use IMRaD in the same way. Students in applied fields like engineering or nursing often work within highly specialized professional genres that don’t follow IMRaD. Others write argumentative essays on STEM topics, which follow familiar academic structures across disciplines. And even within research‑based writing, IMRaD is adapted in different ways depending on the discipline (Moskovitz et al., 2024) and the expectations of instructors, supervisors, or journals. Because this is a blog post, not a book, I’m focusing on IMRaD as it applies to reporting empirical research—the structure we most often encounter with undergraduate and graduate students at the writing centre.
What to Expect in the Series
Over the next few months, I’ll share a post on each major IMRaD section as it appears in lab reports—and other IMRaD structured genres—we commonly see at the writing centre. Each post will:
- outline the section’s purpose and structural logic
- highlight common challenges for students and writing centre staff
- offer practical strategies for giving clearer, more targeted, structure‑focused feedback
My goal with this series isn’t to prescribe rigid rules, but to offer flexible, foundational knowledge that helps writing centre staff ask thoughtful, genre‑aware questions and engage more confidently with STEM communications. STEM writing isn’t a foreign language; it’s another dialect in a conversation we already know how to have. When we understand the disciplinary structures students are working within, our existing writing centre practices become even more effective.
I look forward to sharing what I know about STEM communication, hearing your experiences and knowledge, and continuing to build a shared understanding of STEM communication in the writing centre community.
References
Berdanier, C. G. P. (2019). Genre maps as a method to visualize engineering writing and argumentation patterns. Journal of Engineering Education, 108(3), 377–393. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20281
Bryan Malenke, L., Miller, L. K., Mabrey, P. E., & Featherstone, J. (2024). How genre-trained tutors affect student writing and perceptions of the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 41(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1336
Carter, M. (2007). Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines. College Composition and Communication, 58(3), 385–418.
Dinitz, S., & Harrington, S. (2014). The role of disciplinary expertise in shaping writing tutorials. The Writing Center Journal, 33(2). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1769
Gordon, L. M. P. (2014). Beyond generalist vs. Specialist: Making connections between genre theory and writing center pedagogy. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.15781/T26970D7F
Hill, H. N. (2016). Tutoring for transfer: The benefits of teaching writing center tutors about transfer theory. The Writing Center Journal, 35(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1842
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Velez, M. (2022). Like speaking a blueprint: STEM writing tutors’ disciplinary and writing identities. Across the Disciplines, 19(1–2), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2022.19.1-2.04
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Image credit: CSIRO lab notebook entry, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY