On Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences by Susan MacDonald

This book is exactly as its name suggests, it discusses academic writing, but it does so through the lens of theory. I expected more of a how-to or even examples of the differences between them. But instead, I read about how New Historicism affects academic approaches towards writing and how that writing should inform knowledge-making. This is the most interesting aspect of the book because it focuses on how the role of universities is to produce knowledge and in so doing, we must develop a language that makes that knowledge clear.

MacDonald spends a great deal of time on secular hermeneutics, cresting in a discussion between theoretical and textual-based evidence. Her emphasis on the “continuum of academic discourse between interpretation and explanation” highlights that even though the Humanities and the Social Sciences both stem from philosophy, the two vary in their methodology of collecting and presenting data, a difference that must be acknowledged and understood if true writing across the disciplines will exist. The three things you must know if you’re trying to learn something are the history, vocabulary, and current events.

In this case, a common history may mislead people into thinking that the vocabulary and current research overlap in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This is a mistake. The difference in vocabulary and in research methods reflect divergent thinking, an epistemology with common goals but differing ways of approaching them.