At many liberal-arts schools like Bluffton, we like to stress "writing across the curriculum." It's an old-fashioned term, but some of us still believe in it. The idea is that students ought to be able to write appropriately for whatever subject matter they are studying. It should not be up to the English professors to help students learn to write well. This particular portion of education "belongs" to all of us.
I always have my students write lab reports because I believe in this principle, and I also believe it helps them with the physics. The reports ought to be simple... (1) Tell the reader why you did this experiment; that is, what were your goals and/or expectations. (2) Tell the reader how you performed the experiment. (3) Tell the reader how you analyzed your data. (4) Tell the reader what you concluded.
Professors in other disciplines have remarked that they can usually tell which students have taken a lab course that stressed report writing because those students write better papers in the non-science class. We think this is because the thought process I outlined above is valid for research papers in other fields, except the student is not performing the work itself; rather, they are reading about the work of others when they read their bibliographic sources. It is probably easier for students to tell the story about work they did themselves, and they learn to do that in their science courses. Then, when they have to apply the process to a research paper in the humanities, they have to think about what the author's purpose was as they read each bibliographic source. If they can make that transition, which many do, they can write well in just about any discipline.
Michael D. Edmiston, PhD.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Chair, Division of Natural and Applied Sciences
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
Office 419-358-3270
Cell 419-230-9657