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Another strategy for promoting critical thinking is to teach students the academic “moves” and genres that are important to your discipline. Certain moves of academic writing are generic across many disciplines. For example, Graff and Birkenstein (2009) have identified moves that help students position their own claims within a conversation of alternative views. Here are some examples of particularly important moves:

 “They say/I say”—which teaches students to summarize the views to which they are responding. In some cases, the “they say” is an opposing view that the writer is pushing against (for example, a “mistaken critic”) whereas the “I say” is the writer's own argument. In other cases, the “they say” sums up the current state of knowledge on a question (the literature review) prompting the “I say,” which is the writer's contribution aimed at advancing knowledge.

 “Yes, no, OK but”—which teaches students three main ways to respond to another writer's view: to accept it and extend it (yes), to disagree with it (no), or to complicate it (OK but).

 “Plant a naysayer in your text”—which teaches students to role‐play alternative views by imagining and responding to objections raised by skeptical readers.

 “So what?”—which teaches students to articulate why the writer's argument matters by showing what is at stake.

Closely related to Graff and Birkenstein's academic moves are prototype templates for the deep structure of an academic argument (see Bartholomae, 1985):

 Many scholars have argued X, but I am going to argue Y.

 Scholars have frequently asked questions X, Y, and Z. But curiously they have neglected to ask question A. This essay poses question A and proposes a solution.

 Researchers are currently confident in their understanding of X and Y. But we don't yet understand Z because a component of Z is unknown. This paper tests a hypothesis relevant to that component.

Simply helping students understand these prototype structures goes a long way toward helping them envision a purpose for their writing. The deep structure moves just described seem generic across disciplines, but students also need to learn discipline‐specific ways of thinking and writing, particularly within their majors. Students often have difficulty transferring the skills and knowledge learned in first‐year composition to these new ways of thinking and writing. Recent research in the transfer of learning has led to an important pedagogical movement often called “teaching for transfer” (Adler‐Kassner and Wardle, 2015; Anson and Moore, 2017; Downs and Wardle, 2014; Moore and Bass, 2017; Reiff and Bawarshi, 2010; Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak, 2014). This research has shown that the thinking required for transfer is remarkably complex.

A key research finding is that students' ability to transfer learning from first‐year courses into the major can be accelerated by intentional teaching of disciplinary genres. This research shows how disciplinary genres embody disciplinary ways of thinking, reveal disciplinary purposes, and enable disciplinary ways of reaching targeted audiences (Bawarshi, 2003; Goldschmidt, 2017; Wardle, 2009). Discipline‐specific genres—such as experimental reports, ethnographies, nursing care plans, marketing proposals, business memos, museum exhibit brochures, or interpretive arguments in literature or art—often differ in significant ways from the genres students learned in first‐year composition. Transfer can be facilitated if an instructor simply points out key similarities and differences between a previously learned genre and a new, unfamiliar one. As an example, consider how a psychologist might explain the differences between an APA empirical report and the kind of writing typically done in first‐year composition.

 In your first‐year composition course, you might have been told to put your thesis statement in the introduction. But note that in the APA report the “Introduction” usually presents a hypothesis‐to‐be‐tested rather than a thesis statement. You don't get to a thesis statement until the “Discussion” section.

 In your composition course, the evidence supporting your thesis often comes from your analysis of readings or cultural artifacts. But in an experimental report, the evidence comes from the original research described in the report. The “Methods” section explains how the research was conducted and the “Findings” section shows the results of the research.

 The “Discussion” section is the one closest to the kind of argumentative writing you might have done in your composition course. It often begins with a thesis statement declaring that the hypothesis presented in the introduction “was confirmed/was partially confirmed/was not confirmed.” The rest of the “Discussion” section uses data from the “findings” to support this thesis.

 In your first‐year writing course, you may have used the Modern Language Association documentation system. Note how the APA system differs. It foregrounds the date of publication and uses only initials for first and middle names of the author(s). What does this difference tell you about scientific ways of thinking? Why do scientists want to know the date of an article but not the full names of the authors?

Explanations such as these enable students to value prior learning while transferring it to a new context. Students see that thesis statements are still important, that evidence is still important, that documentation is still important, but that these features show up in different ways in different genres.

This emphasis on transfer of learning has caused many writing programs to revise their first‐year composition courses to better enable transfer. Drawing on the teaching for transfer research, these “writing about writing” courses teach rhetorical thinking that helps students move from one genre to another (Adler‐Kassner and Wardle, 2015; Downs and Wardle, 2014; Yancy, Robertson, and Taczak, 2014). For example, in the writing about writing composition program at the University of California, Davis, that Dan directs, students conduct primary and secondary research, practice a variety of citation style conventions beyond MLA, write IMRD format research papers, and rhetorically analyze genres from various disciplinary discourse communities. For fuller explanation of the concept of academic moves and disciplinary genres, see chapter 3 on helping students think rhetorically, chapter 4 on designing formal writing assignments, and chapter 10 on teaching undergraduate research.