Abstract

Research on academic writing, or rather, writing in the disciplines, today raises a number of questions. One is the relationship between object of study, method and writing in a particular discipline. In this context, the purpose of this study is to elucidate the link between object of study, method and discourses realized in the genres. To this end, teachers and students’ conceptions about academic writing were investigated in Biochemistry, Mathematics, History, and Arts undergraduate programs at a university belonging to the Honorable Council of University Directors of Chile. Drawing on Grounded Theory, we set out to identify, from data, the social representations of the subjects participating in the research. The results show that in Biochemistry, the object of study is a scientific fact that is subjected to the experimental method, expressed in a report or research paper. In Mathematics, the focus is on a formal axiomatic system for which, in this case, the Bourbaki’s method is applied, resulting in a paper with its own code. In History, the object of study is determined by temporality and mainly by the historical method that is materialized in an essay. Finally, in Arts, the difficulty lies in finding a common object of study, given the nature of the sub-disciplines that comprise it, the involvement of the individual writer and the interpretive practices of the visual culture that generate different discourse genres