Given that the task of freshman composition is to initiate students into the multidisciplinary academic discourse community, English teachers can speed up the novice's introduction more effectively than can specialists in those disciplines by having students observe, analyze, and produce the salient features of a discourse community's "dialect." A freshman writing course, designed to provide an understanding of the discourse conventions of various disciplines, had students perform the following activities: (1) read expert discourse from different disciplines and analyze them according to invention, arrangement and style; (2) contrast these texts to distinguish the methods, formats, and styles of different disciplines; (3) connect differences between each discipline's conventions and its assumptions about the origin and nature of knowledge; and (4) write simple papers such as might come out of a few of those disciplines. In one assignment, students sought to understand how much knowledge originates and is transmitted in sociology; they designed a questionnaire, conducted the survey in groups, and wrote a report using the structure, tone, and style of good sociological writing. To evaluate the effectiveness of a nonsociologist teaching that discipline's discourse conventions, the teacher's ranking of student papers was compared with that of a professional sociologist. The resulting Spearman rank correlation of .83 (out of a possible 1.0) suggests that learning how discourse features form out of a discipline's methods and epistemological assumptions is an effective strategy for producing the discourse of a discipline. (JG)