Samples of Writing Within Different Disciplines

An art criticism article:

Everything in this picture argues against something else, but everything else in the picture also repeats and confirms something else. The disturbing, unsettling impact is first created by two devices, and close examination reveals multitudes of other devices that serve to maintain and enhance the original impact. One of the major “contradictions” is the color. Bartholome has painted this portrait with two sets of nearly complementary colors—dark orange and green for the larger color masses, and less intense blue and yellow for the two smaller areas. These two pairs of opposites, plus white, comprise the total palette of the picture. The wild freedom of the brushstroke used throughout most of the picture, a quality that cannot be dismissed as merely a function of this painting’s possibly “unfinished” state since this same brushwork appears throughout Bartholome’s work in technically “finished” paintings.

Excerpt from a Supreme Court opinion (Gideon v. Wainwright):

…The Court in Betts v. Brady made an abrupt break with its own well- constituted precedents. In returning to these old precedents, sounder we believe than the new, we but restore constitutional principles established to achieve a fair system of justice. Not only these precedents but also reason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.

Part of the background for a microbiology lab result summary:

Lyme disease most often presents with a characteristic "bull's-eye" rash, erythema migrans, accompanied by nonspecific symptoms such as fever, malaise, fatigue, headache, myalgia, and joint aches arthlagia. The incubation period from infection to onset of erythema migrans is typically 7 to 14 days, but may be as short as 3 days and as long as 30 days. Some infected individuals are asymptomatic and infection can only be determined by serological testing.

Excerpt from a description of one of the groups in MIT’s artificial intelligence lab

Design Rationale Group works on tools that would allow designers to be able to sketch, gesture, and talk with the computer about their work in the same way they would with another designer. The goal is a design environment with intelligence embedded in the environment, allowing designers to work in familiar ways in familiar media (e.g., whiteboards), yet give those media new and powerful capabilities (e.g., the ability to understand a sketch, ask intelligent questions about a design, etc.).