Essays and review papers
These are an integral part of the liberal arts education and the mainstay of advanced study in most humanities subjects. Such writing requires integrating and organizing large amounts of material and communicating the results. Psychology students gain much experience in this genre of writing both within psychology and across related humanities disciplines.
Experimental reports
Psychology Majors gain experience in writing that, in contrast to the tradition of essay writing, requires making general ideas specific, achieving exacting precision in description, translating human action into quantitative terms, and employing mathematical procedures to evaluate theories. Considerable discipline is required to remain within the exacting confines of this genre.
Observational reports and case studies
Less common than experimental reports and somewhat less rigid in their structure, this sort of writing is nonetheless sometimes required of undergraduate students. These genres share with essay writing the requirement of organizing large amounts of information, detecting the essential, and communicating this in a clear and coherent manner, but differ in requiring that the student integrate concrete, specific material gathered first-hand, with more general, conceptual material.