Cross-Disciplinary Research: Borrowing Method From Other Fields
Launch library · evergreen read
Fields like law, science and history have each developed their own disciplined approaches to weighing evidence, and a narrative writer willing to borrow deliberately from these traditions, rather than relying solely on journalism's own conventions, often gains a genuinely useful new set of working tools to draw upon.
A legal standard of corroboration, a scientific habit of stating confidence levels explicitly, or a historian's careful attention to provenance can each strengthen a piece of narrative writing well beyond what any single discipline's methods would ever achieve entirely on their own, kept in isolation from other fields.
This borrowing works best when adapted thoughtfully to the actual needs of narrative writing, rather than imported wholesale, since a method built for one field's specific purposes rarely transfers perfectly, unmodified, into another field's rather different working context and set of assumptions. A writer curious enough to read occasionally outside their own discipline, even without a specific project in mind, tends to build exactly this kind of transferable method over the span of a career.