Liberal arts writing and physics lab report writing in the context of kinematics thinking

Liberal arts writing are by definition sequential in that its appearance is manifested as successive paragraphs, while physics kinematics thinking involving the five variables of time, distance, initial velocity, final velocity and acceleration may be expressed in nonsequential diagrams that reflect spatial thinking. The non-sequential linkage concept among the variables in a diagram is straightforward, while the multiple linkages across the paragraphs in an essay are less obvious, especially to community college pre-engineering students studying kinematics. A pedagogy has been developed to emphasize the multi-linkages in liberal arts writing as it relates to kinematics thinking so as to improve physics lab report writing. The firstscore and postscore upon receiving writing improvement recommendations have been used to assess the pedagogy effectiveness in terms of correlation and relative gain. The assessment result suggests that the modeling of liberal arts writing in the context of diagrammatic kinematics thinking would help students to improve on their physics lab report writing and undergraduate research paper writing.