For ENGL 230 (next time)--from Beaufort

THIS COURSE NEEDS TO START WITH A LITERACY NARRATIVE: literacy and work...students will reflect on the role that writing played in a specific workplace. Most of them have some experience with work--what role did writing play in this workplace? What did you write? What did others write that you read? The purpose is to help them begin to see the action-oriented nature of most workplace writing.

The Beaufort chapter, "Writing in the Professions" in Research on Composition is chocked full of interesting ideas for readings for a Business/Professional writing class.

"Framing" Quotes

"No amount of preparation in school can equip one fully for context-specific writing tasks in professional life" (229).

"The writing classroom is only one school for writers" (234).

Academic vs. Business Writing

An others (Rivers, 1989; Woolever, 1989) offer general observations about the differences in purpose, structure, and style of academic writing compared with most business-oriented texts. Although such generalizations are perhaps too broad, they nonetheless confirm socially driven textual features and give in broad strokes some of the differences between academic and business writing.

The citations are:

Woolever, K. R. (1989). Coming to terms with different standards of excellence for written communication. In C.B. Matalene (Ed.), Worlds of writing: Teaching and learning in discourse communities of work (pp. 3-16). New York: Random House.

Rivers, W.E. (1989). From the garret to the fishbowl: Thoughts on the transition from literary to technical writing. In C.B. Matalene (Ed.), Worlds of writing: Teaching and learning in discourse communities of work (pp. 64-79). New York: Random House.

Discourse Community/Activity System Matters

English teachers read expository texts by students and workplace writers and grade the professionals lower, thus demonstrating the effect of discourse conventions on the evaluation of writing:

Freedman, S.W. (1984). The registers of student and professional expository writing: Influence on teachers' responses. In R. Beach & L.S. Bridwell (Eds.), New directions in composition research (pp. 334-347). New York: Guilford Press.

(PE1404.N48 1984 )

Kain, Donna & Elizabeth Wardle. "Building Context: Using Activity Theory to Teach About Genre in Multi-Major Professional Communication Courses." Technical Communication Quarterly 14.2 (2005): 113-139.

Ethnographies of Writing in Workplace Settings

Brown, R.L. & Herndl, C.G. (1986). An ethnographic study of corporate writing: Job status as reflected in written text. In B. Couture (Ed.), Functional approaches to writing: Research perspectives (pp. 11-28). London: Frances Pinter.

Doheny-Farina, S. (1986). Writing in an emerging organization. Written Communication, 3, 158-185.

Doheny-Farina, S. (1989). A case study of one adult writing in academic and nonacademic discourse communities. In C.B. Matalene (Ed.), Worlds of writing: Teaching and learning in discourse communities of work (pp. 17-42). New York, Random House.

Doheny-Farina, S. (1992). The individual, the organization, and kairos: Making transitions from college to careers. In S.P. Witte, N. Nakadate, & R.D. Cherry (Eds.), A rhetoric of doing: Essays on written discourse in honor of James L. Kinneavy (pp. 293-309). Carbondale: SIUP.