WORLDS APART

Acting and Writing in Academic

and Workplace Contexts
 RHETORIC, KNOWLEDGE, AND SOCIETY
A Series of Monographs Edited by
Charles Bazerman

Winsor • Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education

Van Nostrand • Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense

Technology

Petraglia • Reality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of

Authenticity in Education

Prior • Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate

Activity in the Academy

Swales • Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University

Building

Atkinson • Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context: The

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675-1975
 WORLDS APART

Acting and Writing in Academic

and Workplace Contexts

Patrick Dias

Aviva Freedman

Peter Medway

Anthony Pare

~~ ~~~;~;n~~~up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First Published by

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers

10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, NJ 07430

Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Copyright © 1999 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other
means, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Worlds Apart: acting and writing in academic and workplace
contexts I Patrick Dias ... [eta!.].
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-2147-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
-ISBN 0-8058-2148-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching. 2. Aca-
demic writing-Study and teaching. 3. Technical writ-
ing-Study and teaching. 4. Business writing-study and
teaching. I. Dias, Patrick.
PE1404.W665 1999
808-dc21 98-49931
CIP

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
 CONTENTS

Editor's Introduction vii

Preface xi

Introduction 1

1 Introduction: Researching Writing at School and at Work 3

2 Situating Writing 17

II University Writing 43

3 The Social Motive of University Writing 47

4 Complications and Tensions 65

5 Writing and the Formation of the Architect 82

v
vi CONTENTS

Ill Workplace Writing 113

6 The Complexity of Social Motive in Workplace Writing 11 7

7 Distributed Cognition at Work 135

8 From Words to Bricks: Writing in an Architectural Practice 151

IV Transitions 183

9 Students and Workers Learning 185

10 Virtual Realities: Transitions From University to 201

Workplace Writing

11 Contexts for Writing: University and Work Compared 222

References 236

Author Index 246

Subject Index 249

 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Charles Bazerman
University of California, Santa Barbara

Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts is an im-
pressive multisite comparative study of writing in different university courses and
matched workplaces: law and public administration courses and government institu-
tions; management courses and financial institutions; social work courses and social
work agencies; and architecture courses and architecture practice. The study, carried
out across 7 years by a dozen people, looked intently into how writing functions
within the activities of each of these various settings. The study, despite its size and
multi-authorship, avoids the simplifications that typically are needed to generate
consistency and comparability across extensive data. Rather than looking for easy
points of comparison, the authors sought to understand each setting through detailed
ethnography and found comparisons only by understanding how writing is operative
within the particularities of settings.
This revealing theoretical understanding was developed in a conversation
among the four lead investigators over the years of the project, a conversation that I
saw as a distant onlooker and then as an editor. Although there are numerous other
products of this research project, this book is a culmination of that theoretical dis-
cussion about the overall meanings of all of the findings. What they found at each
of the sites was that learning to write in the locally relevant genres was a means by
which individuals were socialized into the particular activities, ideologies, identi-
ties, meaning systems, power structures, institutional goals, and cooperative en-
deavors enacted in each place. Furthermore, those genres became the site of
tension among the various motives, perceptions, and goals of different individuals
as those in institutional power tried to regulate others into particular ways of life,
vii
viii EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

and others insisted that important motives were being lost if they wrote as they
were directed, as in the case of the social work agency. Yet, in many of the sites the
generic shaping of the communal activity and way oflife went uncontested as indi-
viduals wanted to become creative architects, competent lawyers, recipients of
contracts, contributors to a well-analyzed monetary policy, or just students with
good grades.
Each of these settings offered different pathways of explicit and implicit in-
struction, mentoring, disciplining, accountability, and evaluation. In schools, no
matter what the subject area, the socialization into practice predictably appeared
as pedagogy directed toward student performance of known practice, for which
students were held accountable-what the authors here have called facilitated per-
formance. Although workplace internship experiences carried important elements
of learning, these still became framed as facilitated performance when returned to
the classroom. In the workplace, the focus was on the work task at hand, rather than
the overt instruction and evaluation of the learner; the learning was in the doing
and the accountability was in the accomplishment of the work; insofar as there was
overt training, it was built around the learner's actual participation in the work, ei-
ther through what the authors call attenuated authentic performance (where men-
tors limit, focus, advise, and themselves remain responsible for the tasks of the
novices) or through legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wegner's term
here used to indicate the novice's actual responsibility and accountability for lim-
ited tasks performed).
In each of the classroom and workplace sites, the writing was integrated with
relevant practices, modes of expression, and material realities, but most of the
classrooms were so fully devoted to textual practices that the world of student pro-
duction was tightly framed by the written and spoken texts that made up the course.
The most notable exception was in architecture, where the writing was integrated
with, and subordinated to, visual and material design; internship courses also pro-
vided some contact with the social, material, and representational complexity of
the workplace, although students' papers remained the central form of evaluation
and responsibility. In the workplace, however, the writing was integrated with
many forms of experience and representation in the course of the work-relation-
ship with and responsibility toward clients and the dramatic realities of courtroom
proceedings; economic data and the actual economic well-being of a nation; and,
again most strikingly, in architecture, the visual design and material construction.
These issues are made most explicit in the chapters on architectural education and
practice, but they are an undercurrent throughout the book.
In coming to understand the writing process and writing learning in these vari-
ous sites, the authors have developed and refined activity theory as a tool of analy-
ses. The theoretical discussions in this book are clear and illuminating, and lead to
a widely applicable and easily intelligible way of approaching writing in any
school or workplace setting.
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION ix

The ultimate effect of the theoretical clarity evolved through the long conversa-
tion of the authors, however, is the surprising illumination of the details of how writ-
ing works in each of these settings and the kinds of demands and opportunities each
presents for the developing writer. The theoretically illuminated case studies reveal
the rich and multiple contours of writing within each situation and thereby help us to
see similar dynamics in other situations. The authors have used theory to help them
figure out what they have seen and thereby have given us sharper theoretical lenses
to see what is occurring in other places. That is among the best uses of theory.
 PREFACE

It is largely in academic settings that writing calls attention to itself and, more of-
ten than not, is regarded in isolation from the larger social and communicative ac-
tion to which it is so intrinsically bound. On the other hand, in non-academic
workplace settings, writing is seldom regarded (when it is regarded at all) as apart
from the goals, occasions, and contexts that engender writing. In these settings,
writing is a means, a tool in accomplishing larger goals, which may involve actions
other than writing and other participants who function in a variety of roles.lt is just
this kind of disjunction between academic and workplace settings that occasions
the study from which this book derives.
This 7-year collaboration between researchers at Carleton University, Ottawa,
and McGill University, Montreal, involves several different academic and work-
place settings. It draws on a wide variety of theoretical approaches to make sense
of what was observed and recorded in these locales and the written material and in-
terview data that emerged. Begun largely with the intention of understanding the
relationships between writing in academic and workplace settings, the research
has evolved to examining writing as it is embedded in both kinds of settings-set-
tings where social relationships, available tools, historical, cultural, temporal and
physical location are all implicated in complex and intricate ways in the decisions
people make as writers. Each setting in its uniqueness makes salient different as-
pects of writers and writing with complex and probably unsettling implications for
writing theory and the teaching of writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This long and multifaceted study has relied on the generous assistance of several
people and agencies. We are deeply indebted to the Social Sciences and Human-
ities Research Council of Canada for funding the research that provides the mate-
rial for this book. We also wish to thank the several partners in our research,
benefactors who remain anonymous, who afforded us the time of their employees,
xi
xii PREFACE

access to records, and the space to carry out our inquiries: the educational institu-
tions, teachers and students, governmental and nongovernmental organizations,
the commercial and professional firms and their employees. We hope these results
justify, to some degree, the patience, trust, and collaboration they so freely gave
us. We are especially grateful to the people who helped collect, assemble, and ana-
lyze the considerable data for this study: Christine Adam, Dawn Allen, Natasha
Artemeva, Jane Ledwell-Brown, Stephen Fai, Jennifer Fraser, Danica Robertson,
Tariq Sami, Graham Smart, and Scott Weir. We thank particularly Carole
Kleivstul, A vi gail Ram, and Michael Beddall for their secretarial help. Much of
this work was presented at several professional meetings and university seminars,
where colleagues and students asked us the questions and provided the sugges-
tions that have helped shape this book. Alas, there are far too many such occasions
to list here. Finally, this book has profited considerably from the perceptive read-
ings of both Charles Bazerman and David Russell; to them our sincere apprecia-
tion and warmest thanks.
-Patrick Dias
McGill University, Montreal
-Aviva Freedman
Carleton University, Ottawa
-Peter Medway
Carleton University, Ottawa
-Anthony Pare
McGill University, Montreal
 I
INTRODUCTION
 1
INTRODUCTION:
RESEARCHING WRITING
AT SCHOOL AND AT WORK
When we began the research from which this book derives, our major question
was about the relationships between writing in school and writing in the
workplace. Our answer to that question, and the conclusion we reach in this
book, is summed up by our title: school and work are worlds apart. That
conclusion, simple as it looks, was not easily come by, since it is contrary to all
appearances. The book can be seen in one light as a documentation of the
evidence and theoretical perspectives that led to our growing realization of this
apartness and its consequences for the teaching and practice of writing. But the
title of this book does double duty; for it is through our perception of writing
as acting that we are able to justify our account of difference. Because writing
is acting, it is highly contextualized, and it is the character of this contextuali-
zation that turns out to be the burden of this book.
Our question about the relationships between writing at work and at school
arose from some dissatisfaction with the performance of universities in prepar-
ing their graduates for the changed writing demands of professional work-
places. Thus, one of our concerns is pedagogical, to do with evaluating and, if
necessary, addressing the ways that universities prepare writers. There is also
a disciplinary history, within writing research, that gives rise to a second set of
questions, not pedagogical but theoretical, that we address both in the research
and in the book. In fact, the pedagogical and the theoretical concerns are closely
linked, reflecting the fact, as we explain below, that writing research grew fairly
recently out of issues related to the teaching of writing.
Both our pedagogical and our theoretical interests are informed by one major
question: What are the relationships between writing as it is elicited in the
university and writing as it is generated in the workplace? A particular stress
we give to that question is: how and to what extent can we speak of writing in
school settings as preparation for writing at work? Or, as writers, what adjust-
3
4 CHAPTER 1

ments, if any, must university graduates make when they move into the
workforce? This is not to imply that we regard all or even most university
education as preparation for the workplace. We must also make it clear that the
question we are asking is not about the effectiveness of courses concerned
specifically with the teaching of writing; rather, our question is about all
practices related to writing in university courses, about how writing is defined
and valued by such practices, about how these practices relate to writing
practices in the workplace, and about the place and value accorded writing in
the workplace. We will be more specific below about the theoretical issues, and
about what relevance they might have to those who are not researchers into or
teachers of writing.
We bring to our study a body of understandings about writing developed in
the fields of linguistics, rhetoric, cognitive, social and cultural psychology,
composition studies, and education. We will say more below, in this chapter
and the next, about the nature of those understandings, but let us first charac-
terize them briefly so that readers have some idea of the sort of account they
may expect from us. The accounts that we find persuasive acknowledge that
writing is not a single clearly definable skill acquired once and for all; that
writing is shaped fundamentally by its sociocultural context; that writing is
often more than transcription or communication, and that, certainly in school,
writing functions as a way of learning and knowing (and not just a way of
demonstrating learning and knowing); that the functions of writing vary
widely-from making discoveries to imparting knowledge, from persuading to
asserting status, from establishing credibility to negotiating power; that there
is considerable variation in strategy-by individual and by task or context; that,
in some settings, composing is an intensely collaborative activity, involving
intricate layers of responding and revising, each with its own complex political
and social dimensions. Writing, in other words, is a very complex act; to
understand what is being accomplished in writing in any social setting requires
lengthy in-depth observation and analysis. Without such understanding, it is
impossible to make any useful or meaningful suggestions (which we hope to
do within the more pedagogically oriented aspect of our purpose) with respect
to easing the transition between one social context and another.

WHERE OUR PERSPECTIVE COMES FROM:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON WRITING

Let us now explain that perspective more fully, locating it in its historical
context. The story of writing research, at least in North America, is that it arose
INTRODUCTION 5

in the context of problems encountered in the teaching of writing and sub-

sequently developed into a more general study that embraced manifestations of
writing outside as well as inside education. We hope our account will help
readers who are not in the community of those who study and teach writing
understand how we locate ourselves in that story and the contexts of those issues
that are central in our inquiry.
Most academics, we believe, are used to thinking of writing as a regular
everyday activity that occupies both students and teachers.lt is just as pervasive
an activity in school as it is in the world outside school, and similarly treated
as transparent; that is, it is regarded less as an activity in itself and more as a
means, a seemingly inert tool through which activities are carried out. Students
write to take notes from lectures and the books they read, to reflect, to record
information, to carry out their research, and to record and organize their
findings for presentation to professors and in many cases their peers, to
demonstrate their learning in tests and examinations-in short, they write in
order to learn and to demonstrate that learning. Students may also write
otherwise: they may keep personal diaries, logs, and journals; write poetry,
fiction, and plays; correspond formally and informally, including letters to
newspapers and complaints to landlords; and they have increasingly taken to
writing on the Internet. When we then contrast writing in school with writing
at work, it appears at first glance that although purposes and modes might
differ, at heart, to borrow from Gertrude Stein, writing is writing is writing;
so that the passage from writing in the university to writing at work ought to
be unproblematic.
But, as a perennial chorus of complaints from the business world (and some
assenting voices from in the university as well) attests, such is not the case. The
writing abilities of students graduating from universities are increasingly in
question when they move into the workplace. For many reasons, which this
study investigates, writing practices in the university do not translate into
effective writing within the work setting (Bataille, 1982; Rush & Evers, 1986).
A large number of people believe that they learned to write on the job rather
than in school or university (Anderson, 1985; Brown, 1988; Rush & Evers,
1991 ). Universities, it appears, have failed to prepare their students to write at
work. From such a point of view, writing, far from being regarded as transpar-
ent, becomes opaque, draws attention to itself as a tool and medium that does
not work well or is improperly employed by its users. So we are forced to ask,
wearing our pedagogical hats: In what ways is writing in university preparation
for writing at work? What deficiencies, if any, need to be made up in such
preparation? Can universities, indeed, by whatever means prepare students to
6 CHAPTER 1

write at work, and is that a realistic expectation? Recent developments in the

teaching of and research into writing have in part been occasioned by such
anxieties.

School Writing Practices

Early responses to such questions, at least in North America, were focused on

changing practices in the university, and those changes were concentrated
largely in 1st-year composition courses, where it seems the task of teaching
students to write for academic purposes was concentrated. Until the late 1960s,
teaching writing in university was largely a matter of introducing students to
rhetorical structures and models and urging imitation. Some courses stressed
forms of argumentation and techniques liberally illustrated with examples from
contemporary essayists. In fact, the goal of writing in such writing courses was
the production of essays or "themes" on topics usually based on personal
experience with an emphasis on presenting an insightful and coherent argu-
ment, and generally requiring little or no investigation. Handbooks of style,
grammar, and usage enforced rules and conventions considered desirable and
seemingly unchanging. As Faigley (1992) puts it, given such tasks, both "the
writer and potential readers are removed from any specific setting and are
represented as living outside of history and having no investment in particular
issues" (p. 15). Such tasks, moreover, define writing as primarily an academic
enterprise, without regard to the traditions of writing in the workplace and in
other nonacademic settings.
But with rapid university expansion in the early 1970s and changes in the
socioeconomic makeup of the population that traditionally gained university
entrance, particularly in universities that had introduced open admissions
policies as a way of righting past discriminatory practices, traditional ap-
proaches to teaching writing were increasingly in question (Berlin, 1987;
Russell, 1991; Shaughnessy, 1977).
Supported by research that focused on understanding the processes involved
in writing rather than studying finished products as exemplars (Britton, Bur-
gess, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975; Emig, 1971; Flower, 1977; Flower &
Hayes, 1981; Sommers, 1980), writing pedagogy began to attend to students'
writing processes; for instance, what enables and what inhibits invention, or
how successful writers anticipate the needs and concerns of readers as they
write. Writing was taught as a process involving exploration, drafting, and
revision, a process involving multiple drafts with opportunities for feedback
INTRODUCTION 7

from peers and teacher. Teachers became empathetic and supportive readers
rather than expert correctors and assessors. Topics were self-initiated rather
than imposed, classrooms became workshops, writing moved toward publica-
tion through a process of being read and revised with the help of encouraging
peer editors (Graves, 1984; Murray, 1980).
The idea of writing as discovery paralleled a renewed interest in the tradi-
tional notion of invention as one of the five arts in rhetorical discourse
(Freedman & Pringle, 1979; LeFevre, 1987). Writing is not simply communi-
cation or translation of something already extant in the world or in the mind.
The composing process itself is a way of making meaning. This is a key thread
in the argument for a view of writing as epistemic or knowledge-making, and
an underlying justification, as we point out below, for the promotion of"writing
across the curriculum."
The teaching of writing as entrusted to the 1st-year composition program,
housed largely in English departments, was regarded largely as a service
industry, intended to train competent writers for other courses, familiarizing
them with academic practices and conventions. In some programs, English
departments collaborated with engineering and business schools to design and
teach specialized courses in technical and business writing respectively; in
some other cases, engineering and business schools developed their own
writing programs. By and large, such courses, seen as foundational, were
offered at the 1st-year level; an unstated assumption was that once taught,
writing need not be a matter for concern and inquiry at upper levels.
A boost to making writing in schools more visible as a medium and less
transparent was provided by Britton (et al., 1975) and his colleagues at the
London Institute of Education in the 1970s, who argued the close link between
writing and learning. Their Language across the Curriculum movement (more
commonly adopted in North America as Writing across the Curriculum or
WAC) provided a rationale for instituting writing-intensive courses in the
disciplines as opposed to teaching writing per se as a discipline-neutral skill
within English departments. Where they were promoted, WAC programs were
also instrumental in helping teachers in all departments accept some degree of
responsibility for the literacy of their students.
WAC movements also instigated investigations of writing within specialist
disciplines, toward identifying those discipline-specific features that could then
be taught to students in those disciplines. However, there was a growing
realization, exemplified especially in the work of Bazerman (1979; 1988), that
such features ought not to be regarded as isolated conventions but as part of a
larger context of disciplinary activity, conditioned by historical, social, and
8 CHAPTER 1

psychological factors. As Bazerman (1988) put it, one "could not understand
what constituted an appropriate text in any discipline without considering the
social and intellectual activity which the text was part of' (p. 4). Such a
recognition is a key instance of the widening perspectives emerging in the
teaching of writing. Instead of domesticating workplace texts for academic
purposes, some writing theorists were redefining writing as situated practice, a
point to which we return often in this book.
A related development in the teaching of writing is linked to a newer
understanding of the role of readers. From the 1930s to the 1960s, New
Criticism occupied a dominant position in North American literary criticism
and exerted a strong influence on how literature was taught in the university.
New Criticism or the formalist approach accorded the literary text the status of
an autonomous object, fixed and unchanging, regardless of the reader and the
situation in which it was being read. Meaning, it was assumed, was located
entirely in the text. The counterpart of such a position in the teaching of writing
would be that all texts should aspire to a condition ofbeing stable, conventional,
self-contained, and separable from a consideration of the writer's intentions and
situation. Increasingly over the 1970s, such New Critical positions were dis-
placed by the notion of reading as an event in time, of meaning as continually
recreated in each act of reading and subject, therefore, to the knowledge and
intentions the reader brings to the text (Rosenblatt, 1978; Suleiman & Cross-
man, 1980; Tompkins, 1980). And in the teaching of writing, with the increas-
ing attention to process and the several variables that figure in that process, such
as the writer's situation and intentions and the role of readers, formal and
structural features of written products are no longer the primary determinants
of how writing should be taught. Moreover, such formal and structural features
are seen not as intrinsically fixed and immutable, rather they emerge and
become salient in recurring rhetorical situations that justify their usefulness,
and continue to evolve or decline in use. It follows that the knowledge necessary
to produce effective texts within a setting is not a static entity but a fluid set of
variables continually revised in the flux of textual and contextual demands.
As studies of nonacademic writing proliferate, it is possible to see the extent
to which writers rely on situation-specific knowledge in the preparation of texts.
This "local knowledge" (Geertz, 1983) concerns all aspects of the writing
situation, from disciplinary and institutional regulations governing the form and
substance of texts to relationships among writers and readers. Such a view of
writing has been confirmed in the growing consideration of genre theory in
theorizing about writing (Bazerman, 1988; Bazerman & Paradis, 1991 b;
Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Freedman & Medway,
INTRODUCTION 9

1994a, 1994b; Swales, 1990). This expansion of studies of writing to nonaca-

demic contexts has been accompanied by the gradual abandonment of the
notion of writing as the solitary act of the autonomous individual. A major
development over the last decade in writing theory and research is the notion
of writing as both discipline specific and socially defined (Bazerman, 1988;
Freedman, 1987; Herrington, 1985; Myers, 1985, 1989; Pare, 1991a, Selzer,
1983; Smart, 1989; Winsor, 1989). Studies have variously demonstrated the
strong link between successful writers at work and their knowledge of readers
and situations (Odell & Goswami, 1982; Spilka, 1990), explored the encultu-
ration of new employees (Hebden, 1986), and studied the writer's transition
from an academic to a work setting (MacKinnon, 1993).
What this research has in common is an attention to the settings in which
writing is produced, a concern central to an emerging social theory of writing,
a theory that explains written communication by reference to its social contexts:
the procedures, regulations, relationships, and activities that influence (and, in
·tum, are influenced by) the production of texts (Berlin, 1987; Clark, 1990;
Faigley, 1986; LeFevre, 1987; Rafoth & Rubin, 19S9). This perspective chal-
lenges many of the assumptions of contemporary writing theory and pedagogy.
Perhaps one of the most important understandings to emerge from recent
studies is the degree to which workplace writing is a collaborative or social
activity (Ede & Lunsford, 1990; Odell & Goswami, 1985; Reither & Vipond,
1989). Many individuals write as members of a group, such as a discipline,
organization, or institution; a full understanding of writers' processes and
products cannot occur without close reference to their place and role in their
particular contexts. Many texts have multiple readers, all of whom have
different reasons for reading, and each of whom may pay heed to different parts
of the text. Such texts must often stay within strict guidelines (stylistic, legal,
procedural) and the consequences of ignoring those rules can be severe. Case
studies of writing contexts describe situations of complex interaction: writers
often work with others in the preparation of texts within a wide variety of
co-authoring arrangements; scheduled revision cycles are common (Ede &
Lunsford, 1990; Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985; Smart, 1993). At the same
time we need to be aware that workplaces can be places of contestation and
disagreement, where writing practices must eventually cooperate with institu-
tional interests and sometimes compromise socially responsible goals (Fair-
clough, 1992; Hemdl, 1993; McCarthy & Gerring, 1994).
To sum up: Writing is a complex act, integrally related to learning and
knowing, and performs a variety of functions. It is not a discrete clearly
definable skill learned once and for all; moreover, both in school and at work,
10 CHAPTER 1

writing is seldom the product of isolated individuals but rather and seldom
obviously, the outcome of continuing collaboration, of interactions that involve
other people and other texts. Writing practices are closely linked to their
sociocultural contexts, and writing strategies vary with individual and situation.

THE STUDY

As stated earlier, the goal of the study is to develop a more complete and more
refined picture than currently exists of the relationship between the writing
elicited at university and writing generated in the workplace. We hope that the
value of this picture will be both practical and theoretical. On the one hand we
hope to provide a basis for more effective planning for the formation and
development of writers in both domains-a pedagogical aspiration. On the
other hand, we hope to draw the various threads of our research into an account
that confronts some key questions about writing as communicative means, as
sociocultural practice, and as a means of learning and definition.
The emerging social perspective on writing made it clear that academic and
workplace writing must be considered in context, within the complex political
and social dimensions that influence and define writing practices and expecta-
tions. Thus it was imperative that we examine in situ the writing elicited
currently in university and the writing typically engaged in at the workplace,
and plan for lengthy in-depth observation and analysis.
We selected four matching university and professional settings: public
administration courses and Federal government institutions, management
courses and corresponding work settings, architecture courses and a firm of
architects, social work courses and social work agencies. These were disciplines
that were considered to be strong in the two universities we chose to work in,
and appeared to offer a range of writing practices. Each discipline and its
cognate work sites call for distinctive genres of writing, so that there is little or
no overlapping in the kinds of texts we examine. Our choice of architecture has
an extra justification. Although writing is a major means of communication and
documentation in the fields of social work, management, and public admini-
stration, it is ancillary to graphical representation in architecture. Thus, aca-
demic and workplace architecture settings allow us to examine how writing
articulates with graphical communication to produce nonverbal artifacts. These
settings also provide a useful counter to the logocentric bias that may still direct
our thinking about writing despite the increasing use of multimedia presenta-
tions and the fact that so much of what we read is interspersed with visual
images.
INTRODUCTION 11

The means by which we would answer our question about the relationship
between the writing practices in the two domains was obviously to compare the
two. Since this entailed constructing descriptions of each, our separate case
studies in workplaces and in universities could not be conducted as free-stand-
ing projects solely in the light of the issues that presented themselves in the
specific sites. Instead, to ensure comparability, they needed to be framed around
a common set of procedural goals and questions, though we also had specific
questions that applied only to one domain or other. In fact a large measure of
commonality across the studies in fact arises from the underlying theoretical
frame in which the whole of the research was conceived.
The aim in each setting was to produce an account that addressed a number
of key issues: the kinds of writing produced; how writing tasks originate; how
writing is generated and proceeds; the place writing occupies in that setting
(salience, frequency, time allotted to it); the relationship between written and
spoken transactions; constraints on writing; the place and effect of deadlines
and document guidelines; the expectations of readers; how writing is responded
to and evaluated; the ways of beginning writers and experienced writers;
acquiring the language of the field; writing in collaboration.
There were two questions that emerged and became central as our study
proceeded, questions that helped us frame the description of practices at the
different sites. The first was, what functions did writing perform: social and
cultural on the one hand (for instance, induction into the ways of thinking and
language practices of a disciplinary or professional community), and epistemic
on the other (that is, supporting thinking, planning, knowing, and learning). The
second was, how do sociocultural settings shape writing practices? In other
words, how is writing defined by the values and practices that prevail in
university settings and in the workplace?
In the university settings, additional domain-specific objectives were to
compare writing in different disciplines, to discover how students learn to do
what it is that they are expected to do in each course (how much explicit teaching
there is, what use is made of models, what other resources students draw on).
And we were interested in what we call the climate for writing in the particular
programs of study.
Issues that related more specifically to workplaces included the range of
readerships for each individual document; the place of writing in maneuver-
ing within the political hierarchies, and the effect of hierarchy on the
composing processes and products; the nature of collaboration in compos-
ing; and the extrainstitutional contextual and disciplinary factors that shape
the writing.
12 CHAPTER 1

By answering such questions, we hoped to identify commonalities and

differences: distinguishing between university and workplace writing, on the
one hand, and among the disciplines and professions, on the other. We ap-
proached the study with certain expectations, derived from the research litera-
ture referred to above and from our own earlier work. We were confident that
the relationships would be far more complex and subtle than conventionally
conceived. Certainly, workplace writing cannot fail to be radically different in
some ways from university writing given the significant difference in its social
context: for example, university students typically write solo to audiences of
one, who quite likely know more than the writer about the subject, who,
nevertheless, by convention are committed to reading the entire text (whatever
its length) within specified time frames, and who value the writing insofar as
it reveals and enacts the students' learning. In the workplace, writers may
prepare documents collaboratively, for complex and varied audiences, who
often know considerably less than the writers about that subject, who will read
only what is useful to them, and who will ideally use the document themselves
for a variety of political and communicative purposes. All these factors, and
many more, are endemic to the institutional situations and necessarily affect
the form and the process of writing in fundamental ways. On the other hand,
certain habits of mind, certain ways of marshaling data or constructing argu-
ments (i.e., aspects of the writing that are more fundamental to its role in
creating and transmitting knowledge and less immediately apparent from the
surface of the texts) may very well be transferred from university to workplace
and vice-versa-according to the discipline.

Research Activities
Given the scope and objectives of this research program (which began in 1992),
we decided to use a multiple-case study approach to study writers and writing
in both academic and workplace settings. The case study approach was neces-
sary in order to ensure that participants' perspectives were an integral part of
the data. Our major operational concern was to derive rich and contextualized
records of communicative transactions (primarily written, but in many cases,
oral, and especially with architecture, graphical). To that end, and depending
on the setting, our data-gathering activities included the following.

Data Gathering

1. Inventorying the genres in each domain: Constructing catalogues of

text-types in the different workplace and academic settings, and classifying the
INTRODUCTION 13

text-types according to a) function or purpose, b) readership, c) nature of task,

d) rhetorical form.
2. Document tracking: In each setting and for each discipline, the history of
specific typical texts was traced from the first specification of the task to the
text's completion and dissemination (its composition, dissemination, and vari-
ous readerships; how the writing originated, what works or people were
consulted, what kind of collaboration or feedback took place and when, who
were the interim and final readers, etc.).
3. Conducting reading protocols of designated readers: Supervisors in the
workplace or instructors responded to texts-articulating aloud (into a tapere-
corder) their immediate responses to the written piece (Dias, 1987; Ericsson &
Simon, 1985; Flower, Hayes, & Swarts, 1980; Ledwell-Brown, 1993; Smart,
1989; Waem, 1979). This procedure reveals similarities and differences in
expectations and tacit criteria for writing in different settings.
4. Ethnographic observation of writers involved in tasks of compos-
ing-from first assignment to final completion of task. We asked students and
professionals to keep logs of all activities related to writing that were conducted
in private and save all notes and drafts; we observed group work and conducted
regular interviews with writers concerning their goals, strategies, and decisions.
Recording techniques comprised audio taping, video recording, and field notes.
5. Interviews: These occurred in relation to all of the activities described
above. Early interviews helped identify participants for more intensive study.
Most interviews were open-ended and nondirective (Mishler, 1986).
6. Participant validation: Selected participants were asked to review and
confirm the case-study descriptions of their settings.

The above represents something of the range of our inquiry processes. Whereas
the research was unified by a common theoretical approach and shared ques-
tions (see below), our data gathering had to be responsive to the particularities
of the contexts we encountered, which varied strikingly. Our data is not all of
a piece: there are similarities in observations that span the various sites and
disciplines; there are significant differences regarding writing practices that are
directly attributable to the specific discipline of study or area of work.

Data Analyses
These included textual analyses ofthe writing collected (syntactic, rhetori-
cal, and conceptual); that is, analyses aimed at defining the modes of argumen-
tation (Toulmin, 1958; Toulmin, Reike, & Janik, 1979) and of categorizing
experience; analyses of oral discourse surrounding production of texts using
14 CHAPTER 1

categories based on systemic linguistics (Halliday, 1985); and sociolinguistic

analyses of production and reception of texts, framed within the contexts within
which the acts of speaking, reading, and writing occurred, drawing on methods
of text analysis developed by Brandt ( 1992), Huckin ( 1992), and MacDonald
(1992).
More recently we have been looking particularly at how novices are initiated
into workplace settings and at transitional programs, such as internships, within
university programs. In the first case, all pieces of writing done by selected
workplace novices over a period of months were collected, and regular inter-
views conducted before, during, and after the composing of a number of tasks.
This analysis enabled us to pinpoint gaps in performance and expectation,
common misconceptions, and ad hoc intervention strategies on the part of
supervisors that appeared to be successful, as well as common false starts and
blind alleys in the trial-and-error attempts of unguided novice writers. ·
The transitional programs we looked at were of various kinds. Thus, in one
4th-year business course, students were assigned to real worksites and asked to
do a real writing project for the enterprise. Social work students spent approxi-
mately 700 hours in field placements. Similarly, students in a Masters of Public
Administration program were placed as full-time interns (for one or two
semesters) in a variety of governmental settings. Observation of the students,
and discussions with the instructor, the students, and their employers enabled
us to determine the success of the programs as well as the areas that need
strengthening.
The team met regularly to agree on the instruments, questions, and ap-
proaches to analysis. Members shared logs and field notes, put forward and
refined hypotheses, considered emerging data in the light of those hypotheses,
and reviewed research strategies. What we report in this book arises from the
comparisons we have been making among the data we have obtained from the
various sites. In fact, writing this book together has been very much a continu-
ation of the collaborative exchange that has characterized our research process
throughout.

Hopeful Outcomes From the Research

Through the understanding that the research is yielding about the relationship
between academic and professional writing, those involved with professional
education and development in both spheres will, we hope, be better able to
develop appropriate programs to help facilitate the transition between the two
INTRODUCTION 15

environments. In the university, instructors who administer internship pro-

grams, for example, will be better able to design, sequence, and facilitate the
kind of writing normally expected in the workplace. Similarly, personnel
officers dedicated to training in the workplace, will be better able with such
knowledge to design relevant and helpful programs. Finally, a variety of joint
endeavors are possible, in which this new knowledge can be used as a basis for
the collaborative development of new co-operative programs. This is not to
imply that all writing in the university, even within professional programs, has
to justify its place by the contribution it makes to the ability to write at work;
certain needs are specific to each domain, so that the practices that address them
are not appropriately or usefully transferred to the other.

THE RESEARCH AND THE BOOK

Those are our practical hopes for bringing help to writers and to those who
depend on the skills of writers. At the same time, as we have made clear, we
locate ourselves in a research tradition and wish to contribute to it. This book,
however, is not addressed to teachers and writing researchers alone. To our
other readers we want to suggest that the interest of our work is not limited to
its practical implications for improving the state of affairs associated with
writing skills. We believe that our findings throw light not only on the nature
of writing but also on the nature of disciplines and professions; to understand
what writing does in either context is to understand a great deal about how the
various enterprises keep themselves on track, secure the allegiances of new-
comers, and maintain power relations in and outside their boundaries.
In the chapters that follow we attempt to answer the following general
questions. We see answering these as a potential contribution to both theory
and practice.

• How do university writing practices relate to writing in the workplace?

• In what sense and to what extent is writing in university a preparation for
writing in the workplace?

At the same time we hope to throw light on a number of areas of practical

concern, by indicating areas of potential intervention to provide for more
effective development of the writing potential of students and professionals.
The following sorts of question relating respectively to university and work-
place arise from that aspiration:
16 CHAPTER 1

• What changes need to be made in university teaching practices in order to

exploit more fully the potential of writing as a tool for learning, and to
prepare students to enter more easily into workplace writing practices?
Can universities prepare students to write for work?
• What workplace practices inhibit the full development and use of writing
for productive work? What practices support the use of writing to promote
workplace goals?

We begin in the following chapter by introducing the theoretical principles that

have guided our inquiry and define the terms that recur frequently in our
discussion. That chapter ought to help readers identify and track the key strands
of our argument through the following chapters. Those chapters are arranged
in three parts: discussions of university writing and related practices, workplace
writing and how it differs from writing in university, and writing in transitional
programs between university and workplace. A concluding chapter considers
the understandings that have emerged in this study and their meaning for writing
practices in the university and the workplace, as well as the questions they raise
for further research.
 2
SITU ATl NG WRITING
In this chapter we describe briefly theories that we have studied and drawn on
in different ways throughout the book. We said earlier that our perspective on
writing was a social one and need to explain what we mean by that. That writing
is social is not news. Of course it is used for social communication and learned
from other people. But we have a stronger, less commonsensical sense of social
in mind, one that we can perhaps indicate with the term situated.

WRITING AS SITU A TED ACTIVITY

Again, this at first looks like a common sense notion. We maintain that writing
does not occur in a social or institutional vacuum, that the context in which any
given writing occurs (with all its particularities) is integrally part of that act of
writing. We are all familiar with experiences that confirm this, and know how
situations and particular relationships can constrain or facilitate inventiveness.
Where the writer is, when he or she is writing, and who he or she is writing to
or for, may precipitate inarticulateness or give rise to apparently serendipitous
or inspired formulations. Looking at our own past writings we realize how some
of the freshest and most powerful parts of our texts are the product of specific
situations and exigencies.
Along with other writing researchers of the last 10 or 15 years we want to
push that notion beyond its everyday consensual application, and to claim that
the contexts of writing not only influence it (facilitating it or frustrating it or
nudging it in a particular direction) but are integral to it. The context is not
simply the contingent circumstances within which we happen to switch on the
writing motor. Writing is not a module that we bring along and plug into any
situation we find ourselves in. Rather, the context constitutes the situation that
defines the activity of writing; to write is to address the situation by means of
textual production. Just as there is no such thing as just writing, only writing
something, so all writing is a response to, and assumes as starting point, a
situation. Or, rather, an interpretation of a situation, because what determines
17
18 CHAPTER 2

the writing is less the objective state of affairs than the writer's understanding of
it. Situation in this sense has, clearly, to be defmed quite broadly and does not
simply or necessarily refer to the immediate social context; the situation that is
psychologically most real to some writers might be that of membership of a
community of poets stretching back hundreds of years (though they will inevitably
be influenced too, consciously or not, by aspects of their contemporary world).
Situation is a psychological reality, but in this book we will be stressing
social reality, situation as a shared, communally available, culturally defined
reality. Our view of the situatedness (alternatively, embeddedness) of writing
is well caught by Lave's (1991) account of"situated social practice:"

This theoretical view emphasizes the relational interdependency of agent and

world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning, and knowing. It emphasizes the
inherently socially negotiated quality of meaning and the interested, concerned
character of the thought and action of persons engaged in activity .... [T]his view
also claims that learning, thinking, and knowing are relations among people
engaged in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally struc-
tured world. (p. 67, emphasis in original)

It is because writing is so embedded in situations that we normally experi-

ence it as transparent (in the sense that it is not the focus or point of our
attention). Writing dissolves into the action, more or less disappearing as
anything separately identifiable-there is only the attending to the tone, avoid-
ing touchy subjects, finding an appropriate phrase, and so on.

GENRE STUDIES

To see writing as situated in the way we have indicated is to take a rhetorical

view. Rhetoric in the classical sense is the art of using language to persuade;
more generally, to act on a situation by acting on people by means of words. In
modem rhetorical theory what a situation presents to us that elicits a verbal
response is an exigence (Bitzer, 1968).
The most developed and comprehensive rhetorical theory to address writing
in recent times goes by the misleadingly limiting name of genre studies. This
approach is central to our own work; we will return to it repeatedly, and will
discuss specific aspects in more depth in chapter 3. The term is limiting because
the theory is not just an account of genres but is also, more generally, a situated
account of writing per se. As we say below, it ties the textual to the social, sees
texts as action and texts as in dialogue with each other; none of those strengths
relate specifically to explaining genres. In attempting to account for genre,
SITUATING WRITING 19

theorists have developed a position that is capable of much more. Genre in this
view has two aspects: social action and textual regularity. In accounting for the
first of these we have potentially dealt with most texts, and not only those that
we would regard as instantiations of a genre. 1
We will now proceed to give an account of genre studies that will give the
background needed for reading this book and for understanding the increasingly
frequent references to genre that are cropping up in quite diverse places. We will
then go on to describe some other theories and theoretical ideas, but must make
clear that their status is rather different. Because of its comprehensively rhetori-
cal character, as we have just indicated, genre studies constitutes the main
framework of our discussion (even when we are not talking about genres). The
other ideas will be used by way of elaboration and extension; thus, for example,
concepts of situated learning will help us to understand how genres are learned.
In our discussion of genre studies, then, consideration of the textual regu-
larities (similarities or family resemblances) that are the most obvious feature
of genres will get us quickly into the other aspect of writing, writing as action,
which in tum will lead us to the crucial notion of social motive.
Genre studies offers a way of dealing at the same time with textual and
contextual regularities, repeated actions, both across texts and across "the
composing practices involved in creating these texts, the reading practices used
to interpret them, and the social roles performed by writers and readers" (Pare
& Smart, 1994, p. 147).
Most readers will recall the more familiar meaning of genre, as referring to
generally unchanging regularities in conventions of form and content, usually
with reference to literary works, allowing readers to identify, for example,
classes of work such as poetry, fiction, and drama, and within such classes,
sub-categories such as the ballad or sonnet, romance or detective fiction, and
tragedy, comedy, or absurdist theatre. Such classification of texts has extended
as well to prescriptive classification in school writing and thus the familiar
categories of exposition, description, argumentation, and narration, with sub-
categories such as the book report, the business letter, and the lab report. In the
workplace we have such familiar genres as the memo, the progress report,
minutes of meetings, and the annual report. The definite article that designates
these genres is telling in that it seems to prescribe an unchanging, fixed, and
authorized rubric, with the strong implication that adherence to form is tied in
with effective writing. Because "they treat socially constructed categories as

1This is a tricky matter. In the strong view of geme as set out by Miller ( 1994) in her original

account, geme is a level of the system of language discourse, so that an utterance can no more
avoid making geme choices than it can avoid mood choices at the level of grammar. For our
purposes in this book we fortunately do not need to take a position on this.
20 CHAPTER2

stable natural facts [,]" such formalist and essentialist approaches to under-
standing genre, according to Bazerman (1988, p. 7), provide inadequate ac-
counts of the semiotic reality .Z
The conception of genre we work from acknowledges regularities in textual
form and substance as the more obvious features of genre, but goes on to
examine the underlying, non-textual regularities that produce these regularities
in texts. These underlying regularities have to do with typical ways in which
writers engage rhetorically with recurring situations. In her seminal article,
"Genre as Social Action," Miller (1994) lays out much of the theoretical
groundwork underlying current reconceptions of genre. Genres, she explains,
are typified rhetorical responses to situations that are socially interpreted or
constructed as recurrent or similar; genres are thus social actions. As in Burke
(1950), the notion of action (with discourse seen as symbolic action) is central
for Miller, as are the notions of situation and motive: "human action, whether
symbolic or otherwise, is interpretable only against a context of situation and
through the attributing of motives" (Miller, 1994, p. 24). From Bitzer, Miller
borrows the term exigence, but radically reinterprets it to refer not to an
objective external state of affairs but to a "form of social knowledge-a mutual
construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them
but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need" (p. 30).
Exigences for Miller are what everyone agrees are exigences. There are social
categories of exigence, and if someone interprets my text as a response to one
of these, then they will find my text rational and intelligible. (Conversely, ifl
write something that does not identifiably address a recognized type of exi-
gence, then I will fail to communicate; exigence is one way in which situation
inserts itself into the essence of writing and is not just circumstance-which is
why we insist on the strong sense in which writing is a social activity.)
Crucial terms in Miller~s discussion are situation and social motive. The
latter needs some explaining, since motive is something we think of as pertain-
ing exclusively to individual psychology. Social motive means not a motive
about the social or a motive shared by the group but a motive that is socially
recognized and allowed for. It is the sort of motive that the culture acknow-
ledges you may have and allows you to have, and the culture's arrangements,
such as genres, are means oflegitimately acting on these motives. An example:
having had a claim for a veteran's pension denied, we perceive it is now the

2 We briefly discuss a semiotic view of communication toward the end of the chapter. The

central point is that meanings are not built into signs (which may be anything from individual
letters of the alphabet to words to texts to gemes) but are brought to them from repertoires of
cultural knowledge (and individual idiosyncratic association) by writers and readers. Thus,
meanings are therefore inherently unstable.
SITUATING WRITING 21

moment to write a letter of complaint, institute a lawsuit, or petition our

representative in Parliament or Congress. Social motive "is clearly not the same
as the rhetor' s intention, for that can be ill-formed, dissembling, or at odds with
what the situation conventionally supports" (Miller, 1994, p. 31 ). This distinc-
tion is equally important for understanding the difference between the actual
players in a scene and the social roles they must inhabit to perform appropri-
ately. Genres ascribe to those involved distinct personae and social roles so that,
depending on the recurring situation and genre, Jane Doe writes as professor,
consultant, mother, or irate customer.
Social motives, and the genres that provide for their enactment, are thus both
enabling and constraining, depending on how closely they map onto our
individual motives. In Miller's (1994) words, "what we learn when we learn a
genre is not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends.
We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have" (p. 38). An implication
ofher account is that socialization into a "community of practice" (see below)
is "learn[ing] to adopt social motives as ways of satisfying private intentions
through rhetorical action" (p. 36). If what we want above all is to belong to a
particular group but do not know what specific things we ought to do in order
to act as members, the genres of the group will tell us both what to want to do
as member and how, rhetorically, to achieve it. We can be easily persuaded that
we thus submit ourselves to the cultural imperatives of the group or the system,
so that private intentions may be constantly frustrated by the available and
required genres, and writers within an occupational culture may experience its
genres as straitjackets. Later, in chapter 6, we report on hospital social workers,
some of whom were unhappy with aspects of the required genre for recording
cases. These individuals would mainly go along with the genre, having no
choice in the matter, but there would be little likelihood of any deep reshaping
of individual desires in the process; learning a genre does not always involve
pervasive secondary socialization. Authoritative discourse does not become
internally persuasive discourse (Bakhtin, 1981 ).
But we need to argue also for the potentialities of genres for creating spaces
for forming and realizing new versions of self as one discovers new motives
and transforms the self in response to the new communicative needs and
opportunities. We report in chapter 5 on the sketchbooks kept by architecture
students and how they provide the "opportunity space" (Bazerman's phrase) to
participate through acts of private inscription in the diverse ways the architec-
tural community act and represent themselves. But we must acknowledge here
that our account documents far more the controlling than the identity-forming
and self-realizing possibilities of genre participation.
22 CHAPTER 2

It ought to be clear now why genres, as opposed to other linguistic phenom-

ena (word definitions and syntax rules), are far more fluid, flexible, and
dynamic; and why their number is indeterminate. For genres respond to social
interpretations and reinterpretations of necessarily shifting, complex experi-
ences. This refocusing of genre away from regularities in form and substance
toward the social action a particular discourse is used to accomplish is the
strength of this particular approach, which we should distinguish in this respect
from one other theoretical position.
A group of scholars drawing on the systemic linguistics tradition developed
by Michael Halliday at the University of Sydney have also emphasized the
social dimensions of genre, pointing out the political and ideological implica-
tions of genre, and, in some cases, how the values of particular ruling elites are
embodied in certain genres. Some of these scholars, such as Jim Martin, Joan
Rothery, and Frances Christie (as for instance in a collection of papers edited
by Cope & Kalantzis, 1993 ), advocate teaching the textual features of such
genres to disadvantaged students in order to empower them. This seems like a
move back to the traditional notion of genre with its concern for unchanging
regularities of form and content, except that these scholars do not focus on
literary texts; rather they are concerned to identify, describe, and teach the
generic structures that occur differently in different school subjects, in order to
provide those who have traditionally been excluded from full participation in
school textual practices an entry into the curriculum.
Again, we reject this reification of genre as a primarily textual matter, as if one
can learn the text type in one context and then transport it into the context to which
it properly applies. An implication of the Sydney position would seem to be that
genres of workplace writing can also be made available to those who seek jobs that
assume at least a beginner's facility in using such genres. But such an approach
would normalize workplace genres as somehow fixed, unchanging, and accessible
to newcomers in an organization. To anticipate the argument we will be setting
forth extensively later in the book, our own contrasting view is twofold. First, we
hold that the kriowledge that one needs in order to write effectively in a particular
work context is not simply of the textual aspect of the accepted genres, in the general
form in which it can be imparted outside the specific site; one also needs knowledge
ofthe culture and the circumstances, and one needs to understand and take on the
local purposes, the social motives that prevail in that setting. Participating in a
genre means not just producing a text that looks like the ones that are usually
produced in that milieu but having purposes, for action and, therefore, communi-
cation, that are recognized and allowed for within that context and for which the
genre has emerged adaptively as the appropriate vehicle.
SITUATING WRITING 23

Our second point is that genres are always in flux, "stabilized-for-now," as

Schryer (1994, p. 107) puts it, provisional and open to contestation and change,
adaptation to or displacement by new technology, or decay from disuse and
irrelevance. A brief case in point is the increasing competition for space in some
research journals of papers based on ethnographic research, and how these
journals must adapt to create room for such necessarily extensive accounts, and
how the reporting of such research must trim unnaturally its bulk and quite likely
the cogency of its arguments in order to be considered for acceptance in such
journals. Determining the shape and content of such articles are also readers'
beliefs, including those of reviewers and editors, about what counts as research.
One might also consider that publishers of manuals and other stakeholders have
some interest in conserving and consolidating research-reporting genres.
To sum up, the value of genre studies as the main conceptual frame for our
inquiry lies primarily in the stance it enables us to adopt toward written
discourse: regularized but not fixed; fluid, flexible, and dynamic; emerging and
evolving in exigency and action; reflecting and incorporating social needs,
demands, and structures; and responsive to social interpretations and reinter-
pretations of necessarily shifting, complex experiences.
We now tum to a consideration of certain other ideas that have influenced us
and we draw on in the accounts that follow. Nearly all may be seen as supplying
elaboration of or a parallel take on concepts that are present in genre theory. So
Activity Theory will offer another perspective on social motive, and on the action
aspect of genre; ideas about Situated Learning in "communities of practice" will
provide ways of accounting for the learning of genres; and Distributed Cognition
draws attention to the way that writing functions within sociotechnical systems
ofknowledge and action. Our remaining topic of Semiotic Approaches to writing
is less directly related, though not unrelated, to genre studies.

ACTIVITY THEORY

Activity Theory (AT) derives from the Vygotskian school of Soviet psychology,
especially through the work of Leont'ev (1981). 3 In proposing a new unit of
analysis, activity, AT can be regarded as a counter to the tendency within
western cognitive psychology to focus on mental operations of individuals, for
example, problem-solving, in isolation from the larger human activity in which

3" ••• colleagues and students of Vygotsky have emphasized that most of the essential roots of

the theory of activity may be traced to Vygotsky's own writings. Various hypotheses have been
advanced for why Vygotsky himself did not reformulate his ideas into a theory of activity. Some
scholars have argued that he would have moved in that direction had he lived longer. Others ... have
claimed that Vygotsky was in fact very close to proposing such a theory" (Wertsch, 1985, p. 200).
24 CHAPTER 2

it is situated. More relevantly for our purposes, however, activity theory turns
out to be highly congruent with the genre theory approach we have presented
thus far.
Briefly, Leont'ev proposes three distinct but interrelated levels of analysis,
each level associated with a specific unit of analysis (Wertsch, 1985). In other
words, Leont'ev proposes three distinct ways of answering the question: what
is an individual or group doing in a particular setting? The first and most global
is the level of activities (the term activity as used in a unit of activity refers to
specific human activities, and ought not to be confused with its use in "activity
theory," which applies to human activity in general). Examples of a unit of
activity are playing, learning, working, and eating, and apply to individual as
well as collective functioning. Activities are distinguished on the basis of their
motive and the object (this could easily translate to our sense of objective)
toward which they are oriented. Thus the activity of going to school may be
motivated by the object of getting an education. As Renshaw (1992) states:

Motives (such as work, education, or play) are the taken-for- granted frameworks
that organize participation in everyday activities and social institutions. A
motive, like Goffman's notion of a frame, provides a socioculturally defined
milieu where participants are able to coordinate their purposes and maintain a
predictable sense of the ongoing interaction. (p. 55)

It is important to remember that it is the subject or subjects (the person or

persons engaged in the activity) who interpret what activity they are involved
in. The action of reading a novel, which is essentially a recreational activity in
most settings, is regarded in most school settings as a learning activity, as work
in a magazine's book editor's office, and very different work in a professor's
study. Renshaw's point is that motive is socioculturally defined. While this does
not exclude the possibility of individual definition, it is the concept of social
definition that we find particularly relevant to our inquiry. W ertsch, Minick,
and Arns (1984) make the same point in this way:

The theory of activity in Soviet psychology suggests that ... the organization of
systems of activity at the societal level establishes important parameters that
determine the manner in which an individual or group of individuals carries out
and masters a particular type of goal-oriented action. (p. 171)

The parallel with Miller's (1994) "social motive" is obvious. Cultures have
repertoires of socially recognized activities; engaging in them is a motive in
itself. Playing, learning, working, and eating are just "things that we do," that
require no further explanation; they are not pursuits that we see ourselves as
SITUATING WRITING 25

engaging in primarily in order to achieve some other end; no ulterior motive is

looked for without which these activities do not make sense. In the same way,
socially institutionalized genres are activities one engages in, without need of
further explanation, as part of what one does as a member of a particular cultural
milieu; they are enactments of recognized social motives, and are activities in
Leont'ev's sense.
The second level of analysis is at the level of action. Actions are "goal-di-
rected processes that must be undertaken to fulfill the object [of the activity].
They are conscious (because one holds a goal in mind), and different actions
may be taken to meet the same goal" (Nardi, 1992, p. 353). Actions may be
driving a car, completing a puzzle, writing a letter, or reading a newspaper.
Wertsch et al. (1984) point out that the need for distinguishing the level of
activity from the level of action is apparent in the fact that an action can vary
independently of an activity. To cite Leont'ev (1981):

an activity and an action are genuinely different realities, which therefm ~ do not
coincide. One and the same action can be instrumental in realizing different
activities. It can be transferred from one activity to another, thus revealing its
relative independence. Let us turn once again to a crude illustration. Assume that
I have the goal of getting to point N, and I carry it out. It is clear that this action
can have completely different motives, i.e., it can realize completely different
activities. The converse is also obvious: one and the same motive can give rise
to different goals and, accordingly, can produce different actions. (p. 61)

Thus, the action of reading, depending on the goal, can realize the activity of
play, or work, or learning.
The third level of analysis is concerned with operations, the conditions under
which the action is carried out and the means by which it is carried out. A goal
of getting to school can command different sets of operations, depending on the
conditions involved: the distance, the weather, time available, traffic condi-
tions-all these will determine whether one walks, uses public transportation,
or drives a car. As long as the goal remains the same, the changed operations do
not determine a different action. With practice, operations may become routine
and automatic, requiring no conscious effort; so that specific steps (walking to
the bus stop, having exact change ready, depositing change, obtaining a transfer)
are subsumed under one operation; for example, taking a bus.Wertsch (1981)
summarizes the distinctions among the three levels of analysis:

Leont'ev points out that activities are distinguished on the basis of their motive
and the object toward which they are eriented; actions, on the basis of their goals;
and operations, on the basis of the conditions under which they are carried out.
(p. 18)
26 CHAPTER 2

Thus the activity of work may involve the action of writing a report, which itself
will include several subactions such as reading, note-taking, interviewing, a
computer-search, consulting company guidelines, and circulating drafts, all
intended to meet the goal of writing a report. These actions are distinguished
from the operations that enable one to perform those actions: typing, reading,
writing, telephoning, faxing (routinized, requiring no conscious attention).
One can see how the question, "What is the writer doing?" can be answered
differently depending on the level of analysis one is using. In the report-writing
situation much of the actual writing (getting words on paper, transcribing) is
merely operational, a means needed to fulfil an action rather than a goal-
directed action in itself. For people who are learning to use a word processor
as a tool for writing, the act of getting letters and words on screen remains a
goal-directed action, until the process has been mastered and become automatic
and routine. Such a development is easily visible in children learning to write.
At one stage, merely holding a pencil in order to create shapes on paper is an
action. As experience sets in, getting recognizable letters down on paper is
moving into the category of an operation, a means, but the matter of forming
words and sentences is now the goal-directed action. In time writing words and
sentences has become largely operational, and developing and shaping one's
thoughts on paper, composing, constitutes the goal and action. Russell (1997)
suggests that writing routinely in a familiar genre is an instance of how a
complex action in time and with repeated use becomes operational. But,
occasionally, even for experienced writers, forming words and letters does
become the substance of an action rather than a routine, automatized operation:
when one enters letters into boxes on forms for instance, or when a pen begins
to run out of ink and making marks on paper becomes a prime goal, or when a
minor hand injury makes holding a pen awkward.
Leont' ev (1981) nicely makes the point about how "actions and operations
have different origins, different dynamics, and different fates" (p. 64) by
describing the operations required for driving an automobile:

Initially, every operation-for example, shifting gears-appears as an action

subordinated to a goal. Such actions have their conscious "orienting basis"
(Gal 'perin). Subsequent! y, this action is included in another complex action, such
as that of changing the speed of the automobile. At this point, shifting gears
becomes one of the methods for carrying out this action-that is, it becomes an
operation necessary for performing the action. It is no longer carried out as a
special goal-directed process. The driver does not distinguish its goal. So far as
the driver's conscious processes are concerned, it is as if shifting gears under
normal circumstances does not exist. He/she is doing something else: he/she is
driving the automobile from place to place .... Indeed, we know that this operation
SITUATING WRITING 27

can "drop out" of the driver's activity entirely and can be performed automat-
ically. It is generally the fate of operations that, sooner or later, they become a
function of a machine. (p. 64)

In our example of report writing, writing was categorized as a goal-directed

action at times, and at other times an operation, a routinized means to the end
of producing a report. Depending on the subject's orientation and motivation,
the activity could be regarded as work or learning. Again, a reminder that
naming an activity "is a sociocultural interpretation or creation that is imposed
on the context by the participant(s)" (Wertsch, 1985, p. 203).
On the other hand, a subject involved in the activity of school going may be
writing a report directed by the object of a good grade and select actions whose
goals are to meet the instructor's criteria for that particular assignment: not more
than 1000 words, provide an outline, and include at least five specific references
to related periodical literature, marks deducted for late papers. The specific
actions that meet such goals may differ according to the writer's experience,
the time available for researching and writing this paper, and the availability of
library and other resources-generally whatever strategic actions the writer
conceives as necessary to meet those goals.
Writing occurs in both settings but it is clearly not the same kind of event or
activity in both settings. The contexts, and hence the tasks, as they are inter-
preted by writers define what that writing will be, and to use AT te-rminology,
will determine different actions and operations. In both the work and in the
school setting, writing is a "a mediating tool," an extension of the person, "mind
in action," as James Wertsch might say. But the mind is not necessarily working
toward the same goals. People who write at work, for instance, are unlikely to
speak of themselves as doing writing as opposed to preparing reports. Social
workers, who claim to do little or no "writing," admit that they spend much of
their time "recording." Jane Ledwell-Brown, a member of our research team,
reports that all of the people she observed in two departments of a pharmaceu-
tical company did a significant amount of writing as part of their daily routine;
yet none of their job descriptions specifically listed writing as one of their job
requirements. It is only through the research interviews that the individuals
discovered how much writing they actually did. To borrow from Michael
Polanyi (1958), writing is held in subsidiary awareness rather than infocal
awareness. As the writer encounters difficulty, writing may shift from being
operational (or subsidiary) to being action (focal).
What does AT's tri-level categorization afford us? For one, it enables an
analysis of human actions in context. For another, we are able to see an
ecological interrelatedness among the three levels along which we can view
28 CHAPTER 2

activity, how activity is distributed along so many covarying strands in its

fabric. Activity Theory, as we show in chapter 4, also uncovers internal
contradictions in our practices, which with our attention to individual processes
and textual products we normally tend to overlook.
In the analysis we present below we do not regularly make direct reference
to AT. It is nevertheless part of our intellectual resource, and in numerous
instances would have provided an alternative perspective in which to make
similar points about our material. We do use it in chapter 5 to make the point
that some of the private design notebook writing we have studied in a school
of architecture realizes a different activity from writing that is done to be
assessed in conventional courses. Similarly, the difference between a university
classroom business simulation (chap. 3) and the related exercise in a firm (chap.
9) can well be described in AT terms.
One specific use of the theory could be as further grounds for objection to
the Sydney view of genre. When they teach a genre we might argue that they
are teaching an action, not an activity; in our terms that amounts to saying they
are not teaching the genre. What people need to learn is to engage in the activity.
It might be argued that familiarity with contributory actions is at least a great
help in acquiring an activity, and in principle that is true. In the case of much
situated writing, however, the action has to be customized to suit the situation
through a form of intelligent reconstruction in the light ofthe sort ofknowledge,
for instance of values and local histories, that genre teachers cannot impart. The
actions in question are not ones that, like gear-shifting, can simply be called up
and run as sub-routines (to adopt programming lingo).

SITUATED LEARNING
IN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Whereas academic institutions and classrooms have received the bulk of

attention in studies concerned with learning, very few studies have attended to
learning within groups and communities outside educational institutions. Even
when studies have focussed on non-school contexts, they have generally
regarded and assessed such learning from a school-based perspective. By far
the most significant work in out-of-school learning comes from Jean Lave and
her associates. As we explain more fully in chapter 9, in our own research
Lave's insights illuminate the processes by which people learn the genres of
the social milieu in which they find themselves, in school as well as out. Our
use of the term, communities of practice (COPs), comes from the work of Lave
and Wenger (1991) and their associates and refers to contexts for learning that
SITUATING WRITING 29

operate successfully outside the classroom and provide the contrasting back-
drop against which we can examine classroom activities. 4 (Lave and her
colleagues did not, we should add, have the learning of writing in mind.)
In his Keywords, Williams (1976) speaks of the complexity of the word
community because, on the one hand, it suggests "common concern," and on
the other, "various forms of common organization." It is in the latter sense, the
less rosy view, as Pare (1993) puts it, that Lave (1988) uses the term. We
considered adopting the term spheres of practice as a substitute for communities
of practice, in order to avoid the warm overtones usually accompanying
community and discounting any notion of conflict and exclusiveness; however,
sphere does not carry the notion of peopled with the same force as community
does. By Lave's ( 1988) definition, a "community of practice is a set of relations
among persons, activity, and the world, over time and in relation with other
tangential and overlapping communities of practice" (p. 98). In fore grounding
relationships, Lave foregrounds situatedness, emphasizing the interrelatedness
of, the need to consider in context, the activity of participants. COPs describe
members of a group involved in a common activity over time (these could be,
for instance, members of a scout troop, tailors, or warehouse workers). In
relation to other COPs, there is a shared understanding within a COP of what
they are doing and who they are. Within the COP there is a relationship of
experts and novices, oldtimers and newcomers; so that members, participating
at multiple levels, are engaged in a process oflearning. A COP need not be
homogenous in its makeup; it is more likely to involve people with different
interests, viewpoints, and abilities. "It does imply participation in an activity
system about which participants share understanding concerning what they are
doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities" (Lave &
Wenger, 1991, p. 98). At the same time, we ought to note that as activity systems
overlap, so do COPS; and these points of overlap can be critical and defining.
Child welfare workers, for instance, may find themselves at points of conflu-
ence and collision, where they must contend with the often competing claims
of the medical profession, the judicial system, the social work agency, and the
child's family members, and know the institutionally more powerful interests
will have decisive say.

4 For people familiar with composition and rhetorical theory, the term discourse community

(Swales, 1990) immediately comes to mind. The notion has, however, been questioned because
it implies static, unchanging modes of discourse as dominant and uncontested; whereas, as with
any such active group one can assume competing discourses and interests (Faigley, 1992; Hemdl,
1993; Pare, 1993) as well as emerging gemes. We find "communities of practice," despite the
problematic term "community" (see main text, below) both more general, in that it covers activity
beyond language, and more precise, since it centers on what groups of people do.
30 CHAPTER 2

The notion of COPs as we have described it thus far calls for illustration. A
COP that also involves writing as one of its major activities is that of social
workers who monitor and prepare regular reports on court-referred children in
families designated as dysfunctional, or other such cases of children requiring
care and attention. A newcomer will, on his induction into the job, work
generally with an experienced social worker, observing and, in some cases,
assisting her in writing up such reports. He will study his supervisor's and
others' files of similar cases and be encouraged to ask questions and consider
alternative accounts. At times, he may assist other workers in transcribing case
notes, updating files, and tracking related documents. He may attend courtroom
arbitration sessions where case-workers' reports are entered into evidence.
Eventually he will write solo, with an understanding that he can count on
oldtimers to review his work and suggest improvements, and typically cosign
the document. Lave and Wenger (1991) describe a process called "legitimate
peripheral participation" (LPP) to explain how newcomers "inevitably partici-
pate in communities of practitioners and the mastery of knowledge and skill
requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural
practices of a community" (p. 29). LPP, they insist, is "a way of understanding
learning," not a teaching strategy (p. 40); and learning is best viewed "as
participation in the social world" (p. 43).
Legitimate and peripheral are carefully chosen words. Legitimate because
participants feel they have access to and belong to a community, that they can
observe and participate in the practice of the community. Lave and Wenger
insist that peripherality does not imply a center and central participation. What
they contrast with peripheral participation is full participation.
The notion that classrooms can model such real world settings and become
COPs is difficult to resist. Brown et al. (1993) propose that schools should be
communities "where students learn to learn.. . . graduates of such communities
would be prepared as lifelong learners who have learned how to learn in many
domains." They argue that by "participating in the practices of scholarly research,
they [children] should be enculturated into the community of scholars during their
12 or more years of apprenticeship in school settings." They propose to do so by
trying to create "a community of discourse ... where the participants are inducted
into the rituals of academic and, more particularly, scientific discourse and activity"
(pp. 190-191). It is tempting to reproduce the workplace within the classroom in
order to have students learn to write professional discourse. If discourse is embed-
ded in social situations, do simulations provide sufficient and contextually valid
settings? It is precisely questions such as this that this study is designed to answer;
and the notion of COPs may provide useful directions for classroom practice.
SITUATING WRITING 31

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION

Whereas the theoretical notions considered so far mainly address writing from
the point of view of writers, explaining what it is they have to do in order to be
writers within a milieu and how they learn to do it, the concept of distributed
cognition gives us a way to think about the way in which writers' acts and texts
are integrated into wider systems of actions. The unit of analysis is not the
individual but the group and the mediating artifacts, including the language,
they use. Cognition in the term distributed cognition refers to the knowledge
and knowledge-making on which a group or organization depends in order to
accomplish its activities; it includes both consciousness and storage of infor-
mation and ideas. The idea is that this knowledge, in the words of Jean Lave,
"is distributed-stretched over, not divided among-mind, body, activity and
culturally organized settings (which include other actors)" (p. 1). It is, as
signaled in the title of Resnick, Levine, and Teasley's (1991) collection of
papers, socially shared. 5 But it is also important to note that the knowledge is
dispersed not only in different people's heads but also in "culturally organized
settings," including the routines and habitual practices of the group. The
relevance to genre is clear; genres embody the experience of previous writers,
allowing it to be reactivated on each new occasion of writing. This is stored
knowledge, even though the individual writers who use the genres would
generally be unable to say what that knowledge is. The stored knowledge is
inherent in the reiteration of genre: textual regularities of form and category,
habits of information collection and archival practices, patterns of writing and
reading.
The work on distributed cognition gives us two useful perspectives on
writing, one (the main one) to do with the manner in which writing contributes
to the work of an organized group, the other to do with the social component
of individual writing. Hutchins (1993) illustrates the first aspect of distributed
cognition with an analysis of the activity of ship navigation, in this case, a crew
working together to guide a naval vessel into San Diego harbor and the systems
of socially distributed cognition they rely on. It is not just the activities and
knowledge of the captain on the bridge that bring about the passage of the ship
into the harbor. Similarly, we can see how the writing of an organization or
community functions as an element within that structure, as one medium in

5 In the final paper of that collection, Cole (1991, p. 398) points out that shared in shared

cognition means both having in common and divided up or distributed. We prefer to think of
distributed cognition as participating in both notions of shared.
32 CHAPTER 2

which its important knowledge, about its core activities and not just about
writing, is formulated, developed, shaped, and reshaped for different applica-
tions, communicated and stored. Hutchins (1993) further explains:

socially distributed cognition can have a degree of parallelism of activity that is

not possible in individuals. Although current research tells us that much of
individual cognition is carried out by the parallel activity of many parts of the
brain, still, at the scale of more molar activities, individuals have difficulty
simultaneously performing more than one complex task or maintaining more
than one rich hypothesis. These are things that are easily done in socially
distributed cognitive systems. Ultimately, no matter how much parallelism there
may be within a mind, there is the potential for more in a system composed of
many minds. (p. 60)

One medium through which separate minds come together in a system of minds
is clearly written communication. 6
By the same token, the system is not merely external to the individual but
enters into and contributes to the formation of his or her operations, including
writing. Hutchins ( 1993) argues that "when the context of cognition is ignored,
it is impossible to see the contribution of structure in the environment, in
artifacts, and in other people to the organization of mental processes"(p. 63).
The distributed cognition model enables us to see writing, too, as not enclosed
within the mind of the knower, but extended in a complex of relationships and
interactions that includes other people and artifacts. Thus a report produced by
a newly hired employee of a small company may have been commissioned as
a result of a meeting at which several questions driving this report were
discussed. Earlier reports may have been consulted, relevant information may
have been garnered from fellow workers via e-mail, a spreadsheet program may
have produced informative tables and up-to-date analysis, and the structure and
organization ofthe report, initially derived from company guidelines and model
reports, may have been shaped by unexpected contingencies and inquiries and
suggestions from coworkers and managers. The sense in which the production
of a piece of writing is distributed is not just that of a mechanical division of
labor. It is also that other people's contributions, not only via direct inputs and
suggestions, but through their experience as stored in genres, existing texts, and
cultural forms, are integral to the apparently individual production.

6"Systems composed of many minds" may be an apt designation for the operations of the

workplace; the question then suggests itself, how well does that phrase apply to what goes on in
classrooms, and whatever the advantages of such distributed cognition systems, to what extent
should classroom organization and practice aspire to such a designation? We give some attention
to this later in the book, in chapter 7.
SITUATING WRITING 33

In addition to those key points about the writing within systems of activity,
W ertsch, Tulviste, and Hagstrom ( 1993) offer an interesting suggestion about
the implications of distributed cognition for learning. They first cite Russian
psychologist Vygotsky's (1981a) formulation:

Any function in the child's cultural development appears twice, or on two planes.
First it appears on the social plane, and then on the psychological plane. First it
appears between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the
child as an intrapsychological category. (p. 163)

Wertsch et al. (1993) then goes on to argue that Vygotsky

was not simply asserting that mental processes in the individual somehow emerge
out of participation in social life. Instead, he was making the much stronger claim
that the specific structures and processes of instrumental functioning can be
traced to their developmental precursors on the intermental plane. (p. 338)

Vygotsky is speaking of the mental development of children, specifically in so

far as such development is integrally tied in with their social transactions with
adults or more knowledgeable peers. But such an argument applies just as much
to the learning relationships between skilled or experienced and less skilled or
inexperienced adults. Socially distributed cognition represents the kind of
functioning on the intermental plane out of which can evolve "the specific
structures and processes of instrumental functioning." Such a claim provides
further warrant for our belief that we cannot fully understand the processes by
which individuals become writers in either academic or work settings, unless
we look at these learners acting in context, their co-participants, and the
mediational means involved. 7
The constructs, situated cognition and distributed cognition, seem so common-
sensical that we might legitimately ask what in them is so insightful that they might
advance our inquiry. Thus Nickerson ( 1993 ), speaking of distributed cognition, asks:

Does anyone doubt that the same people act differently in different situations,
that people are influenced by the social and cultural contexts in which they live,
that what one can do depends to a large degree on the tools and materials at one's
disposal, that there are countless useful tools in the world including many that

7The use ofwordprocessors and the facility they afford to incorporate other texts, revise, and

format to print publication standards, the use of complex statistical analyses packages and other
computer-run analytic tools, and the use of electronic mail and FAX to provide feedback at a
speed undreamed of a decade ago are three well-worn instances of how mediational means are
implicated in making a significant difference to how one defines and approaches a writing task,
and to what one writes.
34 CHAPTER 2

simplify cognitive tasks, that what skills people develop depends in part on the
kinds of artifacts they must use, that it is easier to do certain things in some
environments than in others, that two heads are (sometimes) better than one, that
specialization offunction within groups is often useful, that it is a waste of time
and effort to keep some types of information in one's head ... ? (p. 231)

All true and self-evident, it would appear. But then we need to consider how
writing, and cognition in general, have been studied and taught as though they
involve operations that occur entirely within an individual, as though "this
individual existed in a cultural, historical, and institutional vacuum" (W ertsch,
Tulviste, & Hagstrom, 1993, pp. 336-337). The main body of research into the
"composing process" certainly exemplifies this ideology. And how much teach-
ing of writing does not proceed as ifleaming to write were a matter of developing
an individual's ability? How often in looking for ways to help a struggling writer
do we look to the mode and quality of the writer's connectedness with the
community within which the writing finds its purpose and resources?
W ertsch et al. ( 1993) go on to trace the roots of this view, drawing on the
work of philosopher Charles Taylor (1985, 1989) and his argument that social
science theory is "grounded in a certain tradition of individualism that perme-
ates our personal and professional lives . . . a social science that takes the
atomistic agent as its basic building block" and leads "to accounts of human
mental functioning in which such agency is viewed as being analytically and
developmentally prior to sociocultural life" (W ertsch et al., 1993, pp. 3 3 7-3 3 8).
However much we may view collaboration and exchange among individuals
as a necessary part of writing processes, the default mode in our thinking about
writing and its practices tends to be that writing is primarily and ultimately the
product of individual minds. Such a notion is so deeply embedded in our
consciousness that the question of what constitutes intellectual property or
plagiarism is seldom subject to radical reexamination.
In chapter 7 we make use of the concept of distributed cognition in accounting
for the way that writing worked in a government office we studied. We have not
found that it illuminated much about classrooms, which leads us to an awareness
that the presence of developed networks of distributed cognition may be one of
the important criteria differentiating educational from workplace writing.

SEMIOTIC THEORY: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF SIGNS

The central tenet of semiotic theory, as it derives, via separate streams, from
Peirce (1931-1958) and Morris (1971) on the one hand and from Vygotsky
SITUATING WRITING 35

(1978, 1986) and Bakhtin (1986)/Voloshinov (1986) on the other, and in

distinction from Saussure' s ( 1967) theory of signs that he called semiology, is
that signs, linguistic and other, have no inherent meaning or value but are just
things (literally, in the sense that they always have material reality as physical
phenomena or events) to wpich we attribute meaning. Communication is
possible because to some extent we agree, by convention, to accord the same
meanings to the same signs. So dictionaries, for instance, are possible; these
give us the core meaning of certain verbal signs, though semioticians such as
Vygotsky, like literary scholars too, are aware of the cloud of other associated
meanings, some of them highly personal, that are always also read into signs.
There are three ways in which this area of thinking is relevant for our study.
One is about the relationship between written and other signs, a second concerns
our use of signs as mediating means for communicating and thinking and the third
relates to the way signs get their meanings within particular discursive settings.

Linguistic and Other Signs

Language is clearly not the only sign system we use, and its relative importance
depends on context. Vygotsky (1981 b) offers an intriguing list of other symbol
systems, including, maps, diagrams, art, and mechanical drawings, "all sorts of
conventional signs" (p. 137). In the contexts we have studied, writing often
occurs in close relationship with, and sometimes as an optional alternative to,
other sorts of inscribed signs, and especially drawings, diagrams, and charts.
Understanding these settings requires us to look at the entire communicative
matrix, with all the sign systems it employs, and not to single out writing as
special in a way that the participants clearly do not. The need to consider
semiotic activity as a whole with writing as one constituent of it has been
increasingly recognized in the last few years (Ackerman & Oates, 1996;
Smagorinksy & Coppock, 1994; Winsor, 1994; Witte, 1992).

language (and Writing) as Mediating Tool

This set of insights is not of the kind that will reveal its utility overtly by being
referred to in the specific analysis we will report, but constitutes an important
element of our background understanding. In his Voices ofthe Mind, W ertsch' s
(1991) central claim is that "human action typically employs 'mediational
means' such as tools and language, and that these mediational means shape the
action in essential ways." (p. 12). His point is that we ought to think of "the
person(s)-acting-with-mediational-means as an irreducible agent" (p. 120). He
explains:
36 CHAPTER 2

it is possible, as well as useful, to make an analytic distinction between action

and mediational means, but the relationship between action and mediational
means is so fundamental that it is more appropriate, when referring to the agent
involved, to speak of "individual(s)-acting-with-mediational-means" than to
simply speak ofindividual(s ). Thus, the answer to the question of who is carrying
out the action will invariably identify the individual(s) in the concrete situation
and the mediational means employed. (p. 12)

Thus we can speak of language as an extension of the actor, "not bounded by

the skin," as Bateson puts it (1972, p. 319). In this sense, language (writing in
our case) is imbued with intention, situation, affect, attitude, and purpose.
Moreover, not only is the self extended in the mediational process, but to
quote W ertsch (1991) again, the "incorporation of mediational means does not
simply facilitate action that could have occurred without them, instead" (p. 32),
and here Wertsch cites Vygotsky (1981b):

By being included in the process of behavior, the psychological tool alters the
entire flow and structure of mental functions. It does this by determining the
structure of a new instrumental act just as a technical tool alters the process of a
natural adaptation by determining the form of labor operations. (p. 137)

Tool" may not be the happiest image to convey the nature of language as a
mediating resource, but we accept Wertsch's point that the nature of this external
resource has cognitive effects. Language as mediational means or tool is not a mere
neutral conduit; it also puts its own mark on mediated action. Thus, in our case the
genres that constitute the mediating communicative means of a community may
affect thinking by constraining the sort of thought that can be expressed (and by
creating a need to have certain kinds of thoughts in order to fulfill the requirements
of the genre). And in general we concur with his insistence on regarding agent,
means, and action as integrally bound and irreducible.
This line of thinking of course ties in very neatly with the idea of distributed
cognition, because cognition can only be distributed via the mediation of signs.
The distribution is then channeled and shaped by the particular mediational
tools-genres imply particular social flows, interactions, informational, and
communicative needs.

How Signs Get Their Meaning

Signs, including the verbal formulations conveyed in writing, do not have their
meanings built in but acquire them from the cultural associations that writers
and readers bring to bear on them. In any particular text or utterance, part of
the meaning derives from the dialogic context: what has been said or written
SITUATING WRITING 37

before to which the text is an explicit or implicit response, and what future
utterances it anticipates by way of response. This insight has been most fully
developed by Bakhtin (1986), who observes that "the utterance is filled with
dialogic overtones" (p. 92, emphasis in original), that it "is a link in the chain
of speech communication, ... related not only to preceding, but also to sub-
sequent links ... that the utterance is constructed while taking into account
possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created"
(p. 94). As we discuss below, the term intertextuality captures the manner in
which texts allude to each other, deriving and giving meaning, in an intricate
tissue. To be a successful user of a genre within a setting involves not just formal
knowledge but an awareness of the dialogic chains, both immediate and local
and those that have continued over a longer period and stretch into remote
quarters of the professional community and wider culture. Writers need to know
how to insert themselves into such a chain, reactivating certain of its latent
meanings and leaving others well alone, referring explicitly to some existing
texts and allusively evoking others; these are not matters of textual knowledge
that can be taught in genre school.
It turns out that one of the features that distinguished at least some of our
workplaces from all of our classrooms was the density and complexity of the
intertextual connections within which writers were operating-how many
textual strands a writer was simultaneously participating in, whether texts
contributed to more than one strand at once (e.g., via multiple readership), and
how much of a previous history of communication about a topic had to be
implicitly alluded to in each fresh message.

WRITING IN RELATION TO OTHER MEDIA

There is one other element of our general perspective that we should describe
at this point. Only in part is writing a linguistic phenomenon. A written text
instantiates a linguistic system, certainly, but never only that. In order to write
it is never sufficient to know the grammar and orthographic system of the
language, not even with additional knowledge of the conventions and devices
that create coherence. Choices are always made within other symbol systems,
too, choices that have meaning that is not linguistic. There are times in our
analysis where we have needed to take conscious account of this aspect, not
normally obvious, of the act of writing.
There are two ways in which other forms of semiosis manifest themselves
in the context of writing. The first way relates to the physical medium through
38 CHAPTER 2

which written or spoken language is actualized. Features of the medium

unavoidably carry significance in our culture, so that it is impossible to speak
or write without conveying, alongside the meaning encoded in language, other
meanings that derive from characteristics of the material embodiment of the
language. The voice quality, loudness, speed of utterance, breathiness and
affective tone of our speech as well as the words as lexical items "speak" to our
listeners. Similarly, writing participates in a variety of non-linguistic symbolic
systems because of its need to take material form. Both the materials them-
selves-the surfaces and the marking substances, paper, screen, sky and T -shirt,
pixel, tattoo dye, spray paint, and pencil-and the available forms of visual
array-the fonts, orientations, and patternings-are already as heavily coded
as the verbal signs they inscribe. Choices of writing surface, marking device,
handwriting style or typeface, weight and quality of paper, letter size, degree
of tidiness, and style of layout have semiotic weight and carry meanings that
would often be impossible to render in verbal form (Kress & van Leeuwen,
1996). There are good reasons why university diplomas are not scribbled by
the President in pencil on the back of an envelope, why mortgage documents
eschew some of the typefaces employed in Wired and why many writers value
in their drafting the variability in positioning, sizing, and styling of words and
text that handwriting easily affords and word processors do not, or only with
difficulty. Although the same words may be written in either medium, the richer
visual system of handwriting enables more meaning to be encoded through a
single act of inscription (Chandler, 1992). These meanings are often metatex-
tual, in that they are about the status and significance of that part of the
communication-its tentativeness or definiteness, its status as central or inci-
dental in the argumentative structure, and so on.
If, as we have suggested, writing participates in certain symbolic systems
simply by virtue of being written in a particular visual form and in and on a
physical medium, it can also-and this is the second manifestation-participate
alongside forms of semiosis that operate in their own separate space but work
with writing in the co-production of a meaning. A communicated meaning can be
the product of a combination of writing and other semiotic forms such as, most
obviously, graphical, or mathematical representations, but also speech and gesture.
We take the view that acts of writing represent decisions not just to write rather
than not communicate but also to write rather than to speak, draw, or communicate
by some other means. Alternative media are always present as potential choices,
and sometimes as choices that are actually taken up alongside writing.
In most of our analysis this general view will remain tacit because it offers
no specific purchase for the cases under discussion, which are mainly ones in
SITUATING WRITING 39

which writing is customarily and conventionally expected and other modes are
not actively entertained as alternatives. In some areas, however, and particularly
in relation to architecture, it will be necessary to make explicit the nature of the
choice involved when a participant opts to write at one point and to draw at
another.
We will be suggesting that the way writing relates to other semiotic forms
is an important differentiating feature both between academic and workplace
writing and between the writing of different workplaces.
Here we briefly map the main ways in which different symbolic media may
be combined in the communications we have observed. Because the profes-
sional workplace typically exploits symbolic communicative systems more
flexibly and diversely than does the university classroom (a point we will argue
in later chapters), we will illustrate the functioning and mutual relations of these
systems mainly with examples from practice at work.
Spoken discourse is, not surprisingly, central to all the professions we have
looked at. Only in architecture do we find graphical representations of the visual
and spatial aspects of phenomena, but graphical presentation of quantitative
relationships and data is indispensable in financial institutions and in business
management (two of our other cases), while in the former mathematical
symbols also comprise a significant proportion of many texts.

Types of Relationship Between Media

In all the workplaces that we have investigated, speech and gesture at least, if
not other symbolic processes, are found alongside writing. The relationships
between writing and these other processes are of three types. 8 In the first, there
is no immediate or direct connection between them. In the second, the text in
one medium makes reference to a text in a different medium. In the third, there
is simultaneous mutual reference across media. To discuss these briefly in order:

1. As one would expect, each process can occur independently, without

direct or obvious reference to either of the others. There are times when
architects are just writing, just drawing, or just speaking, or when economists
are just working calculations on a computer. (Indirect reference-by associa-
tion or echo, for instance, or simply by virtue of addressing the same topic-is
of course always potentially present.)

8 These ideas are more extensively developed in Medway (1996).

40 CHAPTER 2

2. Alternatively, there may be connections of a referential nature across

media. A communication in one medium can be about something that has
already been given expression in another. For instance, an architect may talk
or write about something shown in a drawing or about the contents of a written
text. A social worker can get on the phone about information just received in a
fax message or can jot down what a client just said in an interview. Economists
can gather round a screenful of figures and discuss them. An architect may also
sit down and draw a feature that was suggested by the client in a meeting.
In these cases of references to what has already been in some way encoded,
the relationship to the earlier text (using that term to mean any semiotic event
or product, including spoken utterances) may or may not be explicitly signaled.
The existing text or pre-text to which the new text refers may be one of the
practitioner's own written or graphical or spoken productions, or it may have
been generated by an outsider, as when a fax or phone message is received from
an external agent such as a consulting engineer or the social work client's
teacher. The reference text may equally be a public or semi-public document
such as the printed regulations of government bodies or suppliers' catalogues.
Equally it may be a point remembered from a talk at some professional
conference. This sort of connection between new and existing productions is
well addressed through the notion ofintertextuality, which is Kristeva's (1986)
term for Bakhtin's (1981) idea that utterances and texts cannot help reflecting
what has been said or written before (and also what is expected to be said or
written in the future; see also Todorov, 1984). As suggested above, it is useful
to extend the sense of "text" in "intertextuality" to include non-written com-
munications.
3. A third possible relationship is simultaneous occurrence of encoding in
two or more media. Semiotic production can, and routinely does, proceed at
more or less the same time in at least two media. An assessment report, for
instance, may be distributed and/or read aloud during social work assessment
meetings.

The permutations of possible interrelationships are numerous, and these

possibilities offer "rich affordances" (Wood, 1992, p. 2), constituting a deli-
cately graduated semiotic resource. One medium may be dominant, as when
speech offers a sporadic commentary on the architectural condition one is
sketching for a coparticipant, or when the social worker scribbles occasional
notes while listening to the nurse's telephoned explanation of a client's stage
of recovery from an accident; little sketches in the margin of a note to be faxed
to the supplier of door furniture may be incidental and inessential to the main
SITUATING WRITING 41

message. At other times the message formulated in one medium may be

fundamentally defective without the meanings to be taken in parallel from the
second channel. Thus, the spoken accompaniment may convey the significance
of what is simultaneously being sketched, or the sketch may supply the material
configuration of a design idea that is being represented verbally in some other
terms, such as anticipating the experience the eventual user will have of the
building.
In general, the advantages of each medium are exploited in the interests of
efficient and convenient production, and a medium is not preferred if a purpose
may be more easily achieved through a different one. Preference, however, may
be outweighed by constraints that dictate the use of a less convenient medium,
as when the law requires a written record.
As we suggested above, most of the time our awareness of the range of
possible symbolic media makes little difference to our analysis. This is partly
because of the nature of the written texts, the production of which has been the
object of our study. Following the tradition of genre studies, we have tended to
concentrate on substantial texts that are central to the core tasks of the classroom
and work sites we have investigated, and have paid less attention to those
fragmentary and very short texts that may display more interesting relationships
with other semiotic phenomena. On occasion, however, we need to note that
the essential characteristic of a particular piece of writing is precisely that it is
not a phone call or a sketch, or that it adds to a drawing or to a conversation
something unattainable by graphical or spoken means.
In some of our work places we found the choice of media to be improvisa-
tory, opportunistic, adaptive, and fluid; we are impressed with the ease with
which professional communications switch channels or proceed by using two
or more media in parallel. When the need is to give expression to an idea, our
workplace participants often exploit whatever communicative means come to
hand, abandoning them when the communicative demand shifts and another
medium becomes more convenient.
Through the discussion thus far, we keep returning to the various ways in
which writing is situated: within Activity, work or learning groups, by the tools
employed and the cultural artifacts and practices drawn on, and through
genre-making practices. All these ways of situating writing imply writers'
participation in sociocultural activity: in school or outside school, at home or
in the workplace, or linked electronically across settings. We have as yet said
little about the nature of that participation and what it might mean for the
development of writing competencies. These are the topics we explore in the
following chapters.
 II
UNIVERSITY WRITING
From its very beginning, the resurgence of interest in rhetoric described in
chapter 2 has focussed in particular on school writing. Theoretic and pedagogic
issues have been framed within that context, and considerable research has been
deployed to investigate the nature of student composing processes, the range
of written products, and the nature of school contexts.
Insofar as our research adds to this literature, it does so because we have
been able to define by contrast: that is, to look at school writing, and in particular
university writing, by comparing it to discourse produced on similar topics in
very different contexts-those of the workplace. In making these comparisons,
we have been afforded an understanding of the tremendous shaping power of
context and of the consequent radical and, as we shall argue, essential difference
in the nature of the discourse produced.
Social and pragmatic perspectives on discourse and genre theory, in particu-
lar, have allowed for new insights into the nature of student and workplace
writing, highlighting fundamental similarities and differences. By tying the
textual to the social, by seeing texts as ways of doing things with words, by
recognizing the dialogism and the continuous interplay among texts, we have
been able to understand the degree to which texts both respond to and exist in
potential inventive tension with their contexts. With respect to university
writing, the notion of context has been expanded to include not just the
assignment and feedback, not just the course lectures and the classroom
43
44 PART II

interaction, but also the entire discursive and ideological context therein evoked
(through readings, lectures, seminars) as well as the institutional and hence
political, social, and cultural forces that shape and constrain each utterance.

GENRE STUDIES AND "SOCIAL MOTIVE"

A construct that has offered particularly rich explanatory power has been the
notion of"social motive," as developed by Miller (1994). Our discussion ofher
work in chapter 2 outlines her central thesis that genres are best understood as
"typified social actions." More germane to our purpose here is her discussion
of motive: for Miller, action implies both situation and motive, both of which
are interpreted as being socially and communally constructed.
Social motive is consequently a central construct: a key to understanding the
nature of the potential differences between university and workplace writing
lies in discriminating the social motives at play, recognizing that these social
motives may not be easily available to, or expressible by, the players, especially
in institutions whose values are so naturalized to the participants as to become
tacit.
Our central argument is the following. The social motive of student genres
is characterized by an inherent and inevitable duality. On the one hand, such
writing is "epistemic"-in the sense of enabling students, through the discourse
production, to take on stances toward and interpretations of realities valorized
in specific disciplines. At the same time, however, another fundamental activity
of the university is sorting and ranking its students, and scripts are produced as
ways of enabling such ranking. A second social motive for university discourse,
then, is to enable students to be graded and slotted.
The duality of this social motive is pervasive and inescapable. This is true
even when instructors attempt simulations in which workplace motives are
specified and workplace tasks carefully constructed. As long as the writing is
elicited by and handed in to a professor, it is the institutional and ideological
constraints of the university that continue to govern the whole.

THEORETIC BACKGROUND

To clarify our use of the term epistemic, we need to refer to the work of two
philosophers: Stephen Toulmin and Charles Willard. Toulmin's work (e.g.,
1958) is central to the philosophic field of argument theory. His seminal thesis
PART II 45

is that the logic of argumentation is not universal; different disciplines as well

as different forums of discourse all develop different modes of argumentation.
Certain basic elements are available for use in any piece of discourse that can
be classified as argument. These include the claim made, the evidence adduced
to support the claim, the lines of reasoning connecting the evidence to the claim,
et cetera. But the nature of these elements, and the degree to which they are
called on in different fields varies considerably.
In his work on argumentation, Willard (1982) makes a further distinction.
Within specific disciplinary fields, one can further distinguish between dis-
course whose goal is to get things done (instrumental or practical) and discourse
whose goal is epistemic (i.e., knowledge oriented), where the discourse is an
end in itself. Thus, he distinguishes legal briefs used to persuade a judge or jury
from scholarly writing for, say, legal journals. Although this classification, like
most, can become fuzzy at the boundaries and evaporates when pushed too far
(knowledge ultimately may be applied, and some discourse has dual goals),
nevertheless, we find valuable that central distinction he is making.
Our argument relies both on Toulmin's work and Willard's distinction. Part
of the social motive of university writing is for students to be able to argue
appropriately within the forums that they enter: be they law, management
studies, architecture, or literature. Much of the work of each course-the work
undertaken collaboratively by instructor and students-is focused on enabling
students to learn the appropriate argumentative stance of their fields of inquiry.
Willard's distinction helps to define how this university writing differs from
workplace writing in the same fields. At university, the goal of the writing and
the writer is not practical, in Willard's use of the term, but rather epistemic. We
need to acknowledge here that we are using Willard's term in a more specialized
sense. School writing whose goal is epistemic is very different from that writing
whose goal is to produce new knowledge for scholars. In school genres, the
notion of epistemic applies to the writer: the writing is assigned as an occasion
for his or her learning; it is typically not taken on as an opportunity to extend
the knowledge of a discipline or of a community of scholars-at least at the
undergraduate level. The idea that student writing will make a "contribution"
to a discipline's knowledge does not arise until graduate work.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS ON UNIVERSITY WRITING

The discussion in chapter 3 illustrates the dual social motive of university

writing with respect to the writing in very specific courses. The writing elicited
46 PART II

in specific, but representative courses is analyzed in detail in order to reveal

how students are enabled, through the writing (and as a result of the writing) to
take on certain epistemic stances. Textual analyses of the scripts produced open
up one kind of window on the nature of this learning; observational analyses
of composing activities open another. At the same time, the role of grading and
its effect on the writing is also presented.
Chapter 4 focuses especially on the complications inherent in the dual social
motive. When genre theory is enriched by Activity Theory (AT), the tensions
inherent in the duality are cast in particularly bold relief. Complications exist
not only because of the two kinds of motives, but also because, in the larger
system of the university, the need to grade is itself juxtaposed against a range
of other demands on the instructor's time; hence, the need to grade translates,
in most settings, into the need to grade quickly, efficiently, and economically
(from a time perspective).
Furthermore, the epistemic goal itself carries within it a series of internal
tensions. Whereas the instructor seeks to facilitate the students' learning, some
of the very strategies used to "guide" such learning themselves constrain or
limit the possibilities of more fertile or wide-ranging inquiry.
Chapter 5 explores the paradoxical situation of writing in architecture. On
the one hand, writing itself is not the primary means of semiosis in that field,
and consequently written discourse does not have the same kind of privileged
position it has elsewhere in academia. On the other, perhaps because attention
is diverted from the production of written artifacts as signs of appropriate
learning, a very different kind of writing-as-learning takes place incidentally.
This typically unremarked and often underground kind of writing is revealed
to have remarkable heuristic power. Although it was particularly in architecture
courses that this kind of writing was observed, this phenomenon is one that
takes place across the curriculum-but sporadically, and rarely as part of the
conscious design of courses or curriculum.
 3
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE
OF UNIVERSITY WRITING
In this chapter, our intention is to discriminate what Miller (1994) has referred
to as the "social motive" of university writing, especially assigned university
writing. From time to time, we will call on some data from the world of work
to put into bolder relief some of the characteristics of student genres, but our
goal here is to discuss what is central to university student discourse: its guiding
social motive.
As elaborated in the Introduction to this section our central argument in this
chapter is that the social motive of student genres is dual. On the one hand, it
is epistemic-in the specialized sense of enabling students, through the dis-
course production, to learn to use language, "to do things with words," in ways
valorized in specific disciplines. Because disciplines differ, disciplinary courses
tend to elicit writing that is at once homogeneous (within that class) and also
distinctive (as compared to the writing of the same students for other courses).
Both these phenomena relate to the underlying epistemic motive.
On the other hand, this epistemic motive is complicated by the existence of
another institutional reality: a fundamental activity of the university is the
sorting and ranking of students. Another motive for eliciting writing, then, is
to allow for such ranking. To be sure, a key criterion for such sorting is the
degree to which students have realized the epistemic motive: the degree to
which their writing demonstrates their learning (with respect to what the
professor has determined that they ought to learn). Nevertheless, the two
impulses often exist in uneasy tension.
Many consequences flow from the inextricably entangled dual nature of the
social motive-consequences that are realized, for example, in the amount of
shared knowledge that is presented in the texts, the rhetorical and social roles
of writer and reader, the nature of the rhetorical interaction, and the ultimate
role of the text in its context. In the pages that follow, the argument sketched
so generally and briefly above will be fleshed out with specifics drawn from
the research.
47
48 CHAPTER 3

SOCIAL MOTIVE AS EPISTEMIC

The general notion that university student writing is epistemic, or learning-

oriented, turned out to be an explicitly acknowledged and widely held view,
shared alike by the university teachers and students we interviewed. Thus,
when asked during the course of a retrospective interview about the purpose
of the writing assigned to her, one student responded (while the others
nodded), "He [the professor] wants to see ... that you've understood what
the issues are and what the problem is, and that you've used some logical
thinking to come up with your solution." As to faculty, we heard various
versions of this common refrain. "You learn as you do," as one instructor
repeated to his class whenever he elicited written assignments. Implicit in
this comment is the belief that writing not only displays learning (which is
perhaps a more conventional, but certainly more limited view), but also that
it enables such learning.
Of course, to return to a notion that was elaborated in the Introduction to this
section, our use of the term "epistemic" is specialized. The goal of student
writing is not to produce new knowledge for the reader (as is the goal of
academic journal writing, for example), but rather to allow for new learning by
the writer.
In the analysis that follows, we show how, in writing the specific genres
elicited in their university classes, student-writers came to adopt the intellec-
tual postures (e.g., the modes of argumentation, the constructions of reality)
of scholars in that field; in this sense the writing was epistemic-enabling
students to see the world, and to categorize reality, in new ways and ways
characteristic of specific disciplines. Insights into this learning were provided
both through textual analyses of student essays as well as through analyses of
taped composing sessions (for assignments that were collaboratively pro-
duced).

Textual Analyses: Writing for law 100

Law 100 is an introductory undergraduate social science course, aimed at

generalists rather than intending lawyers; it explores issues in law from a
perspective that is intended to be broader than that typical of courses in
professional law programs. The course is also compulsory for both public
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 49

administration and business programs and, for that reason, was selected for
investigation.
Law 100 is a year-long course, offered in a lecture and seminar format:
2 hours weekly of lectures, and 1 hour as a seminar. The lectures are given
to classes of 250-300 students by the course professor, and the seminars,
each consisting of 20-25 students, are led by teaching assistants. As part of
their course work, students are expected to write four 800-word essays, each
in response to a precisely-worded prompt. In the year that we observed the
course, one assignment presented students with a hypothetical statute and
asked them to discuss the relevance of this statute to various hypothetical
situations, using the principles of statutory interpretation.
For our study, all the lectures were taped and one set of seminars was
observed weekly (i.e., a researcher attended and took observational notes of
all that took place). All the essays produced for that seminar section were
collected and analyzed (including drafts and notes). In addition, six students
volunteered to be interviewed individually weekly (for 1 to 2 hours each
week over the entire academic year, from September to April) in open-ended
interviews focusing broadly on what and how they were learning for the law
course. These six students also provided us with their complete academic
output for all courses over that same year so that we could compare their
writing for the law course to their writing for all other university courses.
Our observations of the lectures and seminars revealed that the students
received no explicit directions or guidance as to how to go about writing
their essays. Furthermore, the students were exposed to no models of the
genres that were being elicited by the assignments. Their textbooks were
totally inappropriate as models for their writing, no student papers were
circulated as models to the class, and none of the students sought out or read
other student papers in law (either those of their peers or good papers from
previous years). Indeed, each of our six student informants (and the six
represented a range of abilities and composing styles) reported that looking
at student models was simply not part of their repertoire as learners.
Despite the fact that the students had no exposure to written models of law
writing, our textual analyses revealed that the essays produced for the law course
showed a remarkable uniformity in macro- and micro-level structure, tone,
lexicon, and syntax. Further, these law essays were clearly distinct from the other
academic writing produced by these same students over the same time period.
A distinctive genre was produced in this class, and by analysing the textual features
we learned something about the nature and function of this distinctiveness.
50 CHAPTER 3

Textual Regularities9
One further point. The analyses were primarily based on the Law essays written
by the six students we observed in contrast to the other academic prose written
by these same students over the same academic year. In order to confirm that
the Law essays written by these six students were not, in any way, idiosyncratic,
further analyses were performed comparing the Law essays of the six students
in our study to all the other Law essays produced in the same seminar section.
These analyses corroborated the fact that the students participating in our study
produced writing typical of the essays elicited from the seminar section as a
whole. In other words, although the following analysis focuses on the work of
six students, the description of the Law essays applies to all the writing
produced in that seminar section.

Lexicon. From the first assignment, the papers were characterized by the
use of the distinctive specialized vocabulary of law. The following recurring
instances of specific legal terminology are only exemplary: statute, common
law, equity, sovereignty, eiusdem generis. Less obvious and perhaps more
significant than the use of these legal terms is the use of more general lexical
items in a more specialized sense in the law essays. Instances include: prece-
dent, rule, law, common, and civil. The source of these lexical peculiarities is
not hard to find: the lectures, the seminar discussions, and the textbook were
all characterized by the same language.

Syntax. More startling, because unexpected, are the syntactic differences,

whose significance is all the greater because there were no models for such
distinctiveness in the prose the students read. One feature of syntax that we
looked at was the T-unit-that is, the minimum terminable unit, or the inde-
pendent clause plus all its attached dependent phrases and clauses. Previous
research (see Hunt, 1970; also Hillocks, 1986, for a summary of such research)
has shown that the length of the T -unit, especially in written argument, is an
index of both complexity and maturity, as is the number of clauses perT -unit.
Our syntactic analyses included counts of the number of words, T-units,
finite clauses, and sentences, followed by computations of the number of words

9 The discussion that follows is organized by the categories of analysis. What will be apparent,

however, is a difference between Essays 1 and 2 as opposed to Essays 3 and 4. In every instance,
Essays 3 and 4 are characterized by all the textual differentiating features to be described below.
Essays 1 and 2 display some, but not all, of these features, and as the analysis of syntax suggests,
these first two essays seem to represent a mid-point or bridge between the Law essays and other
academic prose.
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 51

per T-unit, the mean number ofT -units per sentence, and fmite clauses per
T -unit. 10 The analyses revealed that the law papers in general, and papers 3 and
4 in particular, had more words perT-unit, fewer T-units per sentence, and more
finite clauses perT-unit than the other academic writing produced by these same
students over the same year.
In other words, the law essays as a whole were clearly more syntactically
complex than the other academic essays written by these same students at the
same time. Furthermore, the syntax became increasingly more complex in the
later law assignments.
What makes all this particularly remarkable is that the only conceivable
prose model the students were reading was the course text, Looking at Law
(Fitzgerald, 1985). Two entire chapters of this text were analyzed syntactically,
and the same computations were made, revealing that the syntax of this text
was consid~rably closer in complexity to that of the other academic essays
written by these students than it was to the syntax of their law essays. The
explanation for the greater simplicity of the prose in the law text may lie in the
fact that its author (the professor for the course) is a very conscious proponent
of the plain English movement in law, and consequently of what he deems to
be the plain style. Whatever the reason, though, neither this text, nor anything
in the students' reading for this course, provided a model for the increased
complexity of their prose.

Rhetorical patterns. In addition to the lexical and syntactic analyses,

the papers were compared as to their rhetorical structure. We began broadly
with Kinneavy' s ( 1971) classification of aims of discourse. Kinneavy defines
six aims, three of which are referential in their primary focus. Writing for law
is certainly always referential and furthermore always falls into that specific
referential category that Kinneavy names writing "to prove a thesis." In this,
the writing for law was similar to most other academic writing. (In contrast, the
course text was informative in aim, according to Kinneavy' s classification,with
the corresponding differences in rhetorical organization.)
Broadly, what characterizes such writing is that the whole is unified by a
single thesis, often, though not necessarily, made explicit at both the beginning
and end of the piece. The body consists of the proof for this thesis-either in
the form of a series of separate points, or one carefully developed train of
reasoning, or some combination of both. Sometimes a refutation or counter-ar-
gument is included.

1°For a statistical analysis ofthe law essay, see Freedman (1996).

52 CHAPTER3

With this crude scheme as a model, writing for law distinguishes itself from
other academic argumentative writing in three ways. First, it differs in degree:
that is, it seems to embody the above qualities in their purest possible form.
Such writing is almost ruthlessly logical, animated as it is by a precisely
expressed thesis to which every specific point is clearly and explicitly linked.
There is no room for digressions, and no tolerance of irrelevant or even
semirelevant points (no matter how elegant).
Second, writing for law differs in that, far more than any other university
assignments, it insists on the inclusion of all possible counter arguments.
Consequently, there is a characteristic contrapuntal movement to its develop-
ment that distinguishes it from the other academic writing produced by the
students over the same period. In fact, in all the other essays analyzed, counter
arguments were almost never introduced, whereas in the law papers (especially
assignments 3 and 4), they were introduced at every juncture.
Third, although all academic writing must be logical in the sense that the
conclusions must seem to be connected on a reasonable basis to the premises,
the emphasis in writing for law is almost entirely on presenting the reasoning
processes themselves. Every logical step must be articulated. In other disci-
plines, logical leaps are possible: connections are more often accepted as shared
knowledge between reader and writer. In writing for law, the whole point of
the exercise is to present not so much the logical conclusions but rather the
rationale for these inferences. This point is further developed in the following
section.

The nature of the argumentation. Another way of understanding this

distinction is through an analysis of the nature of the argumentation in these
texts, using a categorization specified by Toulmin, Rieke, and Janik (1979). In
this system, the following parts of an argument are distinguished: "the
claim"-"the assertion put forward publicly for general acceptance," that is,
the thesis; "the grounds"-"the specific facts relied on"; "the warrants"-the
"general ways of arguing," that is, the principles for connecting the claims to
the grounds; "the backing"-the authority for the warrants; the "modalities,"
which define the degree of strength of the claim; and "the rebuttals." Toulmin
et al. (1979) argue that although all these elements are at least potentially present
in every argument, there is considerable variation in the nature of each element
as well as the emphasis given it, depending on the audience, the task, and
especially the field or discipline.
Using such a frame of reference to illuminate the distinctiveness of the law
writing, it was apparent that, whereas for most of the other academic writing
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 53

undertaken by our students, emphasis was laid on presenting the claim and
clarifying its implications by pointing extensively to the grounds (with the
warrants often tacit), the primary focus in the law papers (especially the last
two assignments) was on specifying the warrants and their backing in detail,
and on showing how these warrants applied to the grounds. In the end, it
mattered less what claim one made as long as the relationship between the
various warrants possible to the grounds, accompanied by the appropriate
backing, were all laid out.
Furthermore, the warrants drawn on were far more highly formalized,
precise, and exact than those in other academic essays. There are precise rules
or principles for statute interpretation and these must be specified in each
instance of their use. The following excerpt reveals on the micro level the kind
of argumentation that persists through the whole.

The defense in this case would presumably argue that the wall is not a building
by definition. Using eiusdem generis (of the same kind) canon of interpretation,
it is evident that "building" as seen in section 4 refers to the list in section 3: a
house, shed, bam, or other structure, which infers the membership of those
structures that can be occupied. Therefore, the exclusion of members of the class,
fence and wall, imply that they are not included under the meaning of"building."
The elements listed that infer building all imply that one cannot occupy them.
Since one cannot occupy (in the sense that one cannot enter into it and take
shelter) a wall, Brown's boundary marker is therefore not applicable for prose-
cution under this statute.

Micro-level rhetorical patterns. Another distinct characteristic of

these texts can be seen in a recurring pattern on the micro level. As the
previously quoted excerpt shows, there is a characteristic pattern at the level of
the conceptual paragraph that involves the following elements ordered in the
following way: an elucidation of a central issue, the presentation of the
appropriate rule, its application, and a conclusion.
Brand and White (1976), in their discussion of the characteristics of legal
writing, identify such a pattern and give it the acronym IRAC (issue, rule,
application, conclusion). What is intriguing is the degree to which this pattern
recurs in the last two law assignments and only in the law essays, although none
of the students consulted Brand and White or any similar handbook; nor did the
professor or teaching assistant ever make mention of such a pattern in the
seminars or classes.
To conclude, these various analyses reveal the degree to which writing for
law is distinctive. The lexicon is discipline-specific; the syntax is more com-
54 CHAPTER3

plex; the overall rhetorical structure is more purely thesis-oriented, less tolerant
of digression, and characterized by a contrapuntal movement; the nature of the
argumentation is distinct, focusing on specifying precise warrants, in the
context of their backing, and showing their relationship to the grounds; and
there are characteristic discourse features at the micro-level, such as the IRAC
patterning of conceptual paragraphs.
Furthermore, this distinctiveness is clearly not modeled after any prose the
students were reading for this course. Though similar in lexicon, the course text
was less syntactically complex. Partly because its aim was primarily informative
rather than argumentative, the rhetorical and discourse patterns on both the micro
and macro levels differed radically from those discerned in the student papers.

Beyond Textual Regularities

Traditional analyses of genres would have begun and ended with the
articulation of such textual regularities. What we will be doing here is to probe
the significance of these textual features in terms of the role or perspective
consequently taken on by the writer.
In his discussion of how children learn to write, Kress (1982) points to the
"world-ordering" and even the "world-creating" function of "textual struc-
tures" (p. 97). The textual features described in the preceding section imply
something about the way in which their writers approached or interpreted
reality-at least during the writing of those texts. In this section, we tease out
the implications of the textual features specified above for their writers' stances
toward experience, their ways of knowing.
First, however, it is essential to point to the limitations of what can be
inferred. The distinction proposed by Toulmin et al. (1979) is illuminating: the
form of reasoning presented in these pieces does not replicate "a way of arriving
at ideas but rather a way oftesting ideas critically" (p. 29), a way of presenting
them persuasively to a relevant audience. The steps in the legal arguments do
not replicate the mental processes of the writer in determining the solution;
instead, they represent the steps by which readers in a certain community can
be convinced (or are prepared to be convinced) of the reasonableness of certain
claims-claims that have themselves been discovered in as yet ill-understood
ways by the writers. In other words, the discovery processes themselves, the
internal cognitive operations, cannot be inferred from the products.
What can be inferred, however, is a kind of social action, implied and
necessitated by the writing of these specific texts. Thus, the very issues
addressed, the phenomena focused on, involve a certain categorization of
experience that is different from that of the other academic pieces written by
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 55

these students (and different from the kinds of categorizations implied in their
discussions with us). Specific human situations are addressed, and addressed
in a highly specialized way: not from the perspective of the human suffering
entailed nor of the social dynamics involved, not from the perspective of
universal moral principles, but rather from the point of view of the relevance
of certain specialized legal principles.
This highly specialized categorization of experience is implied not only by
the subject matter of the essays, but also by their distinctive lexicon. As we have
seen, the language of the essays is characterized by a prolific use of legal
terminology: law, statute, eiusdem generis, precedent. All these items reveal
that the specific phenomena examined are being classified and organized
according to the classificatory principles involved in the discipline of law
studies. The writers not only look at the kind of phenomena typically analyzed
by the discipline, they also use the same lenses. Furthermore, both the bound-
edness of the texts as well as the intolerance for digressions suggest a concen-
tration of focus that excludes other possible perspectives.
The increased complexity of the syntax, the longer T -units and the greater
number of clauses perT -unit suggest a more intense interest in the hierarchical
interrelationships between propositions: specific propositions are seen in the
context of others, and relationships of cause, effect, condition, and concession
are highlighted. On the other hand, simple co-ordinate relationship in sentences
(as measured by T-units per sentence) are of less interest. In an interview at the
beginning of the course, the instructor tried to define what he thought of as
distinctive in the writing he was eliciting: he spoke in general terms about the
need for students "to see the forest rather than the trees." This search for and
focus on hierarchical relationships may provide part of the textual instantiation
of what the instructor was trying to suggest.
We can see evidence of this in an illustrative sentence from the assignment
on statute interpretation. The task implicit in the assignment was to identify the
nature of the relationships among the following: (a) the canons of statute
interpretation; (b) the elements of specific statutes; and (c) the specifics of
particular situations. Note the second of the following two sentences:
Is a brick wall a structure? Brown could argue that a court would apply the
eiusdem generis statute of interpretation and interpret "other structure" to cover
only structures of the same kind as a house, shed, and bam, thus excluding "wall"
from this classification, and exonerating Brown.
This second sentence has 41 words per T-unit, and an extraordinary range of
dependent phrases and clauses, revealing a sophisticated understanding of complex
logical interrelationships, involving classification, defmition, condition, causation.
56 CHAPTER3

The contrapuntal pattern of the later essays is similarly revealing. Each issue
or question, at the micro and macro levels, was addressed dialectically: for each
point in favor, a corresponding point against was sought. When the array of
pros and cons was set out, an attempt was made to arrive at some overarching
generalization, taking into account all the arguments on both sides, rising thus
to a higher level of abstraction and organizing the specific arguments into a
superordinate framework. Here, too, is an example of seeing the forest, of
pointing to a pattern that can organize the distinct entities.
This dialectical stance is not unique to law as a discipline: it has important
precedents in the history of philosophy, for example. At the same time, it is not
the only perspective possible certainly, and not necessarily the best. Coe (1986)
has pointed to the degree to which a dialectical approach can be limiting.
Without arguing for or against the value of any particular stance, it is important
to stress that the dialectical stance evinced in these essays represents only one
possible stance toward a question-and interestingly not a stance that was
represented in any other essays written by the students whose law essays were
analyzed over the year that they were enrolled in the law course. (All their other
assignments were analyzed at the same time as the law essays.)
The text analyses also pointed to a distinctive mode of argumentation. In
specifying the pros and cons, the writers argued using highly formalized and
specialized modes of reasoning. Without suggesting that such modes of reason-
ing replicated the students' original discovery processes, we are arguing that,
at the stage of drafting, the students needed to follow through in writing certain
kinds of argumentation: that is, to engage in the application of very specialized
methods of inference. In other words, they enacted in writing certain modes of
reasoning that differed from the modes enacted for other disciplines.
To sum up, in the course of and as a result of their writing, these students
began to look at and interpret reality in certain prescribed ways: they focused
on certain kinds of phenomena, categorized them in specified ways, took a
dialectical stance, searched for hierarchic relationships, and enacted certain
formalized modes of reasoning.
To use Willard's (1982) language, through their writing, these students
began "to construe certain phenomena in roughly the same way that other
actors in the field construe them" (p. 34). The field in the case we observed
was that of law as a disciplinary activity whose goals are epistemic (as
opposed to the action-oriented goals of law as an "ordinary" activity). In
writing their essays, the students began to share the stance of, and conse-
quently to affiliate with, a certain argument field or discourse commu-
nity-that of students of law.
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 57

To return to the point made earlier, the writing enabled or constrained the
students to take on certain ways of construing reality-ways that were
similar to those expected in the fields to which they aspired. The social
action undertaken in this writing is typical of that undertaken in much school
writing, in that its purpose is epistemic-not in the sense of producing
knowledge new to the reader, but rather in the specialized sense of enabling
its writer to see and interpret reality in new ways; in that these ways are the
ways of currently constituted communities of scholars, the purpose of and
the action undertaken in such writing is social and cultural as well.

Writing Finance Papers

Textual features of other student papers pointed to other stances. For example,
the case studies written by students in a financial analysis course differed from
other academic papers in their use of numbers. "It's a numbers course," the
professor repeated, but the use of the numbers differed from that in both
accounting and economics courses. To quote the professor, the "quantitative
stuff' in the course "requires some judgment, whereas in accounting cases,
you simply have to consolidate a balance sheet.... Here there is a lot of
interpretation." And the interpretation is always expressed verbally. The
ability to interpret numeric phenomena verbally is one important course
objective. "I find that a lot of finance people know what they're doing but don't
know how to explain what they're doing .... So one of the pedagogical purposes
of the course is to improve on technical finance-type writing." Consider the
professor's complaints about a flawed paper:

Here the problem is he's making statements which have no meaning in

finance. For example, well it's more English-"keep the dream alive,"
"faltering economy," "playing havoc with the economy," "its already fragile
credit rating." So, it's not the type of thing a chief financial officer would
like to read because he has to almost say, "Tell me, what do you mean by
'faltering.' Show me the ratio which tells me this company's faltering. If you
cannot show it, don't say that. If he says something like, "For example,
looking at the current ratio (x) and the liquidity ratio (y) and interest calcu-
lations (z), it seems as if the company would be unable to continue in its
present course." Unless he says that, I wouldn't put any faith in his statement,
in his "faltering company," because he hasn't proved to me it's faltering.

Note the invocation of a figure from the relevant discourse community, "a chief
financial officer," and the way that the professor slips naturally from what that
58 CHAPTER 3

officer would say to what he, the professor, says. What is at issue in the writing
is not only the ways of categorizing experience and construing reality, but also
the grounds for persuasion and belief in that community: numbers are persua-
sive and real; more transparently interpretive phrases such as "faltering econ-
omy" are not.

Composing Processes

Analysis of the composing sessions offered another window into the nature of
the enculturation suggested by our examination of textual features. Specifically,
transcripts of these sessions revealed the deg1ee to which the students' thinking
was shaped and enclosed by the ways of knowing and valuing modeled by the
professor, although initially this phenomenon was difficult to discern-pre-
cisely because the shaping was so pervasive.
Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) provide theoretic analyses of this phenome-
non. Specifically, they speak of processes of symbolic violence and structures
of symbolic domination, which they describe as "the imposition of systems of
symbolism and meaning upon groups or systems or classes in such a way that
they are experienced as legitimate" (emphasis ours; p. 104 ). Our analysis of
student talk in the composing sessions uncovered traces of this process at work.
In the following conversation, for example, we saw how naturally the students
seemed to assimilate the categorizations of reality implicit in the discipline,
especially in their use of nouns.

Mike: I guess the biggest thing is the debt-to-equity ratio. Notice that?
X has way more equity. If you look at Y, their equity compared
to their debts is nowhere near, it's not even in the ballpark.
Joe: Which company is it that took a whole bunch of short-term debt?

Note the degree to which such technical terms as "short-term debt," "equity,"
and "debt-to-equity ratio" are assimilated within the intonational contours of
casual conversation.
Furthermore, as suggested by Bourdieu and Passeron, this assimilation takes
place without reflection and is experienced as legitimate. There was certainly
no questioning in the texts, the composing sessions, or the interviews of the
values and warrants presented throughout the course. The assumption or the
donning of these values occurred entirely tacitly. On occasion, something in
the composing sessions revealed the degree and nature of the enculturation.
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 59

Consider the following example, which illustrates the nature of the collabora-
tive inquiry as well as the way in which certain factors are tacitly recognized
as irrelevant (the tacitness underlining the degree to which the distinctions were
experienced as legitimate). In this excerpt, after a long stretch in which students
kept probing at the case-study data, one student initiated a collaborative search
for potential causes of the company's current financial plight.

Mike: I think that their problem is that they tried to get too big when
they weren't capable of going big. They got screwed. What do
you guys think?

I think that is one of the biggest problems. They tried to go

international and stuff and they didn't have the cash to do it.
Joe: I dunno. I just think that they took on way too much short-term
debt.
Mike: Why'd they take on the short-term debt?
Judy: They issued those shares-
Joe: because they were expanding and they needed the cash to fund
their expansions and stuff and their share prices were low so they
were probably waiting until-
Mike: So, maybe one of the big issues is that they shouldn't have tried
to expand. Like, we are looking at what went wrong. They tried
to go for something that wasn't there.
Joe: Or maybe the timing was bad.
Judy: Yeah, that too.
Mike: Yeah, a lot ofbad things happened
Joe: that they couldn't really control-recessions and exchange rates
were killing them.
Judy: The recession .... They had a drought too.
Joe: And when did all those military coups happen?
Judy: (writing) Political problems

[THE FOLLOWING AS ASIDE]

Joe: Archie McLoughlin screwed them.
Judy: Yeah, peddling-
Joe: Bend over boys, I'm coming to town.
Laughter

[Serious tone resumes]

Mike: (reading from text) their stock price from January '76 to July '80
lost 16 7/8 percent.
60 CHAPTER 3

Note the discussion of Archie McLoughlin, uttered as an aside in a tone

reserved primarily for playful banter-as the particular idiom suggests. Archie
McLoughlin is the fictional name that we are using here to replace the actual
name of the contemporary businessman referred to in the case history that the
students were to analyze. His actions played a significant role in the crisis that
a specific company was facing in the case history. However, the students had
all tacitly intuited that his actions or any responses by individuals were not to
be included as part of their written analyses: economic or political forces
(political instability, market forces, recession), not the actions or stances of
individuals, were understood to be the relevant issues to address in this genre.
At the same time, they all seemed to recognize tacitly that none of the values
at issue in McLoughlin's actions-values such as loyalty, charity, adherence
to family tradition-would be appropriate as warrants. Consequently, the
written case analysis made no mention of him, though talk about him came up
more than once in the composing sessions in the same bantering tone, and
always as asides.
In short, although there was no explicit consideration given to the fact that
the issues surrounding McLoughlin's involvement were not appropriate to the
kind of argument they needed to make, the students all seem to have intuited
this tacitly; they did not even debate the issue among themselves. They seemed
to know that any mention of him would not be appropriate in their written case
studies. At the same time, because he is an immensely successful and highly
publicized business figure, McLoughlin fascinated them, as their conversation
about him suggests.
The writing, more than the talk, revealed a seamless assumption of the
values, stance, and ideology of the course. W ertsch ( 1991 ), drawing on Bakhtin,
talks of the power of dialogism; that is, the degree to which we draw on, echo,
or "ventriloquate" (his word) the language and speech genres we have heard in
every utterance that we make. The students whom we observed responded
ventriloquistically to the readings and classroom discourse, in the tasks set for
them. As suggested earlier, they picked up (and transformed in the context of
their preexistent conversational patterns) the social language or register they
heard. Consider these examples:

A: I figured this is how we should structure it. ... First, how did they
get there is the first thing.
B: So that's ...
A: Business versus financial risk or operations versus debt. What-
ever.... Then ... like we will get it from the bankers' perspective.
B: Yeah, that's pretty much like what I was thinking too.
THE SOCIAL MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 61

A: So, right now I have their thing before 78. How do you want it,
pre-78 post-78? This is what I did. I went through all
B: Internal comparison and stuff.

In writing their papers, the conversational syntax and lexicon disappeared. In

the final draft of a case study, we find the following:

Short-term debt restructuring is a necessity. The 60% ratio must be reduced to

be more in line with past trends and with the competition. This will be achieved
by extension of debt maturities, conversion of debt to equity, reduction of interest
rates, as well as deferral of interest payments.

Through the mediation of and appropriation of the social languages modeled

in the course, the students created the new genres expected of them, realizing
the roles or subject-positions entailed, and the students produced the written
social language designated by their professor as that of a "financial analyst"
(see Freedman, Adam & Smart, 1994).

COMPLICATING THE SOCIAL MOTIVE

To suggest, however, that the sole social motive for school genres is epistemic
would be grossly misleading. At least as significant is a different intention and
often a competing motive. A hint of this is provided in the following discussion
by an instructor describing the way he reads student texts.

What I do with these is I read them twice-the entire group. First I order them
alphabetically, and then I read them twice-the whole set. I don't do any marking.
I don't even think about marking. And the only reason I do that, or one of the
main reasons I do that, is I want to get a sense of the quality I'm supposed to
expect. So, I read through them all, and that really tells me the quality of a
particular group .... And then my second level is when I start marking. But before
I do that, while I'm doing this second reading, I'm putting them in piles already.
To say, "Hmmm, this has some merit." Or "this is really good." And at the end
of this process, I get maybe six or seven piles, and then I start grading them.
Because, it's relative, but I do that before I start actually marking them.

The governing purpose of the reading here is evaluation. The need to grade
determines when the pieces will be read, how many times, and with what end
in view.
Freadman (1987) has pointed to the degree to which a genre can be seen as
play and interplay, and the degree to which feedback is part of the genre. The
62 CHAPTER 3

reading practices thus point to another fundamental and illuminating difference

between workplace and academic writing. Essential to the institution of school-
ing is its gatekeeping function and, more specifically, its role in ranking stu-
dents-that is, assessing them in terms of carefully specified criteria and slotting
them into categories according to their relative performance with respect to such
criteria. Writing forms the basis for such comparative ranking by externalizing
students' ways of construing/constructing reality and thus allowing for the
Foucauldian (1979) "normalizing gaze"-the "surveillance that makes it possi-
ble to qualify, to classify, to punish" (p.184). To put the matter differently, within
the classroom context each paper is graded in comparison to all others, and the
institution has a vested interest in ensuring a quality spread. This was not true of
the workplace; there, the institutional goal is to elicit the best possible product
from each employee each time writing is undertaken.
Bakhtin (1986), Nystrand (1989), and Brandt (1990), among others, have
pointed to the role of addressivity and the shaping role of the anticipated
reader's response in text production. Similarly, from the perspective of the
sociology oflanguage, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) have commented, "it is
the speaker's anticipation ofthe reception which his/her discourse will receive
(its price) which contributes to what is said and how" (p. 154). The anticipation
of such evaluation by the reader affects the writing from its inception. Hence,
students' recurrent references to their anticipated grade before and during their
writing. Equally revealing is the clearly expressed sense that for the student,
for any piece of writing, closure is achieved when a grade has been assigned:
only when the grade is assigned (and celebrated or mourned) is the episode
experienced as complete.
A physical correlate of this phenomenon is evidenced in the spatial and
temporal extension of the texts produced. Student writing has a relatively
ephemeral existence. Student papers are often thrown out immediately after the
grade is assigned; occasionally they are not even picked up from the grader.
Even when they are kept in the student's files, they are rarely consulted again
by the writer and almost never by anyone else. In the workplace, however, texts
have a continued physical existence (in accessible files within the institution)
as well as an ongoing role in the institutional conversation and memory. Smart
(1993) quotes one executive officer as follows: "We rely heavily on a history
of thought, and the files ... are really important. Questions keep recirculating
... and having the written word is very important, at times, to go back to ... to
know what we've done before, and where we've started from." The student
writing we observed, in contrast, had no continued existence in terms of
intertextual reference.
THE SOCIAl MOTIVE OF UNIVERSITY WRITING 63

The concern to rank students affected the reading responses of the professor
in other significant ways. Note the following concern expressed by one profes-
sor about pieces that were assigned to be written independently: "Sometimes,
two or three students would write on the same [topic] .... So I put them
separately. So I really put them separately for two reasons. One is I want to see
how much they have talked to each other and because I had warned them if I
ever hear one word the same, excluding the verbs, I'm going to be back to you."
A related but slightly different concern expressed was that a particular paper
had been written either partly or in full for another course. In the workplace,
concerns about originality, about the possible use of others' ideas (except that
they must sometimes be attributed) or about one's earlier work are not issues
that affected the readers we observed. Workplace writing is characterized by a
kind of intertextuality entirely absent from the student writing; workplace
writing is resonant with the discourse of colleagues and the ongoing conversa-
tion of the institution. The etiquette for citing is complex and political; but the
fact of such intertextual borrowing is a reality and a perceived good.
What we are suggesting, then, is that if one goal of university writing is
epistemic, from another perspective its purpose is to allow for evaluation. These
two are not inconsistent of course: it is through writing epistemically, and as a
result of their relative success in so doing, that students are evaluated. This
reality shaped the writing in ways both simple and complex: from the differ-
ences we have seen and shall see in the relative duration of the texts in space,
time, and memory, to different expectations concerning shared knowledge and
very different kinds of intertextual practice.

CONCLUSION

Two features characterize recent definitions of genre: social action and recur-
rence or typification. We should just note here that recurrence in university
contexts is typically synchronic rather than diachronic. Thus, as we have noted,
there was no attempt to consult models of the target genres by students in
university courses as opposed to the practice of professionals in the workplace.
That this is so is a stunning fact, and like many linguistic achievements, one
that is so naturalized as to be taken for granted.
The recurrence that is characteristic of genres is thus a result of a synchronic
mutual construal of the rhetorical exigence. This synchronic mutual construal
is possible only because the discursive context is so clearly demarcated and
created, and the questions formed in such a way that they point to material
64 CHAPTER 3

somehow earlier cued in the course, as ways of thinking. Furthermore, all this
is collaboratively achieved through the complex interaction of all players.
Students and teachers negotiate a context, shaped physically, culturally, politi-
cally, rhetorically, and ideologically by the discipline, the institution, and
society at large, through processes of dialogic interplay and ventriloquation.
 4
COMPLICATIONS
AND TENSIONS
In chapter 3, drawing on genre theory, we considered the social motives, the
rhetorical exigencies and recurring situations that account for underlying
regularities in textual practices and textual form and substance. We identified
social motive as key to understanding the nature of potential differences
between university and workplace writing. We examined student writing in
order to show how the underlying social motive for such writing is epistemic,
oriented toward knowledge, as opposed to writing for instrumental or practical
purposes, to get things done. However, the epistemic motive is also tangled
within the university's function to sort and rank its students, defining a context
that shapes student writing in complex ways. That context, as it shapes course
design and, specifically, the design of writing assignments, gives rise to
contradictions both in teaching practices and in how students interpret their
roles and responsibilities.
In this chapter, we examine the fundamental contradictions that emerge
because of these conflicting impulses, using the frame of Activity Theory
(AT), introduced in chapter 2, to uncover the complications and tensions
created by this dual social motive. We look at the design of the assignments
that call for the writing, the context of the courses and programs in which these
assignments arise, and the social motives that direct their design and how
writing is solicited. Cole and Engestrom (1993) find it more useful to speak
of an activity system rather than activity as the basic unit of analysis: "histori-
cally conditioned systems of relations among individuals and their proximal,
culturally organized environments" (p. 9). Because AT is so inclusive in its
approach-each aspect of an activity is seen and understood as part of the
molar whole-it can help us understand what actions, motives, and relation-
ships are actually at play in the activity system called the course within the
context of the larger system called the university: its institutional practices,
the participants in that system, the design and operation of courses, and
disciplinary expectations and practices.
65
66 CHAPTER4

That activity systems function within or in close alliance with other activity
systems, as well as the fact that actors in a system are simultaneously partici-
pants in other systems, sows the seeds for the contradictions and conflicts
mentioned above. Professors move back and forth between classrooms and their
academic research with its own set of goals and a different set of perspectives;
both systems, classroom teaching and academic research, compete for time and
attention. Universities function alongside the workplace for which they must
prepare students and with which they remain closely linked and interdependent.
At the same time, with increasing appeals for corporate sponsorship, actors
within the university are hard pressed to guard their autonomy and retain their
identity. It is interesting how workplace management strategies are increasingly
advocated for academic governance and met often with resistance if not
incomprehension. Students often live on the borders between such activity
systems, juggling course demands with social, recreational, and workplace
needs. Such complex systems define our roles and afford or deny us certain
positions. An interesting account of such conflictual positioning is offered by
Bazerman (1988), who traces the development of the multiple and conflicting
roles scientists occupy as a scientific article moves toward publication; for
example, author, editor, referee, critical reader, user of information. AT helps
make salient institutional structures and the complex relationships within them,
revealing how individuals' actions within such structures and relationships are
far less complementary than they appear, and that students and teachers are
bound within certain roles that prescribe actions that conflict or are at least set
up some degree of tension among the several goals they ostensibly mean to
fulfill. Chapter 6 offers a similarly complex picture of a workplace.
The activity system we call the course reveals two sets of complementary
activities. From the perspective of the teacher, we have the activity traditionally
called teaching and including actions such as designing courses, assessing, and
ranking. From the perspective of students, we may speak of actions traditionally
associated with the activity of being a student: attending and participating in
classes, completing required readings, preparing and delivering individual and
group oral presentations, preparing and submitting individual and group written
assignments, and taking tests and examinations. We label these activities
teaching and studenting (for want of a better word in order to designate a far
more active role than the passive-receptive role traditionally associated with
being a student), and we ask how and to what extent the actions that are
discerned as part of these activities are congruent with one another. We expect
to see, for instance, how the motives directing teaching and the motives
directing studenting are not necessarily congruent and reveal on examination
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 67

some fundamental contradictions. The two activities, teaching and studenting,

seemingly complementary and operating in parallel, represent two different
perspectives and generate actions whose goals are often at odds with one
another. Such dissonances are not obvious, often emerging only on analysis;
however, they explain in a large way how writing in university is situated quite
differently from the way it is in the workplace.
Our examination of the activity system, the course, within the larger activity
system, the university, reveals three fundamental sources of tension: tension
between the activity ofteaching and the activity ofstudenting; tension between
the instructor's need to teach, guide, and generally ensure that certain concepts
are learned and the limits such control places on learning; and tension between
the need to grade and the need to do so economically (in terms of time and
effort) and therefore limit the amount and kinds of writing that are required,
and consequently the opportunity for learning through writing. In the discussion
that follows we examine how these tensions are played out in a university course
and how they define the place and function of writing in university settings.

WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?

The kind of questions we are asking and the answers we seek are exemplified
in a study by W ertsch, Minick, and Arns (1984 ), who observed the interaction
between teachers and young children and parents and their young children as
they assisted these children in completing an experimental task. They found
that

[concerned for] the correct and efficient completion of the task at hand,
mothers viewed the task setting as calling for maximal assistance, whereas the
teachers viewed it as calling for maximal independence on the part of the child.
(p. 170)

Wertsch et al. (1984) distinguish between formal schooling, where learning is

the overriding motive, and household economic activity or work, where the
emphasis (for several reasons) is on "error-free performance ... [and] flawless
task performance is valued over learning for learning's sake" (p. 155). The AT
analysis W ertsch et al. employ allows them to explain how seemingly the same
activity (in this case, the experimental task) is defined in two different ways
according to the motives of the subjects, and generates a different action in each
case. This illustration is particularly effective in explaining some of the differ-
ences between writing practices at work and in university discussed in the
68 CHAPTER4

foregoing chapter. Writing at work as an economic activity justifies the kind of

intervention and assistance needed to ensure a flawless performance. Writing
at school, because of the focus on learning, allows teachers to discount errors
or failures to meet specific demands or expectations, in favor of assessing what
has been learned. In fact, such errors or failures may be valued as opportunities
to clarify a particular concept or teach a relevant skill. Even though they may
set a high value on flawless performance, teachers, including teachers of
writing, would question any suggestion that they intervene in a student's writing
to ensure a product that meets the specifications they have set. They could see
such intervention as contrary to their role and function as teachers, subverting
both their goal of promoting learning and their goals of evaluating and ranking
students on the basis of what they know and can do.
Such tensions and conflicts arising from contradictory views of roles and
goals were amply present in a course we observed over two semesters in a
Management Studies program at a Canadian university. Our intention was to
discover how writing practices were defined within those two activities, teach-
ing and studenting, and how those definitions complemented or contradicted
one another.
Management Strategies is a required course in the second year of a 2-year
graduate program. The main thrust of the curriculum has to do with analyzing,
evaluating, developing, and implementing appropriate management strategies
in the context of solving complex management problems. In the first half of the
year-long course, students are introduced to theories and issues in preparation
for fieldwork in the second half.

Work Required

Students in this course generally work in groups (6-7 students per group) and
generally remain in these groups throughout the semester. Groups are reconsti-
tuted for the fieldwork component in the second semester. Most of the work
done in the course is planned within groups and presented by groups. Case
studies are assigned on a weekly basis, each case-study analysis designed to
help students demonstrate their understanding of and apply key theoretical
notions. In their groups, students prepare their analyses, using preset guide
questions. All groups prepare reports, using overhead transparencies to register
the major points of their reports. While only one or two groups are chosen at
random to present their analyses to the class, all groups must provide copies of
their transparencies and a list of references to the teacher. As these presentations
are open to discussion and questions from members of the class, groups that
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 69

have not presented have an opportunity to raise questions and issues which have
arisen from their own group discussions. Four of these case studies will be
written up by the groups in the form of one-page position papers to be turned
in on the day the case is discussed. Groups also take turns preparing for the
class an update on the particular company that is the subject of the case study
(what has happened to the company since the case study was prepared), a way
of checking their analyses and predictions against actual outcomes.

Evaluation

Grades are calculated on the following basis:

• Participation 25%
• Group case reports 25%
• Four group one-page position papers on selected cases 30%
• Take-home essay examination: an individual case report 20%

As the greater part of work for this course involves planning and presenting in
groups, assigning 55% of the final mark to group work is easily justifiable.
Individual performance is evaluated primarily on the basis of the take-home
essay examination (20%) and on the instructor's assessment of the student's
participation (25%).
The second-semester Fieldwork Project presentation, a group project, is
graded Pass, Fail, or Excellent. Members of groups that receive a Pass will be
assigned the numerical grade they received for their first-semester work.
Groups that receive a failing grade are required to write a 30-page report on the
project. If the report is acceptable, members receive their first-semester grade
for the entire course. If the report is unacceptable, group members fail the whole
course. Members of groups that receive an Excellent for the Fieldwork Project
have their first-semester grade raised by 5%. Only one of six groups received an
Excellent and the extra points. No group presentation was judged Unacceptable.

AN ACTIVITY THEORY (AT) ANALYSIS

We have gone into some detail on the structure and organization of the course
in order to situate the actions of students and their teacher, particularly with
regard to the place of writing in the course. The following analysis uses the
70 CHAPTER4

three-tiered scheme from AT (see pages 23-28) to consider how the motive of
teaching and the motive of grading and ranking students configure the action
of writing in this course. The account is sketched first in terms of the teacher's
motive and goals. We go on later to view some of the course events in terms of
the students' motives and goals in order to consider whether and how the
students' several actions support the teacher's motives and goals.
Using an AT approach, we would identify two conjoint activities: teaching
with the motive of promoting the learning of certain concepts and grading/rank-
ing with the motive ofboth monitoring learning and meeting institutional goals.
Toward those ends, the teacher's actions are fairly conventional: lectures and
assigned readings with the goal of communicating an understanding of key
concepts, and designing and administering a series of tasks with the goal of
helping students apply those concepts and at the same time enabling the teacher
to monitor their learning and assign grades on the basis of preset and announced
criteria. It is when we examine these tasks as a series of actions with their
respective goals that we discover several internal contradictions.
From the teacher's perspective, the goals of these presentations are to allow
students to develop (during their group discussions primarily) their under-
standings of the issues involved. Such learning opportunities are further en-
hanced in that time is set aside after the presentations to "discuss, critique, and
elaborate" (course handout) on the presentations. Presenters are expected to
respond to questions from the group, and demonstrate their understandings so
that they can be assessed.
It is clear from the description of the assignments that the teacher's actions
are directed by two major goals:

1. ensuring that several key concepts are learned and applied to real-world
problems as simulated by the case studies, and
2. given limited resources, ensuring that such learning occurs efficiently
and expediently, and provides at the same time, sufficient and clear
evidence for grading and ranking.

Similar goals can be attributed to most if not all university courses; unfortu-
nately, expedience, efficiency, and the need to rank also have unwanted
consequences. Expedience requires that oral presentations be promoted at the
expense of written analyses, reducing the amount of individual writing that
needs to be read in this course to the five-page written case analysis assigned
as an examination. These oral reports must be presented on overhead transpar-
encies and include three to five key points (bulleted on overhead transparen-
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 71

cies), which allows for a quick and easy assessment of whether the required
issues have been identified. According to the teacher, the three- to five-point
limit also cultivates a focus on the issues that matter and a judicious exclusion
(by negotiation in groups) of issues that can be omitted without misrepresenting
the case.
The need to reduce the amount of writing that must be read and assessed
leads to a ritual of oral presentations by groups, the one or two groups that
present being chosen at random (but all groups come prepared to present), and
the opportunity to be publicly accountable, to question and discuss, and to
receive peer and teacher feedback. So evaluative criteria are enacted far more
publicly (and are potentially more instructive) than they would be if they were
relegated to feedback on writing. The working in small groups allows for a
process of familiarization with new terminology, the talking through of new
concepts, developing oral fluency, sharing of interpretations and relevant
experiences-all very much a display of distributed cognition.
Though again there are inherent contradictions. Students are asked to assume
important decision-making or advisory roles (product manager, advisor to the
CEO of a large corporation, owner's daughter assisting her father, manager of
a large steel mill), analyze the situation (as described), and make judgments
and predictions. But the situations are spurious; these students as and when they
enter the workforce will be at the periphery rather than at the center (to adopt
the phrasing of Lave and Wenger, 1991 ), learning much from observation and
the expertise of oldtimers. Despite this worthy intention to involve students in
real-world situations, the cases represent an encapsulated reality (to adapt a
phrase from Engestrom [1991] for how reality is reduced to manageable
proportions for the purposes of teaching), and in the sequence in which they
are presented, an ordered introduction of key concepts to be mastered. Each
case, for instance, calls for and illustrates the application of a specific strategy
or theory. Moreover, the problem solutions that students are expected to explore
are circumscribed and assured by the five or six questions that the teacher has
provided with each case. Those questions focus students' attention on just those
issues that are relevant in the planned sequence and also ensure that all groups
have addressed a common set of issues rather than strayed in the ways
independent groups are wont to. The teaching goal clearly controls the design
of the tasks. In the workplace, it cannot be assumed so easily that tasks are as
clearly defined and situations unchanging as such simulations imply
(Engestrom, Engestrom, & Karkkainen, 1995.)
A brief view of this activity from the students' perspective is also instructive.
If we view the activity of studenting as fixed on completing the course with a
72 CHAPTER4

good grade, we can discern one typical action and its directing goal: attend to
and recall the teacher's announced, preferred ways of demonstrating knowl-
edge in order to succeed in this course. Thus as we observe one of the groups
working on a case for presentation to the class, one of the members .reminds the
group to focus on the points the teacher "really emphasized in Tuesday's class"
and lists them. Another recalls, "like, these are things she repeated." In another
group, a member reminds the group that the professor had said she was looking
for certain strategies: "She wants to see that in the paper." It isn't that these are
deliberate strategies; rather, a school performance genre has become routinized,
what in the three-tiered Activity scheme we would assign to the level of
operations: attending to the teacher's expectations becomes second nature in
school. The main actions of the group are to follow the list of questions provided
by the teacher, report their answers to the group, and then have one or two
students use their notes to write up the analysis. In this particular case their
analysis must be reduced to a one-page position paper (one of four cases
required to be written up in this way). Despite the fact that they are encouraged
to go beyond case details to investigate the current situation of the company,
use library resources or visit a branch office, for instance, the groups find
sufficient detail in the case account itself to be able to answer the guiding
questions. The one-page limit for the position papers, the emphasis on oral
presentation using overheads (reducing analysis to key points), and the
teacher's list of guiding questions ensure that the students will learn what they
are meant to learn. The students are in fact reminded early in the semester that
they must focus on these questions. And to be fair, there is no time and little
room for independent inquiry and fortuitous discovery.
Thus a one-page position paper based on the APE case faithfully follows the
discussion questions provided by the teacher (as do the write-ups on other cases
we have looked at):

Teacher's Questions Group's text

Identify 3-4 factors in APE's corporate structure The main structural contribution to APE's
and strategy-making process which led to its decline in the 80's and 90's was ...
decline in the 1980s and 90s. Three strategic factors that further pushed
the decline were ...
What could APE have done to avoid such a To thwart such a tum of events ..
turn of events? What factors helped keep The main factor which kept APE afloat after
APE afloat after ... ? ... Another factor was ..
What are critical factors in turning around an The critical factors in turning around an
organization? organization are ..
Could APE's measures apply In order for APE's measures to be effective in
in other organizations? Why or other organizations ... APE was fortunate in ..
or why not? Not every company .. .
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 73

The teacher's questions function as a template for the writing. The students
use the word-processor to specify very narrow margins, both top/bottom and
left/right, in order to remain within the one-page limit. The one-page limit was
not adhered to in subsequent tasks that specified such a limit. This particular
group was aware that other groups had ignored this limit and not been penalized.
From an AT perspective it appears that the teacher's action of providing guiding
questions is directed by the goal of ensuring that certain key concepts are
addressed. The one-page limit, intended to force a narrowing down to the
critical issues ("It forces them to summarize the key issues if they only have
one page"-teacher interview) acts in the actual discussion as a means of
enforcing closure on both the discussion and the writing.
The group position paper is rated an A-, with comments urging elaboration
in two places and a reminder to take issues to another level and address them.
Such urging to expand and explore, in direct conflict with the teacher's demand
for brevity, is a reminder of the teacher's prior concern to promote learning, as
is her apparent willingness not to penalize those who exceed the prescribed
one-page limit. The teacher's grade of A- confirms to the group that they were
right in stretching the page-length limit in order to pursue the teacher's
questions more fully. On the other hand, if penalized, they would have in
subsequent tasks reverted to the one-page limit, as they (student-wise) did in
their first paper, even if it meant they had to forego answering some questions.
But there are other interests at play here in this activity system. With a class
size of 50, the teacher needs to ensure from week to week that the key concepts
each case exemplifies are recognized by all students. The four or five questions
she appends to each case (e.g., How did MENTOR's strategy and organization
lead to a loss of momentum? How might Levinson, the new CEO, act to recover
lost ground and positive momentum? What long term goals must Levinson
establish for MENTOR?) are in addition to questions already appended by the
authors of the case. Although we could argue that these questions are likely to
forestall ownership of the problem and independent inquiry (as well as the
development of analytical skills), the pedagogical tmperative prevails. The
teacher cannot risk that key concepts will go unrecognized and undiscussed,
and that therefore the discussion that follows the presentation of the cases will
not focus on the precise agenda those questions set up.
Unlike writers in out-of-school settings, who are expected to provide (or give
the appearances of providing) as clear and as full an analysis as would get a job
done or enable a decision on the part of those who have commissioned the
analysis (the economic imperative), writers in school, while keeping a partial
eye on the announced goals of the task, are much more concerned by what it is
74 CHAPTER4

the teacher really expects of them. This is a serious issue for students when one
considers that they must work this out in relation to the expectations of four
other instructors with more or less similar demands on their time.
We have examined the activities of teaching and studenting in the context
of the actions involved in the case-study presentations. The individual take-
home essay examination and the second-semester field-study group report
provide, on analysis, additional instances of the ways in which the epistemic
motive is compromised by the institutional need to grade and rank.

The Individual Case Analysis

This case analysis, which functions as a take-home examination, requires a

five-page report, provides direct evidence of individual learners' progress in
the course, and is the only extended individual piece of writing submitted in
the course. All other required writing, as we said earlier, is a joint effort: four
1-page position papers and an 8-page analysis ("Use the questions in the course
guide to plan your analysis and writing," the course outline advises). Again,
this case is written up with four questions to guide analysis. An analysis of
practices associated with this task provides a clear message that writing is not
seen as a means of informing the reader; it is intended primarily to display
knowledge. The teacher knows all reasonably acceptable permutations on how
the case ought to be written up, and in fact, provides an answer key to guide
the teaching assistant who will grade these papers: "the major points of the
analysis," a set of criteria for six grade levels ranging from a grade of "A" to
"C", and bench-mark papers. Consistency in grading becomes the ruling
criterion. Students who read the situation as a test-taking genre are unlikely to
see this case study as an opportunity to pursue innovative solutions.
The teaching assistant reads the papers primarily to establish the extent to
which the papers meet the set guidelines, checking off the approved points as
they appear ("I'm just trying to underline the relevant points that are given here"
- from taped think-aloud during reading). This task is not taken lightly, as the
teacher does review the papers and grades to ensure that the teaching assistant
has followed the grading scheme.

Writing From a Workplace Situation

During the second semester, each group chooses and studies a company
(arrangements to be made by the group; commitments to the firm to be
negotiated and met by the group, including a report if required) with the
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 75

intention of finding an organizational problem with strategic implications

within the company, diagnosing the problem, and recommending solutions.
Unlike students in co-op programs, these students enter a company as consult-
ants and outsiders. The study involves interviews with members of the company
and an analysis of relevant internal and external documents. A similar assign-
ment in a systems analysis course is described in chapter 10.
Each group must present an oral report to the class and invited repre-
sentatives of the cooperating organization. The presentation is limited to 30
minutes, with a further 30 minutes for questions from the class. Groups must
follow certain guidelines for an effective presentation. "Begin with a bottom-
line summary, 3-5 subpoints to support central argument, support data for key
points, use only data that fits action-oriented recommendations, realistic rec-
ommendations" (from course materials). Presenters must use overhead trans-
parencies to highlight the key argument or recommendation(s), the subpoints
that bear out the central point, and supporting data.
This project constitutes the entire second-semester portion of this course;
however, six preliminary lectures are scheduled that focus on introducing
students to issues that relate to their entering an organization, conducting
interviews and other forms of data-gathering, and presenting their results in an
effective format. Considerable emphasis is given to presentation strategies,
focusing primarily on organization of the content in logical fashion. Members
of the class have the option of completing and handing in evaluation and ranking
forms on each group's performance. The items in the form place a high value
on how well the presentation has been structured, preferring a particular order:
identify underlying problem, support with clearly-linked subpoints, conclude
with summary. These peer evaluations will be used to determine the grade for
the group.
This second-semester writing task is intended to help students apply their
knowledge to analyzing problems and developing strategies in workplace
situations. The faculty, and this program particularly, prides itself on being
oriented to teaching skills in context. Because students in a group have to search
out and negotiate entry into a company or institution, they have begun to
function like professional consultants seeking out clients and with some claim
to a special expertise. The report they present in a closing session at the
university with company representatives present is intended to simulate a
consulting report; however, the guidelines for the task clearly imply the
centrality of the teacher's role as intended audience and evaluator.
Because students have to negotiate their own entry into an organization, they
are severely constrained in matching the requirements set out for the project
76 CHAPTER4

with the organization and the problem they eventually identify and study.
Specific requirements for the problem they identify and choose to report on
are set out in the assignment guidelines, as are the format for the report and
oral presentation. The students are used to having a situation spelled out for
them in the case study reports, with just those relevant details that help
identify a problem situation, which by the way in such situations is always
identified after the fact and benefits from hindsight in the writing. They are
used to creating a controlled reality from already mediated data many times
removed from reality. On site, because they are outsiders, they may or may
not have access to all the information they need to identify, describe,
analyze, and suggest solutions to a problem. Strategic observations from
experienced employees will not necessarily be volunteered. As in the case
of theW ertsch et al. (1984) study referred to earlier, these students are quite
likely to be regarded by these employees as learners who would benefit most
from being allowed to make their own decisions and learn from them. It is
less likely, therefore, that these students' reports will be received and treated
seriously.
The reports are to be presented orally with the aid of overhead transparen-
cies. These oral reports replace a 30-page written report that was required until
the previous year, but was discontinued for reasons discussed below. How-
ever, if students fail this oral presentation, they are to write the 30-page report,
a requirement that cannot but be read by them as punitive. In AT terms, the
activity of writing such a report, which ought to be positively charged,
challenging and inventive in orientation, becomes an after-the-fact, course-re-
quired and grade-directed (but otherwise inconsequential) activity.
During the presentation the students appeared somewhat uncertain and
diffident when guests from their host company were present, compared with
when only the teacher and students made up the audience. Clearly, those guests
were not the primary audience they were meant to be. Although the guests
listened with some degree of interest, none of them took notes. It is quite likely
that the students' reading of the situation in the company was not adequate to
the complexity and nuances of the actual situation. "Local knowledge" was
precisely what was lacking. Although company representatives were free to
ask for copies of reports (which would then have to be written), no such
requests were actually made. The primary audience was the teacher, whose
particular concerns appear to be reflected in students' seemingly inordinate
focus on using management terminology. Ostensibly a work activity, the
project and its implementation remains in essence a school activity directed
both by epistemic motives and the institutional need to rank and grade.
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 77

WRITING IN MANAGEMENT

It is not an accident that writing has not been in the forefront of this account.
This isn't only because relatively little formal writing is required in this course.
The four 1-page position papers were intended originally to be written as
individual papers; however, the teacher balked (rightly, it seems, given her
workload) at the amount of writing she would have to read. Writing is secondary
to oral reporting, the latter being regarded by the teacher as the prime means of
reporting in business. The second-semester project confirms this view: the
30-page external report formerly required from the field-work project was
discontinued in favor of an oral presentation. The writing, the teacher says, was
"superficial," and as for the time and effort saved by not writing, "I would rather
have their energy go into analyzing and thinking rather than be ... writing up
something that's poorly done." What we see here is evidence of a view of
writing as an action that is separate from thinking and analyzing, if not actually
a hindrance to these processes when one is considered a poor writer. As well,
written presentations take up the teacher's scarce reading time. At best, writing
is a means of recording information to be reported orally. It is not regarded as
a means of exploring or clarifying ideas or shaping knowledge. When it is
required, writing provides evidence for assessment purposes; students demon-
strate their knowledge, as in the take-home essay examination or in the four
1-page group position papers. All other evidence for grading comes from oral
presentations. Because the latter are all products of group work, the take-home
examination provides the only clear evidence of individual performance.
Writing within this course is primarily a collaborative activity. Even the one
case analysis that is evaluated on an individual basis (as an examination) occurs
at a time in the course after students have discussed in groups and in the whole
class a total of 10 cases. They have also presented as members of their groups
their analyses or heard and discussed the analyses of other groups. (One must
recognize though that there is no assurance that written reports are generated
by the group as a whole and not the product of a few individual members.) By
reading, talking about those readings, writing up their analyses, and collaborat-
ing on final reports, they have had ample opportunity to use the language of
their field and to apply the concepts they have been introduced to. By the
standards of most one-semester courses (13-14 weeks x 3 hour meetings), one
might consider this an exemplary course in affording students considerable
opportunity to talk through their understandings of and apply the concepts they
have been introduced to. It enables appropriation of ways of talking about
strategic management, and to borrow from Bakhtin, it affords ventriloquation,
78 CHAPTER4

the speaking in the language of others, as we have already seen in chapter 3 and
as the following extracts demonstrate, as a phase in the passage from speaking
into writing.

[At one stage in his group's discussion of the Deacon case, Hans argues:]
I think one of the main things, too, that kept them, that they said was uhm
practically keeping alive right after the buyout was the enforcement situ-
ation, because you're so highly leveraged that they had to generate cash flow
and that's when they said they had to cut inventory and they said it was
afterward like ... they had to go into JIT [Just In Time] or whatever?
P: It wasn't just ...
H: Into the system. But so yeah it, I'd get another computer in their situation
and that was part of what kept them going.
S: You mean how they kind of discovered the triad ...
T: Yeah, they stumbled on to it almost 'cause they had to cut their inven-
tory. Well, how do you cut your inventory? Well, you go into JIT. Well,
what's part of JIT?
L: ... triad.
I: That's how it started but then if they weren't, they would have just
brought these processes in and ...

In their jointly produced one-page written analysis of this case, we get passages
like this, passages clearly meant to show their familiarity with the concepts this
case is meant to teach:

Deacon's tight cash position after the LBO [leveraged buy out] forced manage-
ment into a situation where they had to generate cash and the only way they could
do this was by cutting costs on inventories and staff; this in itselfled to the drive
for JIT and eventually the rest of the Productivity Triad ...

For the instructor, writing is a means of ensuring and confirming that

prescribed readings and analyses have been carried out and that certain theo-
retical concepts are employed as useful analytic tools. As well it provides the
ground for assessing what and how much learning has occurred. In these ways,
this course, quite likely, does not differ from most courses in the sciences,
humanities, and professions.
Most of the written assignments for this course are the product of group
discussion with two of the six to seven members taking turns to write up the
case from their notes of the group discussion. This discussion derives entirely
from the case notes; so that while students are free to read up on related
background material, they find that the case scenario provides all the informa-
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 79

tion they need to carry out the analysis and answer the guiding questions. One
can see how the encapsulated reality of the case is even further reduced by the
teacher's questions and the predictable answers they inscribe.
In fact, the instructor is concerned to reduce the amount of reading (of their
writing) she has to do for several reasons. They write badly, she believes, and
she hasn't the time. So they write in groups. The cases are harder; however, she
prefers that one person write rather than six people each contribute a piece of
that paper. The implication is that writing is a skill that one brings to knowledge
in order to provide a shaped, organized version of knowledge. The focus on
demonstrating knowledge remains uppermost; and in that case, doing so briefly
(one-page reports, bullets on overhead transparencies) is the preferred means.
And in fact, it is the oral presentations that represent students' work much more
than the writing. According to the teacher, the ability to put together a coherent
essay eventually reveals itself in the ability to develop "an overhead presenta-
tion or an executive summary" because these forms show whether the key ideas
have been realized. In fact, extended writing encourages empty, seemingly
impressive verbiage ("bullshit"). So writing is not devalued; rather in its public
appearance, it falls far short of the succinct and telling overhead presentation.
What processes are the students involved in as writers? Time constraints and
the demands of four other courses would dictate a concern for efficiency and
division of labor rather than concerted inquiry. Except for the five-page
individual case analysis (a take-home examination), all other writing is done in
groups: four one-page position papers, one 8-page analysis with questions to
guide the analysis and the write-up, and a field-work report to be presented
orally. In fact, oral reports are the principal means of demonstrating learning.
The teacher's guidelines for these presentations and written reports put a
premium on brevity. Given 50 students, such a tack appears to be an efficient
way of ensuring that key course concepts are learned and applied, and that the
teacher is in a position to assess such learning efficiently and fairly. In AT terms,
assigning writing on the part of the teacher is an action whose goal is two-fold:
a means for students to demonstrate their learning and a means for assessing
that learning. That, with the exception of the take-home essay examination, all
such writing is the product of one or more individuals within groups, may attest
to the teacher's commitment to small-group processes as a powerful means of
learning. Copies of overhead transparencies submitted by each group (whether
they present orally or not) provided a check on whether they have done the
necessary work. Oral presentations by one or at most two groups provide
occasions for clarification and expansion. Clearly, how writing is assigned and
carried out is determined primarily by a concern to obtain evidence of learning
80 CHAPTER4

within predetermined guidelines and to assess such learning. With one excep-
tion (the take-home examination), recorded evidence of individual learning is
subsumed under group effort.
From the perspective of students, guidelines for written reports define the
goals for the action of writing as one of answering the guide questions and
remaining (with some leeway) within the one-page limit (for at least four of the
six group writing tasks). Depending on how the groups decide to divide their
labor, the task of writing may be assigned to one or more of the group's
competent writers, leaving little opportunity for less competent writers to
develop their skills as writers in this course. As the teacher argues, "Ideally
they'll pool their intelligence ... they'll be smart enough to know that one
person should write, rather than ... six people each write a piece."
Our examination of this course as an activity system within the larger activity
system, the university, was intended to uncover how the epistemic function of
this course and how the writing that might promote that function must contend
with complications arising from the goals of assessing and ranking students. A
further complication arises from competing demands on the teacher's own time,
her other courses and academic research commitments being some of the more
obvious constraints. Throughout her interview on this course, the teacher
attributes the lack of individual writing assignments to her lack of sufficient
time to read them. Similarly, students read the system to determine how they
might achieve a high grade in the face of similarly competing demands from
other courses as well as from the other activity systems that impinge on their
lives.
So one of the clearer patterns that emerges in this analysis is the steady effort
to reduce the amount of writing that students must present as evidence of
learning and, therefore, for purposes of assessment. Oral presentations, with
overhead summaries, replace individual writing as demonstration of work done
and learning. The pedagogic imperative, the need to ensure that certain key
concepts are learned, prevails in all tasks with the insistence on "key points,"
which for purposes of assessment are fore grounded in the teacher's lectures, in
the appended guiding questions, and the spelled-out grading criteria for the
teaching assistant. Students are directed into modes of oral presentation that
highlight the display of such points. A strong justification for such presenta-
tional modes is business practice, an activity system that impinges powerfully
on work in this course. At the same time, such a shift from university discoursal
practices provides an expedient means of meeting the teaching and grading
objectives of this course, without burdening the teacher with a considerable
reading workload. What is difficult to reconcile, however, is the notion that
COMPLICATIONS AND TENSIONS 81

seems endemic to the system: students write badly; so ways must be found
around the problem of having to read such bad writing. There are obvious
advantages, both instrumental and epistemic, in concentrating much of the
writing required in this course into the preparation of overheads, a form of
writing researchers on writing have by and large ignored. Clearly the collabo-
rative talking in small groups and the need to be relevant and succinct instigate
learning; however, the argument that only a minority of students write well,
and therefore time given to such writing by both students and teacher is most
likely time wasted, needs to be redirected toward considering how students
might be moved from genres they have trouble with to genres at which they
might be more successful, for example, writing in the mode of the design
notebooks discussed in the following chapter.
It may be a function of teaching institutions that many tasks (in our case,
preparing bulleted overhead transparencies to speak to or attending peripherally
to the guiding questions the teacher has set) remain at the level of actions with
the goal of obtaining a favorable grade, rather than becoming the routinized
operations they ought to become. The emphasis on reporting orally, however,
can ensure that such actions do become routinized operations, enabling skills
that the instructor sees as valued in the workplace. Paradoxically, on a positive
note we believe, the action of writing in this course, which is now relegated
largely to preparatory work (note-taking and recording group decisions), ap-
pears to have become operational in this course, a routinized practice much like
talk, and quite likely developing in the same way.
Helping students become better writers, however, is not an object that will
direct teaching in this course. Should we be concerned that writing will be
displaced in the ways it seems to be in this course, particularly if business
practices have been clearly redefined so as to stress graphically enhanced oral
presentations, and extended writing is seen as a necessary skill for only a small
minority of workers?
 5
WRITING AND THE FORMATION
OF THE ARCHITECT
In comparing the role of writing in the educational programs of the profes-
sional disciplines, we would expect it to make a difference that architecture
is, in the end, about nonverbal processes. What finally results from architec-
tural practice is a material structure, a new or modified building. It is true that
what ultimately happens as a result of activities in law and government,
business management and social work is likewise material and is not confined
to the epistemic realm of ideas; the verbal outputs of these professionals will
impel or enable people to do things or impede or prevent their doing things.
The foreseen outcomes of these practices, however, are mainly quite general
and unspecific; although there are exceptions (e.g., a court order requiring an
adolescent to be taken into custody), the practitioner, as a rule, is not able to
envision as the outcome a particular event or act that will occur in a particular
time or place. By contrast, the product of architecture is of unusual specificity
and materiality.
As a result, the semiotic outputs of the other disciplines and of architecture
have different status. The work of public administration and management, at
any rate, ends with the production of spoken and written texts. True, these
productions are not the final goal of the activity (or of the Activity-see chap.
4); they are only of value in so far as they produce effects in the world of actions.
But how people act on these texts is beyond the control and responsibility of
the professionals we have studied in those fields; in producing the texts they
have done their bit. In other words, their work is simply to write and speak.
Social workers are a somewhat different case, in that they sometimes write
documents-for instance, treatment plans and presenting reports-that are
blueprints for courses of action the implementation of which they will then
monitor. Architects, even more typically, oversee the use of their texts (written
and graphical) on the site and take responsibility for the accomplishment of the
building; their texts are experienced by them as simply mediating means; their
goal is a more real and more immediate day-by-day motivation. Writing and
82
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 83

drawing are not felt to be final products, the outcomes that mark the limit of
their professional domain.
Consequently, a law student writing a paper analyzing a case is being more
of a lawyer than an architecture student is being an architect in writing on the
origins of Gothic. This is so even though the law student's paper is not framed
within a professional genre. She is, nevertheless, exercising forms of discursive
thought that will inform the discourse it will later be her core task to produce
(see chap. 3). By contrast, generating written discourse is relatively marginal
to the core of the professional architect's job. This is not to say that architects
do not do plenty of writing. They do, but it is ancillary to their central
accomplishment of design, a process achieved through a combination of
drawing and writing, with writing in very much the subordinate position.
What is most distinctive about writing in architectural education and that
warrants its treatment in a separate chapter is precisely its lack of centrality. It
is not just that the main activity of the discipline lies elsewhere, outside
language, and in the realm of things and their visual representation. Architecture
also, like the other disciplines, has a verbal discourse that embodies essential
ways of thinking and seeing, one that would-be practitioners need to learn. But
whereas in social work, law, and business, writing is a central means of
practicing and displaying mastery of the disciplinary discourse, in architecture
it is not. In the work produced over 5 years by the architecture undergraduate
one cannot assume there will be a significant body of extended written texts
through which progress in the use of architectural discourse may be tracked. In
the most significant teaching contexts, the design studio courses, control of the
discourse is judged by its assumed fruits in successful design although its main
deployment is in speech, both in the seminar-like infrequent gatherings of the
class, in the one-on-one "desk crits" -consultations at the student's drafting
table-that are the main vehicle of teaching, and in the "crits" in which the
work is displayed and orally defended. There is no written test in design studio.
However, although the production of writing in school is relatively tangen-
tial to the principal and defining tasks of the job and the discipline, the writing
that does get done can be highly significant. Often, moreover, it is very different
from anything normally seen in other disciplines, and perhaps hints at alterna-
tive ways in which writing might more generally contribute to the formation of
a professional.
The phrase "formation of a professional," it is worth reminding ourselves,
refers to a function that is entirely absent from workplace writing. The purpose
of the latter is either to affect some state of affairs outside the writer or to enable
the thinking and recording that underpin action. Educational writing may also,
84 CHAPTERS

of course, be practically geared to the achievement of an immediate task (e.g.,

taking notes during a complicated chemistry experiment). But, as we have seen,
it may also be motivated very differently, by the need to develop and practice
a way of thinking that will remain as a permanent resource for the practitioner.
Some writing in the school of architecture appeared to be serving both functions
at once.
The uniqueness of the task of architectural education, and also the ambiguous
nature of that education's relationship to the profession (see below), are
manifested in a distinctive writing profile, although not all the elements of that
profile are unfamiliar. The texts produced range in character from the relatively
conventional (a reader from another discipline would have no trouble in
recognizing what sort of a beast a typical student paper on Palladio was) to the
(in academic terms) exotic. A possible broad classification of the variety of
genres can be constructed in terms of three relationships of writing to the work
of architecture: writing about architecture, writing/or architecture, and writing
as architecture. In this chapter we take each in tum, concluding with some
observations on the relationship between the education and the profession. 11

WRITING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

This category accounts for most of the writing produced for course require-
ments outside the design studio classes, that is, in courses on the theory and
history of architecture, technology, and professional practice. (In the school
where we did most of our research there are only one or two of the latter; they
do not appear until the 3rd year of a 5-year program and are not regarded by
the students as important.) The genre types within which writing for these
courses is framed would be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with
the way universities work, despite local peculiarities and the frequent presence
of drawn illustrations. It is academic writing, epistemic in function in the sense
in which we have been using the term and bearing little relation to writing
produced in architects' offices. Indeed, the content of these courses often
overlaps with that of other, nonarchitectural disciplines such as literature or art
history, as can be seen from Fig. 5.1, a sample page of an undergraduate thesis
that will be further discussed below. There is not as a rule any specific or
systematic connection between what is learned in these courses and studio
practice in design. As we shall see, however, the discourse that writing helps
the student to acquire may have powerful effects within the design process.

11 As well as the school of architecture that was our main site, we did some studies in a second

university that we here call Cornwall University.

WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 85

Preface

Although the issue of representation is a fundamental one within architecture, its position
within contemporary discourse is uncertain. What does architecture represent? Is its subject
architectural, or does it lie outside the realm of architectural concerns? The confusing situation in
contemporary practice makes such questions difficult to answer. It seems apparent, however, that
the negligence of architectural subjects within the discipline could lead to its further erosion. This
being the case, it is clear that the issue of architectural representation presents a problem for
contemporary architecture.
The idea of memory is of critical importance to anyone considering the question of
architectural representation. For architects, to ask what is being made visible requires speculation
on what is worth remembering - what is a proper subject for architecture? What do cities
remember? What do buildings remember? When faced with questions such as these, the confusion
surrounding the issue becomes evident. Without a subject for architecture, no criteria exists on
which design decisions can be based. Design becomes an exclusively subjective activity, and
architects are absolved of any responsibility of intention. There is no judgment involved;
architecture has forgotten its capacity - indeed its responsibility - to remember. If nothing is
remembered, then it follows that no one can be accountable, since there is no 'physical evidence' -
nothing has been shown. Without any connection between physical form and intentions or values,
there can be no public face to any building or activity, and hence no accountability. Thus, the
responsibility for architecture to show the city to itself is denied; one of its fundamental roles has
been avoided. Conditions such as these are not encouraging, since they represent the slow
suffocation of a discipline through the avoidance of its true subject matter.
One way of addressing this problem is through researching the issue of architectural
representation in another context- perhaps one where the issues involved have greater clarity, even
if this context seems distant and strange to us. One other context is ancient literature, specifically,
the architectural role of the trophy in Homers' Iliad.
As a story, the Iliad contains many examples of ritual acts and mnemonic events which
represent the values and desires of a people. These practices have a practical value in that they hold

FIG. 5.1. Page from Preface oflnne's undergraduate thesis.

WRITING FOR ARCHITECTURE

This category refers to writing produced as part of the process of bringing an

architectural design into being, in studio courses and in the design thesis that
some students undertake in their 5th and final year. It must be said that this use
86 CHAPTERS

of writing is neither universal nor widely taught or required. Most of our

examples are of self-initiated writing undertaken by students because they
found it helpful, and often not seen, or at any rate evaluated, by the professor.
Writing contributes to design projects in two different ways, as record
keeping in support of the management of the project and as an aid to design
thinking. The need for and nature of the first sort is explained by a 3rd-year
Cornwall student:

Writing is more of a tool organizing information and organizing ideas within the
development of your idea, within the development of the project. And for me I
think it's a most important tool in studio, as a tool to organize, as a tool to record
things that you couldn't fit.

The reason for this is the complexity of the project:

The project starts as a very small seed, but at the end of a term, by your final
crit, you cannot fit it all in your head, and you can't think about the building
in its entirety at one time. So you have to be very careful to record the original
thesis ofthe proposal, what's motivating it at the beginning, and keep a record
of how things are unfolding, and how I see them unfolding, and how I see
them projecting, and only then, at the final crit, can I, in retrospect, work it
together as a type of thesis. And without writing you couldn't do it. You
couldn't do it just in sketches either .... I don't write a lot ... I just write what
I need to keep the project going .... when I reach a point in that project, I'm
not going to write, you know, four pages about it, I may write a paragraph, I
might write three lines.

Such writing particularly records intentions that may get forgotten in meeting
the pragmatic imperatives of developing the design. Occasionally it may be
required, as Cornwall's Professor Hurlingham explained:

usually at the conclusion of the first or second [design] exercise, I will require
them to distill everything that they have learned in that exercise through design
and through experimental investigation. I will ask them to distill it in writing ...
I think it is extremely important to be able to verbally articulate it.

and as we heard Professor Schofield explain to his class:

Now, for next Monday, you should write a page or two identifying the aspect of
the subject that you propose to pursue and how you might start.

The following is a sample of this sort of writing, taken from notes for the design
of a Canadian war memorial in Normandy:
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 87

The thematic structure has to work independently from the actual historical
narrative-to avoid the problem of allegorical triviality.
i.e., someone unfamiliar with the actual events would still feel it
i.e., the garden conveys an architectural idea, not a historical one-the two could
conceivably be separated, although they are obviously intimately connected
Therefore the focus must be on the emotional character ofthe event, and its many
aspects.

- The landscape provides the necessary "canvas" for setting up these

conditions. They must initially be reactions to the landscape.
~ Parallel between these decisions and decisions involved in planning a
battle-the landscape is always a basic determining factor-sea,
beach, cliff, plain.
~ tie together with emotional conditions

But it is not normal for this sort of writing to be required by professors. (In the
much bigger professional design projects that are undertaken in offices we
occasionally found the same use of writing, and it was similarly brief.)
The other manifestation of writing for architecture, writing as an aid to
design thinking, can be illustrated by the design notebook of a 4th-year student,
Edith. 12 Professor Schofield had instructed the class to keep joumals-"Keep
a journal, converse with your own ideas"-but did not formally inspect them.
(Nevertheless, he often saw them when students referred to them during
individual consultations at the drafting table, the "desk crits" that occupied
almost all of the instructor's studio time.) Sample pages are reproduced as
Figs. 5.2 and 5.3.
In Fig. 5.2 some of the writing is tightly associated with the drawing, in the
form of a label linked by an arrow. Drawing is probably the form of recording
we would expect to find in an architecture studio, and indeed there is plenty in
evidence, in the students' notebooks as well as in the work for presentation. But
we can also see writing inscribing thoughts and ideas that are presumably
essential to the design process but that cannot easily be drawn. The preference
of most architecture students is, not surprisingly, to sketch, not write, so that
when writing is employed it presumably performs some function not attainable
through drawing. The notation (it might be misleading to call it the title) at the

12Whenever the use of writing is discussed in accounts of architectural education, it is usually

writing as an aid to design thinking that is referred to, in the range of versions described in this
section; for example, Ackerman & Oates (1996), Corbin ( 1992), Goodman, Fairey, & Paul (1992),
Martin (1992), Matthews (1992), McCann (1992), and Upchurch (1993).
88 CHAPTERS

t:·-·\_
(:Q)

FIG. 5.2. "How to create journey": page from Edith's notebook.

top of the page, "How to create journey," explains how the drawings are to be
read, namely as the fulfillment of a particular intention. But if it had been written
before the sketch was produced, its function may have been to fix the intention
firmly by attaching it to a (verbal) sign, so that it could more easily be adhered
to in the face of distractions (cf. Vygotsky, 1978, e.g., pp. 35-36, on the use of
words to control attention and overcome the dominance of impulse). The
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 89

FIG. 5.3. Further page from Edith's notebook.

written intention stands, visibly, as a recurrent reminder to help the student stay
on track. Turning to the inscriptions at the bottom of the page, we note that
painted-over, carved, and stripped bark can be represented graphically-and
they have been, though not with sufficient care as to make the reference entirely
clear to an outside viewer. The writing, in contrast, represents not material states
but acts-wrap, paint over, strip, carve; these would have been much harder to
represent unambiguously in pictures. Also, there is no way of drawing "maybe"
(as in "Maybe one figure dictates"). Finally, the two-line text contrasting the
90 CHAPTER 5

FIG. 5.4. A page from Joan's notebook.

two "figures" (two variously wrapped, stripped, carved etc. logs) does some-
thing different again:
1 figure dictates
1 figure is informed [i.e., receives information from the other figure-our gloss]
This records the sort of interpretation the viewer is finally to place on the
relationship between the two. Dictating and being informed are conditions that
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 91

can neither be drawn nor literally embodied in logs; nevertheless the sight of
the figures might evoke that sort of image in us through the operation of our
incurably anthropomorphizing vision. Drawing could not have done what those
seven words did because what could be drawn could only be a particular
instantiation of that intended impression. The drawing could not communicate
the intention as a general purpose that has not yet entered into any sort of even
provisional commitment to a specific form (Medway, 1996).
Fig. 5.3 has far more writing, and we see further cognitive moves essential
to design encoded in written discourse, notably questions ("How do you move
from entire room to gateway ... ?"), and oppositions and comparisons:

many figures but they reveal themselves to you through detail

figures looking at viewer
vs
figures not looking

Note that in the latter piece of text the resources used are not just linguistic but
visual (the central positioning of"vs" on its own line; cf. Kress & van Leeuwen,
1996), and it is generally characteristic of design notebooks that part of the
meaning of written text derives from its spatial arrangement on the page. Also
characteristic is the use of signs like arrows-used inside sentences and not just
to link text to drawings-that derive not from written language but from
everyday nonverbal signs or from mathematical or logical symbol systems.
What Cornwall's Professor Hurlingham (quoted above) wants to see writing
used for is the specification of qualities.

I think there's a vagueness, but there's also a kind of precision. Because through
writing you may be extraordinarily precise about the kind of quality that you are
looking for, right? And so writing can sometimes lead you in a direction ....
I think you have to be as precise about qualities, in qualities offeeling, qualities
of emotion, or sentiment, you have to be as precise about that as you do about
how you support a roof, if it's going to help, otherwise it's just a kind of free
association about everything.

The representation of qualities in these pages of Edith's hardly reaches the

"extraordinary precision" he speaks of ("fear," "empathy"), but the written text
does achieve something else he says is important:

... there's another kind of precision which those drawings [i.e., ones that use
the technical notational codes of architecture} will never reveal to you. For
example if they're ink drawings or pencil drawings on tracing paper, they don't
92 CHAPTERS

tell you anything about the experience of the building, right? So how does one
communicate those to somebody else? Or sometimes even to yourself.... Now
some people use drawings to make that clear to themselves, other kinds of
drawing .... Or they're writing texts, texts which exist side by the side with the
architectural drawing.

In other words, the experiential qualities of a building can be conveyed either

through nontechnical drawings (sketches, impressionistic renderings, etc.) or
through writing.
The variety found among design notebooks is clearly shown when we add
to Edith's the work of three more students. Figure 5.4, for instance (by Joan),
displays a clearer separation of text and drawing and an arrangement of text on
the page that conforms more closely to the conventions of purely written
discourse.
Lisbeth's hard-to-read text in Figs 5.5 and 5.6 reads:

What scale are we talking?

The 1st marker should be small I gather.
I think they should be fairly close-forced.-So forced that they
become uncomfortable.-Maybe that's where the indecision
comes from
The objects a stair (threshold-no--[the object]'s a gravestone
and chair can be spaced out (like me.)
I must create my only language. one that unites the pieces. a
logo--a symbol. -Maybe its a material-a unusual use of a
material-woven twine. no it has to be something fragile
uncertain.
Something distracting-wind operating-Noisy. (maybe a clapper.)-
Yeah-my log book. -each piece can be used to indicate my different
stages.
~ My log is the distraction
[Label on drawing-?Clack Clack]
~Maybe not noise maker but some sort of marker (visually-after all it is arch.)
~scale worries me

Whereas Joan's writing was firmly referential, representing states, processes

and qualities, Lisbeth's is expressive, containing (in addition) declarations of
intention ("I must"), explicitly marked internal dialogue ("a, no, b"), and ironic
comment on the whole situation of doing this. On another page (see Fig. 5.7)
she writes, "This going to be like a 3-D-super big 1st year project."
John's notebook (see Figs. 5.8 and 5.9) comes closer to the precise specification
of quality that Professor Burlingham hoped to fmd. Clearly, writing is very central
to his design process. The project is to design a cafe under a bridge on a canal. He
refers, in a careful formulation, to "a more ambiguously dynamic light" that
93
 i·~ (\ 1
..L

t t. ...•. ] i
lLt~
Jffi
.f l

94
 ' '' ' ' I

~.' ft:j~ ~ i. :4;:. .f~

. .-~_f
~~·

~ \p ,··· h~. }] ~t$ [}.

'
·~ '\: 1 . ~ ..

l \~: .'~. \~ J,!l ~~}

. . J L _L __:_ __ l
.. t .· .. . .
i : .•
\ . .

!']
-'i

Ji ~'! l
. , I : ~ jUJ; ·~ •. ' , i
;·ll. ~~~~~·~4 ~t~1t ~
0:

: \i'C:C
: " . . . "'0:

95
96 CHAPTER 5

FIG. 5.8. Page from John's notebook.

contrasts with "a vast mysterious darkness." Some of the other things he does
we have already seen elsewhere, such as specifying his intention ("I will try to
evoke the intimacy between ourselves and an enchanted forest, represented by
Emily Carr [Canadian painter]," "The cafe will put visitors in a state of
wonder"). But he also does other things we have not seen in the texts already
discussed. First, he enunciates relevant guiding principles: "It is impossible to
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 97

FIG. 5.9. Further page from John's notebook.

embody all of nature-we must restrict ourselves to a secondary whole-forest for

example." Second, he articulates the sort of project this is in general terms, by
contrast with other architectural projects: it affords unusual freedom (because the
built-in requirements of a cafe are fairly minimal and can be met in any number of
ways); and "As with all freedoms (freedom) responsibility is inherent-the cafe
must present a clear idea. The main responsibility is to build a coherent[?]."
98 CHAPTERS

Of course, such word-spinning could be just a form of procrastination,

putting off through over-verbalization the tough work of generating forms that
will work. But the dilemmas and decisions represented in the text are ones that
unavoidably have to be faced in some form in "responsible" design. More
experienced designers may deal with them in their heads, but perhaps it helps
for a novice to work in overt rather than inner speech.
One of the reasons why writing is valuable at an early stage of design is that,
unlike drawing, it can avoid premature specification. Drawing has to opt for
specific shapes and positions which writing can leave vague or simply omit,
attending instead to more qualitative properties (Medway, 1996). Using lan-
guage, however, one can use expressions such as "somewhere": for example,
"There'll be a fountain somewhere in this area." But, as Professor Hurlingham
said, "there isn't a graphical 'somewhere'."
Writing does not have to be extended or elaborate to perform a powerful
function; a very brief note can often do the job. The difference between writing
even briefly and not writing at all is far more significant than the apparent size
and effort of the activity would suggest.

... while you're sketching, your mind is racing so quickly, and your hand can't
follow that quickly, so you write ... you make a few notations which are verbal,
which remind you of a whole ... can remind you of a whole .... You could take
the whole history of architecture, in a sense, like a stack of cards and just fold
them together, with a few very cryptic written notations. So I think writing is
extraordinarily useful. But I'm not talking at this point of doing a kind of
dissertation on something, it's ... procedural.

"Procedural" writing might in fact be a useful category for us to adopt from this
informant.
Should the design notebook be considered a genre? If so, it is certainly a
very flexible one. The proportion of writing to drawing varies from page to
page, from 0 to 100%, and between students. One student told us that his
"sketchbook has probably about as much writing in it as sketches in it. It's filled
with just notes that I write down." The register varies between a speech-like
chattiness and gnomic formality, and in degree of syntactical elaboration, from
the notation of single words to phrases to complete sentences. It seems equally
impossible to define the content of the notebook: alongside the written and
graphical design notes, many other forms of notation appear that seem to have
been included simply because the writing and drawing surface was ready to
hand-lecture notes, domestic shopping lists and reminders, phone numbers,
sketches of fellow students, quotations picked up from professors and books.
Receipts, business cards, postcards, and letters may be stored between its pages.
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 99

Nor is this a genre that is taught, although examples are readily available on the
desks of some other students and in the library, in illustrations of the work of
architects and designers back to Renaissance times (e.g., Leonardo's note-
books).
But those examples seem, at first sight, hardly necessary, the notebook
activity appearing to answer so naturally and obviously to the demands of the
designers' situation. That is the sort of assumption, however, that the writing
researcher must question.
For us to claim the existence of a distinctive genre ofthe design notebook,
or perhaps more usefully the architecture student design notebook, some degree
of institutionalization or conventionalization needs to be observable. In other
words, the texts should not be individual ad hoc responses to exigence that draw
opportunistically and eclectically on the total resources of the language-lin-
guistic, semantic, generic, and rhetorical. The writing should not itself be a
totally fresh design job on each occasion. Rather, we should be able to identify
the calling-up of some ready-made assemblage: the response to the exigence
should be, to some degree, the activation of a standard solution ramer than the
devising of a fresh one. The evidence that this is occurring will include the
consistent absence of certain features that purely functional requirements might
suggest could well have been admissible, and the consistent presence of ones
that seem no more justifiable than ones that aren't found. (Compare the
admitted and unadmitted explications of background knowledge revealed by
Giltrow and Valiquette (1994) in their study of certain university student
genres.)
There certainly are features that seem conventionalized. In terms of the
material instantiation of the genre, design notebooks are perfect-bound in hard
covers, are always black, and contain unruled cartridge paper. There are neither
lines, as in a notebook I might use, nor square grid ruling such as engineers
often prefer. Although much of the content of the notebook is writing, the paper
is suitable for delicate pencil drawing or watercolor sketches; the physical
notebook could equally become an artist's sketchbook. The writing and draw-
ing, moreover, are almost always in pencil or black ink from a drafting
pen-almost never blue ink-almost never ball-point. And the handwriting,
even for extended passages of prose, is typically uppercase-a feature that
seems actually counter-functional, in that the more usual mix of upper and
lower is far more readable.
In terms of content, we soon come to have certain expectations. At least in
the particular educational tendency that informs the schools we know, aspects
of buildings will be considered phenomenologically-that is, for how they will
100 CHAPTERS

be experienced-much more than technically. Calculations and topological

struggles will not be strongly in evidence (contrast the engineer's notebook).
Quite likely to be found are fragments of poetic imagery, shards of metaphoric
expression that convey something about a mood that is to be created, unorgan-
ized phrases suggestive of parallels and associations and precedents. On the
other hand, it would be strange to find more than the occasional sentence of the
type that the specification documents for a contract are full of.
It could be said that many of these features simply reflect the distinctive task
and perspective of the architect. Given the nature of the way architects conceive
of their job, the sorts of text they write and draw in their notebooks can be seen
as rational function responses, with no need to invoke notions of convention
and standardization; faced with an architectural (as opposed to an engineering)
design project, what else would you do? Our initial provisional formulation was
that the notebook activity appeared to answer naturally and obviously to the
demands of the designers' situation. But "the designers' situation" begs the
question, as does "simply reflect" at the beginning of this paragraph. "The
designers' situation" is a condition that involves a particular construction of
"designer," as an individual who approaches a problem constructed in culturally
specific terms, from a particular sensibility and within the frame of a particular
discourse. The designer's situation is, in part, objectively given and in part a
construct of an architectural view of the world. But a view of the world is a
constantly realized activity [cf. Vygotsky's (1986, p. 6) insight that the word,
as generalization, is activity]: an activity that occurs in different sites, one of
which is design notebooks. The genre does not so much reflect the architectural
sensibility as constitute one of the sites of its realization. It is not (or is not only)
the result of a way of thinking so much as the means for that thinking to happen.
At one level, the architectural view of the world exists as its genres, spoken,
drawn, and written.
We actually do not know enough, from our own studies or from the literature,
to be confident in our appraisal of the design notebook. One speculative
hypothesis, however, seems worth putting forward. It relates to the fact the
design notebook seems to occur far more among students than among practicing
architects. If the exigence is the need to develop a design and the genre is a
response to that exigence, we might expect to find instances in both domains
equally.
Our hypothesis is that the notebook serves needs and desires beyond the
instrumental exigences of design. In performing the genre students may also be
"being architects." Certainly the outward accoutrements (such as obligatory
black) seem to fulfill this function. Architecture students are exceptionally
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 101

self-conscious about their actions and are often concerned to accomplish them
with style. The notebook is almost inevitably a performance in the theatrical
sense as well as a functional means. We sometimes have the sense that students
require their notebooks to constitute intriguing evidence of the activity of a
lively mind. They are written/drawn/assembled with half an eye to a later
re-reading-perhaps years later, perhaps a re-reading by posterity-as the
documentation of a curious and fertile intellect and imagination. Hence, what
the notebook is not allowed to be is boring; the tediously technical may have a
place, but only sufficient to demonstrate the professional competence and
seriousness of the designer. The interleaved bus tickets and restaurant receipts
may be integral to the genre.
These comments, we repeat, are speculative, offered for their possible
heuristic value. An associated hypothesis is that the design notebook is a vehicle
primarily of epistemic rather than practical activity. Those parts of the notebook
that are about recording intentions and decisions are, of course, directly prac-
tical: they help to keep action on track. Those aspects, however, that relate to
the conception ofthe artifact perhaps serve the needs oflearning as much as of
design. It is significant that the genre, though not widely used by professional
architects (as far as we can tell), is not exclusive to students. It is used also by
half-academic, half-practitioner architects who teach but also undertake design
work. When used by practitioners like Professor Schofield, who is a theoreti-
cian, researcher, and teacher more than a practitioner working regularly on
design contracts, the design notebook serves the two functions simultaneously
of supporting the development of the design, in ways we have seen, and
supporting reflexivity: the constant endeavor to bring one's design process into
full consciousness and articulation and to make articulate knowledge out of
intuition is more an intellectual, even academic, pursuit than a practical one.
Thus when Professor Schofield maintains a design notebook, it is research,
pushing forward the boundaries of understanding and making new know ledge.
When, on the other hand, Edith, Joan, Lisbeth, and John do it as students, it
is education, not because they do it in the context of a university course but
because a major purpose is to practice organizing thought and perception in the
terms of a discourse and to achieve fluency in the verbal articulation of
intentions and spatial conditions. This may be why the use of the notebook can
fall away once this facility has been acquired, unless one wishes to maintain a
level of consciousness beyond that required for routine office practice.
Our tentative conclusion, then, is that the exigence addressed by the design
notebook in school is less the need to develop a design than the need to learn
to think a certain way and to use a certain language-a point that we have
102 CHAPTERS

already made in relation to the students in the law course in chapter 3. The
enterprise can be described as learning a genre only if genre is a very broad
category, such that an instance of it can occur in all three modes: writing (mainly
students), and speech and inner speech/thought (practitioners). It seems better
to say that what is being learned is a discourse, in Foucault's sense (see chap.
10 for a fuller discussion of this issue), although many of the things researchers
have said about genre remain true. One of them is Miller's (1994) observation
that through genres "we learn ... what ends we may have" (p. 38). The discourse
teaches you the sorts of things you could want to do with a building, like making
a frame be a "structure and foil to [a] plane," "build[ing] up a thickness (of
void) which contains ideas of both walls" (Joan), forcing elements close
together so that "they become uncomfortable" (Lisbeth) or "presenting a clear
idea" (John). It teaches you, too, ways of seeing the made and natural physical
world, such as "tame, but with subtle hints of natural wonder" and "ambigu-
ously dynamic light" (John), flames of a funeral pyre that "play [a] unifying
role" in the order of the Homeric funeral (Innes's thesis, see Fig. 5.1 0). For
novice architects, getting reality and possibility to reveal themselves in these
terms probably takes conscious thought-and time, which is why acquiring the
discourse is facilitated by practice within the slower and more deliberate mode
of writing. Once the discourse is learned, however, it no longer has to be
consciously "applied"; the world simply presents itself in those terms and
speech about it spontaneously adopts the language of architectural vision.
One reason why writing in architectural practice seems to be used more by
architects who are both academics and practitioners than by those in full-time
practice appears to be the experience of teaching. Professor Hurlingham uses
writing to develop his design, but also

for describing to someone else a process which is described primarily through

... a form of [drawn] notation which we don't necessarily share, unless we're
architects or artists. [Writing] enables me to communicate it much more suc-
cinctly. And I think that has come about in large part through my experience in
teaching, with that constant demand to be able to articulate things that are very
difficult to grasp.

The writing can communicate to outsiders, but also serves as a rehearsal for
spoken communication.
In the context of the design studio we also find, less commonly but very
significantly, a quite different use of writing to generate design. Whereas the
written discourse of the design notebooks looked somewhat (though to varying
degrees) like dialogic speech or like talking to oneself-one could imagine the
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 103

they maintain distinct fonns. The role of each is specific, and corresponds in both cases to its

configuration. The barrow is indirectly described as round, or oval-shaped: Achilles, while mourning,

travels 'around' the barrow. He drags the body of Hector 'around' Patroclos' bier; around the body of

the hero being mourned. This recalls Achilles' pursuit of Hector 'three times' around the walls of Troy.

Patroclos' life is finalized in the funeral that Achilles gives him; Achilles' circling of Troy finalizes the

fate of the city. The two fundamental events, intimately connected in the story, are given a corresponding

architectural metaphor. The pyre, being square, is geometrically distinct from the barrow; it is described

in the text as measuring 'a hundred fee teach way'. The square configuration of the pyre is also suggested

by the image in the vase painting. The pyre's form corresponds to its 'incendiary' role: to burn the body

quickly, firewood must be stacked a certain way.

As in these two examples, the overwhelming amount of material and procedure that make up the

funeral rites follow a clear organizational structure. In the carrying out of the funeral's various stages,

we see strict order and careful planning. The disparate parts fall within this order, but it is clearly the

flames which play the greatest unifying role. Every event, every sacrifice, every object is 'consumed'

by the glowing evocation that inspired it. The different episodes of the funeral, no matter how enigmatic,

are thus channelled towards a higher ideal: the blazing reconstruction of the hero's life and subsequent

establishment of his memory.

This desire for architecture is suggested not only in the funeral, but in other episodes of the story

as well. One particularly strong example takes place in Book seventeen and describes the horses of

Achilles standing over the body of their 'temporary' charioteer, Patroclos. This is one of the first clearly

architectural references in the Iliad:

They were unwilling to go back to the wide passage of Helle

and the ships, or back into the fighting after the Achaeans,

but still as stands a grave monument which is set over

the mounded tomb of a dead man or lady, they stood there

holding motionless in its place the fair-wrought chariot,

leaning their heads along the ground, and wann tears were running

FIG. 5.10. Page from !nne's undergraduate thesis.

sentences featuring in a design conversation-this other sort is remote from

speech. The discourse tends to do the sort of thing that can only be done in
writing.
Lay people like ourselves tend to see design as a matter of finding ingenious
solutions to problems-like juggling a lot of awkward shapes to fit them into
104 CHAPTER 5

a particular space. This view is too limited, however, certainly in terms of the
perspective that dominates in the schools of architecture we have looked at.
What is called for goes beyond technical adeptness in two ways. First, there is
often more than one way of fulfilling the brief and dealing with the exigences
imposed by site, available materials, financial constraints, and so on; the point
is not to arrive at a minimum working solution but to find a solution that is
elegant, satisfying, and delightful. Second, the architect's responsibility is not
just to the fulfillment of the programmatic requirement but to the enhancement
ofthe culture through contributing a rich addition to the made world. For both
these reasons what needs developing in trainee architects is not only the sort of
technical ingenuity and spatial vision that might be shared with engineers but
also, and distinctively, an ability to generate form prolifically, to come up with
new configurations of three-dimensional space. The promotion of this ability
is one ofthe traditional strengths of the school from which we have drawn most
of our data. It shows, for instance, in the students' drawings, which are not
merely precise and elegant but often stunningly beautiful-for instance those
done on 4th-year study terms in Rome, like the one led by Professor Tetreault:

There were a couple of Italians there, actually, as well who looked very ... they
were very curious about what was going on. They looked at the drawings and
couldn't believe how beautiful the stuff was, and didn't know where it came
from. "How do you do this stuff? Where does this come from?" you know. And
[the school] does that a lot, when we go to Rome, almost every year you hear
this story, doesn't matter who takes the group. There's a certain energy with this
school, that is different than any others. Everybody looks forward to the
[school's] show, because it's kind ofbeautiful. Who knows what that is, where
that comes from, which angels are aligned at that point?

Architecture students have to develop a facility in coming up with fresh and

varied forms. They must also learn to achieve coherence in a design, so that it
is not just a set of relatively unrelated neat ideas. The collocation of elements
has to "read" as motivated, not arbitrary. Writing is sometimes used to assist
the generation of formal ideas, more in exercises, it must be said, than in
simulated design assignments set up as if for actual clients and a real site.
Written texts produced by collage and similar techniques involving a random
element throw up interesting and provocative collocations that suggest formal
spatial possibilities.
One example of this application: what makes the experience ofbuilt form a
lively one is sometimes the memories and associations the form activates. The
experience is particularly engaging if the memories of two different situations
or phenomena are simultaneously activated so that the "reading" oscillates
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 105

between the two. In his own work and his work with students, Professor
Tetreault uses writing to help this happen. For instance, he exploited his own
bilingualism ("I didn't speak English at all until I was 8 years old") in the
following procedure:

I'd take a piece of text, a given piece of English text and read it as ifl was reading
French, and so I would use the sound ofthis text and then transcribe [the sound]
and find the closest [French] word to that transcription. So, for an example, the
start of one of the examples I have is "From the labyrinth" .... It gets translated
into de Ia birheme, because there's no birinthe, it's not a word. But I looked for
the closest word in the dictionary and it was birheme, de Ia birheme, "from the
ship, birheme," which is a Greek ship. So "from the ship" replaces "the Laby-
rinth," it's actually "the Labyrinth" translated to "de Ia birheme." And then I'd
keep going ... all kinds of surprises and strange things. And then the rest is all
suturing, basically it's actually trying to make sense of the text as it starts
evolving.
I think there is a component of your mind which actually makes connections with
the work at hand. I was working on an installation, a construction that had certain
intentions, a ship was actually quite a big part of it. It was a Basque ship in this
case. I wasn't expecting to find "birheme" meaning ship but some strange things
started happening. But it was actually quite a beautiful little text in the end and
I used it as part of the program for the installation. So ... a fragment of the
installation was the Labyrinth, but at the same time some of it was about this ship
that it was describing in the second text. So, that was one way that I tackled this
gap, sort of playing with the gap.

In a development of this technique, after he had acquired a word processor, he

would run English text through the French thesaurus and spell checker and take
the closest words that were suggested, and then adjust the text until it made
some sense.

What I'm actually trying to trigger in a sense is kind of a file of memory. Ifsome
of these things are actually fluctuating between either one language or another,
or two very different conditions from the labyrinth state to the ship, then memory
is triggered in order to make parallels between the two. It's like an oscillation
between two different conditions. And I think you can do it with objects as well
as with sounds or words. So when I'm building something it becomes the same
kind of fluctuation, I call it arc-ing. It's almost like a spark existing between two
things.

This informant used the word "program" above. In regular office practice
the term usually refers to the functional requirements or terms of reference for
the design, given by the client or arrived at in consultation between architect
106 CHAPTERS

and client: it might specify, for instance, the number, type, and size of rooms.
But the program may include aspects of meaning or reference, or what is to be
achieved more generally. It may set out the range of intentions that will guide
the design; thus the connection between labyrinth and ship got embodied in the
program. Professor Tetreault's aim is to make the program richer, more
"layered," leading to a richer artifact that engages more of the viewer's
memories and knowledge and pleasure in speculation.

There's all kinds of these things that are evolving in the construction from using
... the language connection as well as just object connections.

In some projects, including some student projects, the "language connection"

is established by writing and becomes part of the program guiding the design.
Because both words and objects function semiotically, and because the mean-
ings and associations are similarly various and layered, exploring language can
reveal analogously polysemous aspects of the physical objects assembled or
alluded to in architectural or artistic constructions.
Developing a rich program that will lead to a dense artifact is one of the
abilities Professor Tetreault seeks to teach his students. The program needs to
be adequately subtle and complex in the evocations it sets out to activate. It
must also be adequately rich and subtle in its conceptions of the needs and
habitual practices of users. In professional practice, clients are rarely self-con-
scious or perceptive enough to be able to supply an adequate description of their
own needs or those of other users. It is therefore necessary for the architect to
go beyond the provided brief, to research those needs and to construct an
account of the life and activity that will go on in the building. This account may
not, in the office, be written down, or even spoken, but it can be written, and
in the school it is pedagogically helpful that it should be. "It's trying to make
an architecture that responds to human behavior in space, by framing that space
with material." Writing can be a means of researching that human behavior in
space. As their first step in a design project set in Rome where they spent a term
of their 4th year, Tetreault's students therefore observed people's habits and
movements and wrote narratives that might be semi-fictional.

I think it brought to consciousness some of their experiences, made them think

about them at least, enough that if you ask them now to do a bar, a cafe bar, or a
bar as defined by the Romans, for example, it'd be very different than before they
went, obviously, because of the experience. But also, if you're sitting there, and
you're basically describing what you see, you might soak in a little bit more of
what makes it different there, than here. It's not just the fact that it has a counter,
four chairs, and a table, that it's a bar-it's the interactions that exist. So quite
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 107

often these little narratives have characters in them that are not so strange, that
are actually people off the street, or, it might be strange to us, as onlookers, or
outsiders. But you realize that this is the clientele for the programs of the
architecture, so you're saying, Well, I can'tjust design for a blank group, right?
They do have personalities, and they will respond in certain ways. So if you're
thinking of a bar, and you know there are at least four old women who are going
to come in at 9:15 every morning to have a coffee, that changes the program of
the architectural space. You know that that one table will be occupied by four
old ladies. And you ... write that down as a little story. It might seem like an odd
little story, but it's actually part of the program. So it's not just the same people
as listed in the requirements for the client ... I think [that exercise] changed some
people's perception of the relationship between program and architecture. [The
program] is not just what's officially given by some bureaucrat.

This is the sort of thing the students write:

Across the street a stranger motions for my attention. Intrigued by the instrument
in front of him I moved a little closer. He sat behind a table of amazing
craftsmanship which displayed mirrored eye glasses of various shapes and forms.
Begging for me to sit with him I obliged making myself comfortable beside the
table. He began to adjust his instruments with quick movements of extreme
precision-always being careful of what looked like a nickel wound line extend-
ing from somewhere above down through the table. I was curious of this character
but the sun was shining directly into my face making it difficult to make out any
features. All I know (or think I know) is that he wore a hooded jacket to shade
himself from the sun and sometimes counted to himself while manipulating
objects in a bag. He motioned for me to examine the eyeglasses noticing the
quality and beauty of the handmade craft. Several pairs I tried on not being aware
of the vendor's lack of interest in what I was doing-busily preoccupied with
something under the table.

WRITING AS ARCHITECTURE

In this manifestation, writing is another way of doing architecture, or, perhaps,

less provocatively, a way of doing something that is parallel and akin to
architecture. The thesis by Innes that we referred to earlier (illustrated in Fig.
5.1 0) is a case in point. It is significant that the final piece of extended written
work from a school of architecture may be a historical study of a work of
literature (his title was "The Trophy and Architectural Desire: Aspects of
Memory and Representation in Homer's Iliad"). This reflects the fact that
"being an architect"-the condition it is hoped the student will arrive at if the
education has been successful, rather than formally registered professional
status-is thought of less as an occupational practice or qualification than as a
108 CHAPTER 5

state of awareness, sensibility, and capability that may manifest itself in a

variety of activities, and not just in designing buildings. What these activities
have in common is not easy to define, but there is no doubt that Innes was "being
architectural" and exercising a specifically architectural sensibility in his read-
ing of the Iliad. The page reproduced as Fig. 5.10 presents part of his case that
although there was no architecture in the Iliad (e.g., no temples), an essentially
architectural impulse was manifested in, for instance, funeral structures. This
perspective is the product and expression of a distinctive type of awareness
promoted in the school.
A clearer case, however (because Innes's thesis falls within a recognizable
academic genre), is Tariq's pilot thesis (a sort of trial run undertaken in the 4th
year), which takes fictional form and is entitled "Tales of a Jacker." The
fictional commentary, purportedly composed at some unspecified point, that is
attached to the fictional tales begins

137 years ago there was no history. 136 years and 364 days ago there suddenly
was. This was the moment of plague [ ... ]a morning when civilization woke to
nothing ( ... ] on that particular morning not one person on record to date woke
with any recollection of the events of the past. The entire province of the
Allocated Territories retained all mental faculties other than that which control-
led, what would best be described as, collective memory [ ... ] many social
safeguards were implemented to protect the province from another attack of the
feared plague( .... ] the most effective safeguard became the obsessive recording
and subsequent storing of daily events. Within one week the well known Society
of Chroniclers was formed [ ... ]One very influential branch of the Society was
called the Minor Provincial Ministry of Juxtaposition and Adjacencies. The
ministry described itself as one which handled all matters of side-by-sideness.
Its wards were usually referred to as Jacks or Jackers (a convenient but less than
clever title for one who is involved in juxtaposition and adjacency) [ ... ]

One of these Jackers apparently left accounts (the tales) of some of the notable
disputes and dilemmas he had to deal with. A page of one of them, "Orthogonal
Misfortunes," is reproduced as Fig. 5.11. The following extract is illustrative
of the way a strongly architectural sense of the world is worked out in
descriptions of material states in this fictional world:

... each plantation consists of a home for the plantation owner and a water tank
in which a particular algae is grown .... Each tank is eight feet by ten feet in
rectangular dimensions and four feet deep. The average tank sits submerged in
the Aqua waters, only revealing an inch or so above the surface. The tanks are
physically separated by thin steel barriers, which have a tendency to move from
side to side spanning a small distance between one-quarter and one-half of an
inch.
 A1 the western-most edge of the province on will quite easily find the Aqua River. No
one knows or, for that matter, cares what ex' ts beyond It as the river itself is so rich a
commodity. For many knowns a certain du b tranquillity has remained here. This
would Ukely have something to do with the method by which property is allocated.
Land along the river is available in lots, e of which Is the same In dimensions and
cost. This Is possible because there Is o y one form of income here: plantation
larmlng. Perhaps farming Is an Incorrect rd as the sort of work, that occurs along the
riverside Is much more like botany. i· L _. ·, , , ( <, "i:. )•. I·' 1'"''~
!\ J ~t.· rv~t<",~G ,.._ y· .. ·. '- ,\. \, ·-J t("' -.,.)..,~-':
Along the edge of the river lie rows of Med1cure plantationsi each pla'iill!tion consists ofe~•t
a home for the plantation owner and a water tank In which a particular algae is grown. J
This algae became a much sought alter raw c!R:terial a number of diminishing knowns
ago when scientists discovered tha~ph · (the most popular and readily used
anti-viral drug available} could be extracted from it. The water tanks themselves
require the privilege of description as there are Important to the events of passing:
Each tank Is eight leet by ten feet in rectangular dimensions and lour feet deep. The
average tank sits submerged In the Aqua waters......only revealing an inch or so
above the surface. The tanks are physically separated by thin sheet steel barriers,
which have a tendency to move from side to side spanning a small distance between
one-quarter and one-hail of an Inch

One day the tranquillity of the riverside was disturbed when a startling discovery was
made. Knowledge of the known will come with great 8CQ!ptance on the part of the
reeder. There are those things perhaps unseen that should be conjured In the mind.
VISUalise a stillness when water does not move yet something disturbs it by its mere
presence. In the cold of the winter there is an old man who walks on the frozen
surface of the water contained In the tanks. He steps from one tank to the next as if
they were the spaces between raUway tracks. For some reason unknown to any, the
old man loses consclpusness and finds himself In a compromising situation. He has

common for some unknown re

onto the edge of one of the tank sepa
iy
quite conveniently lay himself in a position which placed his right and left on either
side of a steel separator. A r~rly expected but unusually heavy snowfall buries
him for the duration of the winter As the Ice thaws from underneath (which is
in the west he old man's body Is slowly lowered
w . In the lall, two neighbouring
plantation farmers find that they have ved, _!!!!__v.:!t~U!.!?_~i~!i9!1, hail of the old
man in each of their tanks (a terrible acting best described as an O!Jb.ogQ!H!I
Misfortune). Both curse, 'Tank the err
-This posed a partlcular problem in e west. The question of responsibiUty rose.
Ignore the fact that half of a sever old man would very likely contaminate the water,
who was to accept the burial? It j$ common practice in the west (out of respect for the
dead's last steps) to bury one irv\he spot where death occurred. Of course neither
Iarmer chose to 8CQ!pl the ~· It was then that a very clever compromise was made:
Since the man had In fact di on the steel separator It was there thai he should be
buried. The separator wave a maximum of one-hall inch (a neutral zone between
adjacent tanks), therefore a w one could be fashioned with that knowledge. One
which was hollow with a on hail Inch space inside; for rigidity and burial respect the

c
In fill for this separator wou,become the neatly pressed remains of the old man.

FIG. 5.11. "Orthogonal Misfortunes" from Tariq's project.

109
110 CHAPTER 5

This encountered condition is an example of the Jacker's discovery

that the province was not governed by illustrations of side-by-sideness alone; he

found that there was a new explanatory dynamic at work-it was that of
in-betweenness.

The writing embodies an architect's world view in a more fundamental sense

too. The tales as a whole deal at one level with the decline of Toronto within
Tariq's lifetime, though he did not realize until afterwards that it was this
underlying sense that provided the basis for the writing:

A lot of it from what I wrote came from, just in the back of my mind, like it never
became something that was integrated in the text, but most of it came from
impressions I had of the city of Toronto where I grew up and how that city
changed and, but, I don't know if I quite realized that till afterwards. I was
thinking about that recently. I think that will almost become the base for the
thesis. It's trying to talk about how the city of Toronto's changed over, well,
probably fifteen years, because there's almost a story attached to Toronto, how
we were supposed to be this wonderful city in North America but something has
gone wrong in the past few years, it's not really the best place to live any more.

If being an architect, or being architectural, is looking at the world a

particular way, clearly that way can find expression in representations of the
existing world, whether direct (Professor Tetreault's students' annotations of
scenes in Rome) or fictionally metamorphosed, as much as in representations
of projected or planned states in design work. The school's view of what it
means to be architectural is not exhausted by what professional architects do
in firms-a point to which we return in our final chapter.
This chapter has stressed differences rather than similarities between archi-
tecture and the other disciplines we have looked at. We, nevertheless, know
that other students also engage in some of these practices. Certainly, there is a
widespread use of informal and private (or, at least, not-for-the-professor)
writing, often utilizing graphical signs and diagrams and spatial as well as
syntactic arrangement, as a means of handling and exploring the ideas, estab-
lishing relationships between concepts, drafting formulations for use in papers
or presentations, noting questions, and the like. Notes made in lectures or on
readings are not simply transcriptions and paraphrases but incorporate elements
of the student's responses and thoughts; sometimes they are further inscribed
after the lecture is over, or they may lead into separate or partly separate
abstracts or reformulations. Similarly, surrounding the drafts of a student's
paper are often tangential texts of varying length and in different relationships
to the paper, anticipatory workings and thinking-throughs, and spin-off
WRITING IN ARCHITECTURE 111

thoughts for possible use elsewhere or pursued simply because the diversion is
tempting. This range of casual and undeclared written productions may take
place in a bound notebook like the ones the architecture students use, in binders,
on loose sheets kept in folders, on scraps of paper that are not preserved, or on
the computer screen, with or without printout. Our experience is that in these
unofficial texts the students are rehearsing both the ideational content and the
rhetoric-the terms and argumentative structures-of the discipline.
 Ill
WORKPLACE WRITING
As mentioned in chapter 1, the widening focus of composition studies since the
late 1970s and early 1980s has produced a considerable body of research on
writing in the workplace. Recently, Cooper (1996) called this work "the most
exciting area of research and scholarship in writing" (p. ix); and, she continued,
"the most exciting thing about research on nonacademic writing is the way it
problematizes the traditional assumptions about writers and texts" (p. x). It is
the extreme complexity of workplace writing that challenges those traditional
assumptions. Unlike many of the school writing tasks described in the previous
section-which typically have discernible beginnings and endings, single
authors and readers, and relatively stable, epistemic rhetorical aims-work-
place texts are but one strand in an intricate network of events, intentions, other
texts, relationships, and readers.
In an early study of workplace writing, Knoblauch (1980) described the
rhetorical challenge facing the business executives he observed: "These writers
set out to achieve several conflicting purposes simultaneously while responding
to the needs of several, quite different, intended readers, each with different
expectations of the writing" (p. 155). Anderson (1985), Driskill (1989), and
Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller (1985), among others, have specified a range of
possible purposes for workplace writing-all of them instrumental or praxis-
oriented. This complex picture has been further elaborated in survey research
(e.g., Anderson, 1985; Bataille, 1982; Faigley & Miller, 1982) and studies of

113
114 PART Ill

workplace writers and writing contexts (e.g., Doheny-Farina, 1985; Odell &
Goswami, 1982; Selzer, 1983; see also collections by Anderson, Brockmann,
& Miller, 1983, Odell & Goswami, 1985). Since that early work, many studies
have emerged to further our understanding of the place and function of writers
and writing at work (e.g., Bazerman & Paradis, 1991a; Dias & Pare, in press;
Duin & Hansen, 1996; Spilka, 1993).
From this brief tradition of research, we have come to see that rhetorical
purpose in workplace settings is in large part institutional rather than individual,
plural and contradictory rather than singular and coherent, and ideological
rather than merely communicative. Many workplace texts, as Cooper (1996)
explains, "are primarily means of restructuring relationships of power and
influence in the pursuit of particular goals" (p. xi). Moreover, institutional
documentary practices are inseparable, even indistinguishable, from the intri-
cate culture of practices that constitute "activity systems": As Engestrom ( 1993)
states, "If we take a closer and prolonged look at any institution, we get a picture
of a continuously constructed collective activity system that is not reducible to
series or sums of individual discrete actions, although the human agency is
necessarily realized in the form of actions" (p. 66).
The conflict and difference Knoblauch identifies above are the consequence of
complex and overlapping activity systems. In law, government, and various types
of negotiation, rhetorical conflict is institutionalized and built into the activity
system: courtrooms, committee hearings, parliaments, and other legislative ar-
rangements are structured along partisan lines, with designated roles for advocates,
opponents, plaintiffs, prosecutors, judges, and so on. And, as Bazerman (1988) has
demonstrated, "the scientific community developed around the engendering and
management of conflict" (p. 149). More often, however, the conflicts played out
in and through institutional texts are the undesigned, inevitable result of tensions
between the discourses of competing workplace interests (Hemdl, 1993; Pare, in
press). Even when those interests are organized to collaborate rather than com-
pete-as they are in most large collectives- the differences in their motives,
perspectives, procedures, topics, arguments, and goals are likely to cause friction.
The hierarchical structure of organizations creates economic and political imbal-
ances that work against shared goals, and the continual growth of specialization,
including the increased use of technology, rules against any common discourse.
Competition for decreasing funds, and consequent concerns for "accountability,"
further intensify the struggles for power. To complicate matters more, there is in
many fields a tendency toward the use of multidisciplinary or multiprofessional
teams which become, in Lave and Wenger's (1991) words, "tangential and
overlapping communities of practice" (p. 98).
PART Ill 115

As a result of this complexity, the notion of audience~an inheritance from

the Classical rhetorical tradition-is inadequate to explain the multiplicity of
readers and reader expectations associated with any given workplace text (Ede
& Lunsford, 1984; Pare, 1991 b; Park, 1982). Any analysis of the reading
practices in the workplace is necessarily limited because specification of the
full range of potential readers over time is almost impossible. This fact itself
suggests a significant difference between academic and workplace writing. The
readers of any document in the workplace are both many and indeterminate, in
contrast to the students' readers who are clearly identified and generally
singular. In the workplace, papers are passed up and down the hierarchy (for
collaborative reading/input as well as for action) and potentially consulted at
points distant in time and place, by readers with complex, shifting, and often
unpredictable agendas.
Even the once-solid image of the author has fragmented in the face of
research reports of collaborative authorship, boilerplated texts, and document-
cycling practices (Lunsford & Ede, 1990; Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985;
Smart, 1993 ). Many of the workplace writer's activities would be unlikely,
impossible, or illegal in the school context: writing in pairs or teams, claiming
authorship for text produced by another, appropriating research without attri-
bution, receiving extensive assistance from colleagues, making multiple sub-
missions of similar or identical texts, and so on. Rhetorical intentions, long
considered the author's prerogative, are more accurately located in the work-
place community's collective aspirations and goals. As Bazerman and Paradis
(1991 b) put it, workplace writing is the "textual harnessing of human social
energies to support institutional versions of reality" (p. 6). Though individuals
may appear to control invention, arrangement, and style, most workplace
authors follow a host of implicit and explicit rhetorical rules; successful
compliance marks membership, failure may mean career stagnation or job loss.
In large part, the complexity of workplace writing arises from the subtle
interplay between various, often competing, social motives. In institutions,
there is more than one motive at work, and the motive that becomes promi-
nent-that is, influences all other motives-is the motive of the highest status
social group within the institution. In the chapters that follow, we paint a picture
of that rhetorical conflict and complexity.
 6
THE COMPLEXITY OF
SOCIAL MOTIVE IN
WORKPLACE WRITING
In this chapter, we provide a glimpse into one complex workplace setting in
order to demonstrate the difficulty that newcomers face as they attempt to
make the transition into writing on the job. By describing the position of
writers and texts within the complicated dynamics of human work, we wish
to demonstrate the highly situated, contingent, and ideological nature of
writing. The chapter relies primarily on genre studies for its theoretical basis,
and offers a picture of the intricate and purposeful organization of genres in
an institutional setting. Briefly, our argument is this: workplace genres em-
body and enact ideology; that is, genres both reflect and create the ideas,
interests, and values of those who participate in them and use them for their
particular ends. Although the genres of stable, homogenous institutions may
display a relatively consistent ideology, most contemporary organizations of
any size consist of overlapping communities of practice (COPs) whose genres
embody a variety of ideologies, some in concert, some in conflict. Indeed, as
we hope to demonstrate below, individual genres may serve as sites of
ideological struggle, as different communities within the larger collective seek
to advance their own knowledge, values, and beliefs. As individual newcomers
enter the workplace and participate in a particular community's genres, they
adopt its ideology and join the struggle that is played out through rhetorical
practice.
As we have noted in previous chapters, genres spring from a collective or
social motive, and that motive is the manifestation of ideology: it is the beliefs,
power relations, and aspirations of the community transformed into rhetorical
action. We have argued that the social motive of workplace writing is instru-
mental because its primary aim is to get something done. But because there is
more than one ideology at play in complex organizations and more than one
thing to do, there is more than one social motive.
117
118 CHAPTER6

The workplace setting that is the basis of our analysis in this chapter is a
large, urban hospital for children. In particular, we consider the genres associ-
ated with the hospital's social service department. We locate that department
within the ideological tensions of the larger institution, tensions created by
overlapping, competing COPs, and we consider the multiple social motives that
compete for and in the department's genres.

GENRE: ENACTING SOCIAL MOTIVE

Genre theory has helped delineate patterns in the rhetorical complexity of the
workplace and allowed us to see how COPs (companies, agencies, institutions,
disciplines) organize sociorhetorical rituals in response to socially construed
exigences. Bazerman (1994) offers this explanation of that phenomenon:

Over a period of time individuals perceive homologies in circumstances that

encourage them to see these as occasions for similar kinds of utterances. These
typified utterances, often developing standardized formal features, appear as
ready solutions to similar appearing problems. Eventually the genres sediment
into forms so expected that readers are surprised or even uncooperative if a
standard perception of the situation is not met by an utterance of the expected
form. (p. 82)

Miller ( 1994) makes a similar point about what Bazerman calls "a standard
perception" when she refers to rhetorical exigence as a "form of social knowl-
edge-a mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not
only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need"
(p. 30). It is critical to note that the patterns of similarity that motivate genres
are not so much identified as they are constructed: "Sameness is not a quality
that can be recognized in things themselves; it is conferred upon elements
within a coherent scheme" (Douglas, 1986, p. 59). Genres develop as responses
to what is perceived socially or collectively as sameness in situations. The
coherent scheme that confers the sameness is ideology. And, because they are
conservative forces, genres tend to reify that sameness: they tum the interpre-
tation of similarity into reality. To borrow from Bourdieu's (1972/1977)
definition of habitus, genres, are "structured structures predisposed to function
as structuring structures" (p. 72). Bourdieu' s notion of habitus helps explain
the dialectic relationship between genres and the collective experience of
repeated exigence. According to Hemdl (1996), habitus is "the way of thinking
we inherit from past experience which then makes sense of our current experi-
SOCIAL MOTIVE 119

ence and allows us to act. Furthermore, this habitus is itself continuously

produced by our ongoing activity" (p. 29). Once communities have developed
"a standard perception of the situation," as Bazerman puts it above, a genre is
designed or evolves to respond to the situation and to generate the knowledge
and ways of knowing the community needs to conduct its business. Participa-
tion in these "structuring structures" initiates newcomers into the collective,
into its ways of knowing, learning, and doing. A genre, according to Miller
( 1994), "embodies an aspect of cultural rationality" (p.39), and by participating
in a genre, we learn "what ends we may have" (p.38).
Within large COPs, genres produce specific types of knowing and knowl-
edge and are organized as genre sets: relatively stable collections of repeated
and related texts. Amy Devitt ( 1991 ), discussing tax accounting texts, explains:

These texts ... interact within the community. They form a complex network of
interaction, a structured set of relationships among texts, so that any text is best
understood within the context of other texts. No text is single, as texts refer to
one another, draw from one another, create the purpose for one another. These
texts and their interaction are so integral to the community's work that they
essentially constitute and govern the tax accounting community, defining and
reflecting that community's epistemology and values. (pp. 336-337)

Within multidisciplinary or multiprofessional COPs, such as hospitals, large

corporations, or government departments, genre sets are organized in cross-
community patterns so that rhetorical (and therefore cognitive) activity can be
distributed across the collective. (See chap. 7 for an analysis of the rhetorical
distribution of cognition in a bank.) The genre set of one group is structured
and sequenced so that it will (or can) influence another group at some point:
the initial management proposal leads to the technical viability report, which
leads to a market study, which leads to legal reports and sales brochures, and
so on. Bazerman (1994) calls such chained texts "systems of genres" (p. 79);
in effect, one group of people think and write in a particular way so as to produce
a text that allows another group to think and write a different way. As a result,
texts serve as critical points of interaction between and among institutional
sub-groups. (And, as we demonstrate in chaps. 9 and 10, it is often in multi-
group contexts-hospital rounds, presentations, team meetings-that newcom-
ers begin to learn the organization's discourse conventions and dynamics.)
Fairclough ( 1995), too, speaks of complex organizational intertextuality, and
refers to "the ordered set of discursive practices associated with a particular
social domain or institution" (p. 12), which he calls "ideological-discursive
formations," or IDFs. He argues that IDFs "are ordered in dominance: it is
generally possible to identify a 'dominant' IDF and one or more 'dominated'
120 CHAPTER6

IDFs in a social institution" (p.41 ). Fairclough explains the relationship be-

tween ideology and regular discourse practices thus:

A particular set of discourse conventions (e.g., for conducting medical consult-

ations, or media interviews, or for writing crime reports in newspapers) implicitly
embodies certain ideologies-particular knowledge and beliefs, particular "po-
sitions" for the types of social subject that participate in that practice (e.g.,
doctors, patients, interviewees, newspaper readers), and between categories of
participants (e.g., between doctors and patients). In so far as conventions become
natural and commonsensical, so too do these ideological presuppositions. (p. 94)

Thus, engagement in a genre promotes particular ways of knowing and

acting. To participate in a genre is to assist in the production and reproduction
of an organization's knowledge, power, and culture. As Coe (1994), following
Burke (1957), puts it, "genres embody attitudes. Since those attitudes are built
into the generic structures, they are sometimes danced without conscious
awareness or intent on the part of the individual using the genre" (p. 183 ). Thus,
genres form a principal means of situating the individual's cognitive activity in
the community's overall epistemology and ideology. Genres, Coe says, are
"important factors in the social construction of orientations, paradigms, ideolo-
gies, worldviews and cultural perspectives" (p. 184).
And though genres do change over time, they are by definition somewhat
stable, and their stability promotes a sense of normalcy. Devitt ( 1991) explains:
"The mere existence of an established genre may encourage its continued use,
and hence the continuation of the activities and relations associated with that
genre" (pp. 340-341). This historical force of repetition creates regularity;
sociorhetorical habits become "the way things are done," and the reality they
create becomes the ontological norm. In the process, the origins and underlying
human agency of genres are obscured. Smith (1974) puts it this way: "Socially
organized practices of reporting and recording work upon what actually hap-
pens or has happened to create a reality in documentary form, and though they
are decisive to its character, their traces are not visible in it" (p. 257). Or, as
Fairclough ( 1995) says, "metaphorically speaking, ideology endeavors to cover
its own traces" (p. 44).

A SOCIAL WORK GENRE SET

The complexity of workplace writing and the dynamics of genre are explored
in the analysis that follows, an analysis based on interviews with practitioners,
textual analysis, and observations of activity in the social service department
SOCIAL MOTIVE 121

of a large, children's hospital. During the time at which the data were collected,
the department was in the process of modifying its genre set; changes were
being made to formats and procedures. This disruption of usual writing practice
at the hospital shifted the performance of genre from the workers' subsidiary
awareness to their focal awareness, to use Polanyi's (1958) terms: the genres
became visible rather than remaining transparent. The social and rhetorical
regularities associated with their habitual production of texts were being
revised; as a result, the workers became more conscious of the exigences, the
social motives, their practice served. In addition, the change made it possible
to see some of the attitudes that were being embodied by and embedded in the
revised genre set, attitudes that newcomers would "dance" when they joined
the community.
Patients are referred to the social service department for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes those reasons are relatively benign; for example, parents might need
help finding lodging close to the hospital so they can visit their sick child. More
difficult cases result when families experience the stress of having severely or
terminally ill children, cases sometimes further complicated by cultural differ-
ences between families and hospital personnel. A high proportion of referrals
are made because of suspected or certain physical and sexual abuse.
The hospital social workers are part of a multiprofessional team that includes
nurses, physiotherapists, psychiatrists, medical doctors of all specialties, tech-
nicians, volunteers, and so on. The hospital's director of social work says that
"80 or 90 different people" might have contact with a patient during hospitali-
zation. Many of those people, as well as the patient's family, would have access
to the child's medical chart. The chart is actually a centrally located file kept
on the ward for in-patients and in Medical Records for out-patients. It contains
a variety of texts or "consults" from the specialized groups that constitute the
multiprofessional team. Individual groups maintain their own, separate records
as well, but the chart constitutes a collective archive. In theory, each person
who deals with a patient reads the chart initially and regularly, because it
contains updated medical and psychosocial information. In fact, as suggested
by Fairclough above and as demonstrated below, some texts have higher status
than others, and may be consulted more frequently or granted greater value.
The chart, then, is the physical location at which the hospital's genre sets
overlap and the rhetorical location at which those sets become a system: each
text in the chart can and should be read by every member of the team, and the
collection as a whole represents a unified textual picture of the patient.
According to the director, the "basic rationale" or purpose of social work
records in the chart
122 CHAPTER6

is to document what our professional contribution is to the treatment plan ... so

that other health care professionals can work in consort with us and carry through
the best treatment, the most comprehensive treatment plan possible, for the
patient and/or the family. And so the psychosocial is one piece of the bio-psy-
chosocial plan, to use current lingo, that would enable the other health profes-
sionals to understand what our contribution is.

In the medical chart, social work texts join other "psychosocial" texts
(psychiatric, psychological) and various medical and laboratory texts to form
a bio-psychosocial genre system. Before modifications, the genre set that
documented social work's contribution was supposed to consist of a referral
form that indicated the reason the child had been brought to social work's
attention, an assessment report submitted some time after initial contact with
the child and family, ongoing assessments or progress reports at regular
intervals, and a closing or transfer summary when the case was closed or moved
to another institution. In actual practice, however, there was wide variation in
individual recording formats and procedures. Records, in the director's words,
were

variations on a theme. Some workers didn't record at all, some workers write in
the medical chart [daily notes] and don't write anything else, some workers would
take the referral form and just keep on adding other pages .... they never felt that
there was a format to do the initial assessment ... the complete assessment, and
the closing summary. And social workers are notoriously poor about closing
cases; they just sort of go on and on and on until you never hear from the family
again.

Formats were a mixture of headings and sequences adapted from other

institutions or developed idiosyncratically. According to the director, there was
widespread agreement among her staff, her management team, and the hospital
administration that the genre set needed to be modified, although the arguments
used by each of these groups to support changes were not identical, as we shall
see below. A consideration of the modifications and their justifications gives
some sense of the competing ideologies and the vested interests at play in
institutional texts.

A CASE OF GENERIC ENGINEERING

The basic sequence of the genre set remained the same, but formats were
standardized and composing and submission procedures were regularized.
Each of the four texts was restricted to a single, carbon-backed page and
SOCIAL MOTIVE 123

uniform headings were provided. A green stripe was printed down their
right-hand margin to make the texts readily identifiable in the chart as social
work documents. A blank sheet, also green-edged, was made available in case
a text spilled over its allotted space, although this practice was discouraged.
Workers were strongly encouraged to submit the referral form to the patient's
medical chart immediately and to follow that with the initial assessment as
quickly as possible. It became mandatory to submit a progress report on each
patient every 3 months, a move designed to make workers reassess cases and,
it was hoped, close them more frequently. Regular recording, faster initial
assessments, and scheduled progress reports increased the amount of each
worker's writing, though it discouraged extensive writing on any one case. The
director explained the changes in terms that Aristotle would have approved:
"What we've said is, in every situation there's a beginning, a middle, and an
end," a referral, an assessment, and a closing summary.
Consistency and uniformity might, on the surface, seem like sufficient reason
to revise institutional textual practices and, indeed, most social workers expressed
approval for regular record-keeping procedures. The regulation made it more likely
that they would do the writing they needed and wanted to do, and updated records
made it easier to take on a colleague's case load during holidays or illness. But
genre theory encourages us to look more closely, both at the underlying social
motives that shape genres, and at the influence those genres have in shaping the
life and culture of their institutional settings. And Fairclough's (1995) work in
critical discourse analysis alerts us to the "engineering of change in discursive
practices" (p. 105), which he calls the "technologization of discourse":

Technologization of discourse is a process of intervention in the sphere of

discourse practices with the objective of constructing a new hegemony in the
order of discourse of the institution or organization concerned .... [l]t involves
an attempt to shape a new synthesis between discourse practice, sociocultural
practice and texts. (p. 102)

Genres are both text and context, and altering the regular features of repeated
documents has a ripple effect out to the practices used to create, distribute, and
interpret texts, and to the settings within which those documents operate. To
borrow terms from Activity Theory: altering mediational means affects the
whole activity. Standardizing texts, restricting their length, providing headings,
and regulating submission schedules cannot help but affect generic activities
associated with the text, such as writing and reading processes and the relation-
ships played out in and through the texts (see Pare & Smart, 1994). Moreover,
rhetorical form is heuristic. Form, Coe (1987) argues, is "a motive for generat-
124 CHAPTER6

ing information. Like any heuristic, it motivates a search for information of a

certain type: when the searchers can anticipate what shape of stuff they seek,
generation is less free, but much more efficient; by constraining the search,
form directs attention" (p. 18). Standardized headings construct the categories
under which writers gather and present information. Douglas ( 1986) writes that
"sameness is conferred on the mixed bundle of items that count as members of
a category; their sameness is conferred and fixed by institutions" (p. 53).
Furthermore, limited space reduces and shapes that which is gathered; hasten-
ing text submission times hastens the accompanying practices (interviews,
consultation, reflection, interventions, etc.).The director captured this relation-
ship between form and thought succinctly: "We've made headings that require
people to focus, and focus briefly." One social worker commented on the
influence of headings in the revised text formats:

I find the headings-okay-I find they've made me structure my thoughts, but

I find it difficult at times. I might want to put a lot in one heading, and nothing
in the next.. .. It would have been nice if those headings could be somehow
moveable.

Devitt (1991) suggests that the genre sets employed by tax accountants
"constitute and govern the ... community, defining and reflecting the commu-
nity's epistemology and values" (pp. 336-337); it follows that changes to a
genre set will influence the community's knowledge and beliefs. The original
social motives that inspire genres are often invisible to the newcomer, as are
the constraints on knowing (the epistemology and values) that genres embody
and enact. Because genres so obviously enable completion of workplace tasks,
and because participation in them so clearly marks membership in the commu-
nity, newcomers may be unable or unwilling to question or criticize them.

"ACCOUNTABILITY" AS SOCIAL MOTIVE;

"FOCUS" AS PRACTICE

The multiple ideologies of the hospital produced multiple social motives, which
inspired the genre changes in the hospital. When workers and managers spoke
about these complex and sometimes competing motives, they used the term
"accountability." Likewise, the many immediate and long-term consequences
of the revised genre set were often summarized by the single word "focus": the
genre changes were meant to influence-in fact, alter-the workers' practice,
to sharpen their "focus" in order to make the department, its individual mem-
SOCIAL MOTIVE 125

hers, and its genres more "accountable" to their own and others' motives. Four
broad areas of accountability were apparent; that is, through their texts, the
workers were responsible to four distinct interest groups within the hospital: to
themselves and their colleagues, to management (and, through management, to
the hospital's administration), to the medical team, and to the clients. In each
case, the change in focus imposed by the revised genres changed the workers'
motives and practice.

Accountability to Self and Colleagues

Since early in its emergence as a profession, social work has been aware of the
epistemic potential of writing: the power that written language has to help the
writer make sense of complex information and situations. In the first book on
social work record-keeping, Sheffield ( 1920) said that the social work file is "a
body of personal information conserved with a view to ... establishing the case
worker herself in critical thinking" (pp. 5-6; see also Bristol, 1936). Similar
comments accompany discussions of social work writing up to the present. The
director summarized this function of writing: "[The forms] help the worker to
focus on what it is their role is, to take a look at their own practice." Here "focus"
is self-reflection in the service of improved practice.
In addition, workers wanted greater accountability to each other, and regular
recording habits did that by ensuring that documentation was up to date and
uniform when holidays, transfers, retirements, or illness made it necessary for
one worker to take on some or all of another's case load. As one worker put it,
up-to-date recording is helpful "in case you go out and get hit by a truck,"
because "the person that comes behind you knows what's going on." Inconsis-
tency in recording had meant that some workers had full and detailed records
while others had brief notes or none at all. Overall, in this regard, the workers
appeared pleased with the ways in which the genre change would guarantee
standards in submission and content, but there were some misgivings:

I am not sure whether-I've tried to put myself in other [social workers'] shoes,
and when they pick this [new text] up and read it, do they really know the family?
Or do they have a sense of the family struggles? I don't know.

This double motive of accountability to self and colleagues was captured by

the director: "[the genre change] is in line with focussing what your intervention
is .... if you have to focus it on paper, in the recording, then hopefully you've
focused it in your head, and you've focused it in terms of explaining it to the
126 CHAPTER 6

other team members." "Focus" here suggests accountability to self (reflection)

and to the team. However, although workers agreed with this intention of the
genre change, some were not sure that the new texts and the focus they provided
would encourage the necessary reflection:

[The changes) have taken away a level of dynamic formulation and thinking
about the case ... because it's a more superficial assessment. I have to take
deliberate time to think in a more sophisticated manner about a case, because the
form doesn't demand it. ... I have to take the extra time to conceptualize, because
the piece of paper [form] doesn't demand it on that level.
I find this form that we have does not encourage coherent thought from the point
of view of really looking at a situation: how it began, what's happening, how it's
happening, what's keeping it happening, and how you want to have it changed,
and how the proposed changes could impact upon it. It simply doesn't allow for
that level of thought.

The motive of accountability to each other and to themselves created a subtle

paradox for the workers: regular, brief reporting did produce documentation
for others and serve as a heuristic for personal reflection, but some thought the
"focus" was too tight to allow for a full sense of the "family struggles" or the
"coherent thought" necessary for effective practice. As one worker noted, the
changes had "clinical implications, obviously." Two workers expanded on
these concerns:

[The form] doesn't account for a full, dynamic picture. That's completely left
out of this form. Because I usually ... get a developmental picture of the child, I
get a sense of the family, and where they're coming from. There's nowhere on
this [form] really to write that in.
But if the report doesn't allow you to show the gaps [in your own or others' work
with family], then I don't think you learn very much. It'sju.;t nice and neat. You
want a report that challenges you a little bit. And I find that our system at the
moment has not allowed us to appear vulnerable. It's a nice show, it looks good,
but it's not meaty enough for me, that's my sense.

Accountability to Management and Administration

A key motive to which the genre changes responded was management's

concern with supervision and evaluation. Hospitals are rigidly hierarchical, and
social workers are not among the elite. Social service management fulfilled a
middle role between workers and administration and a liaison role between the
department and other departments. The 11ew genre set provided for ongoing
SOCIAL MOTIVE 127

management and monitoring. As one manager put it, "It's like a tool ... for
supervision: you sort of go back into the handling of a situation, or you go back
into the way in which it's being judged and worked with through the recording."
A worker put a slightly different spin on it: "Big Brother is watching." She went
on:

we are naturally much more accountable, okay, because these green [edged]
forms go to our supervisors, who bring them to their supervisors, who bring them
to the director, who might have to bring them if she's audited ... to the clinical
director or the financial administrator, whatever, to explain why a case is left
open beyond the 3-month mark.

Another social worker saw the genre change as detrimental: "I don't think
it really meets the situation as adequately as the other system, but we have
become very conscientious about accountability and every file has to be
complete, and people are going to check up on it."
Even when they agreed with the change to the genre set, some workers were
rankled by the supervisory implications. One suggested that, "from an admin-
istrative point of view, it's a very valuable innovation." Another lamented:

It worries me, philosophically, this whole thing .... it suggests that things have
to be so tight that people left to their own devices will not be conscientious, will
not do their work. That's the underlying suggestion: that you won't do the work,
if you aren't accountable for it, and if you don't have to write about it all the time.

The pressure to place initial assessments in the chart as soon as possible after
a referral had been made, and the required progress reports every 3 months,
meant more frequent (though less extensive) writing. A worker complained:
"It's physically impossible to do a lot of assessments .... I do a lot of assess-
ments, and I just can't possibly do it. So I downgraded the quality of the
assessments." The exigence of accountability to management caused workers
to focus on their practice-that is, to practice-differently. Managers needed
documentary evidence of worker's efforts for supervisory purposes, of course,
but also to appease their own superiors. Paper work, or the version of work that
gets documented, is the institution's virtual reality. In effect, no text meant no
practice, so managers needed the texts to reflect (and cause) the type of practice
the administration required.
Canadian hospitals are state-funded and, like other government controlled
institutions, desperate to reduce deficits. This financial motive led to close
examination of all hospital units to determine efficiency and effectiveness, as
the administration sought arguments to convince their political masters of the
128 CHAPTER6

need for funds. Failure to meet the administration's standards meant cutbacks.
One of the chief advantages of the genre changes for the director, then, was in
her dealings with administration: "Well, I think [the workers] feel that there's
a lot more accountability because there's a paper to be filled out now. The
squeeze is on for many areas ... and I think this is just one of them. I said very
clearly to them, if you don't have recording, and you haven't done your
statistics, if you get sick, I don't get a replacement for you, because I haven't
got the wherewithal to convince administration."
Some sense of the complexity of this accountability to administration and
its financial motive is captured in this extensive interview excerpt, in which the
director of the social work department explains the link between "productivity"
and recording:

Well, we're constantly being looked at by the administration to justify our

establishment, you know? And we do that in a number of ways. Our productivity,
and the way we can measure our productivity is by the number of families that
we've seen, and you can't pick a number out of a hat. You've got to be able to
document who it was that you've seen, and what it is you've done, and try and
identify from that what are the major issues that we're dealing with in the
department. Because you have nursing, who are into the psychosocial area, you
have psychology, psychiatry, pastoral [religious] counseling, all these other
hybrids .... We had like the big three here originally, you know: psychiatry,
psychology, and social work.... my budget's a million point three, and they're
asking what are they getting for that? And if they're going to cut, are they going
to cut the operating room schedule or, you know, only operate Tuesdays and
Thursdays, or are they going to cut technical staff, lab staff? Are they going to
cut psychosocial staff? ... when I came here, we were 43 positions ... and we're
now down to 22, and the work is more intense, the problems are more serious,
the resources that people have are fewer .... and when administration sees this
array of beauty around the table, they'll say, they did say, "You've got a lot of
workers, and what do you need all those people for?'' And it used to be you could
just say, well, you know, it's very hard on children coming in to be operated on,
or to have these awful procedures. [But they say] "well we're paying others, we
have volunteers to do that, we have nurses to do that, and blah, blah, blah." ...
we're in a competitive market, and if they want to increase the number of
psychologists, they're not going to get a pot of gold to dip into, they're going to
have to make some choices. Do they need fewer social workers, or maybe more
psychologists?

Social work texts-and, as well, associated activities-must demonstrate

cost effectiveness, to use the market's term. They are the visible record and
proof of "productivity." Moreover, it is imperative that the social workers
produce discourse that distinguishes them from others and that contributes
uniquely to the collective enterprise. Institutional documents define cognitive
SOCIAL MOTIVE 129

and rhetorical territory and alert others to the group's presence and purpose. If
psychosocial discourse can be produced by nurses, psychologists, pastoral
animators, or volunteers, why keep a social work department? Social workers
must provide textual accounts of themselves and their work, accounts that
function as distinctive and essential parts of the hospital's genre system by
helping the other disciplines do their work more effectively or by satisfying the
needs of higher status groups. Thus, genres are factors in what Bourdieu
(1984/1993) calls a "linguistic market":

There is a linguistic market whenever someone produces an utterance for

receivers capable of assessing it, evaluating it and setting a price on it .... [The
market] is a particular social situation, more or less official and ritualized, a
particular set of interlocutors, situated at a particular level in the social hierar-
chy-all properties that are perceived and appreciated in an infraconscious way
and unconsciously orient linguistic production. (pp. 79-80)

Clearly, one of the social motives operating under the rubric of "account-
ability" is financial. The hospital is a "competitive market," as the social work
director notes, and funding for social services is diminishing. Changes in the
genre set were designed, in part, to prove and improve productivity, a move
that met with mixed reviews. A psychologist who supervises social workers
sees a positive correlation between financial accountability and professional
activity:

there's much more spotlight on all the professions, and that's a good thing: they're
not private enclaves, they're funded by public funds, and they have to be open
and available and well structured. So [the genre change is] a tightening I think,
too, of how we count activity, productivity.

But others are not so sure. Although acknowledging shrinking budgets and
the need for professional accountability, some workers worry that a "bottom
line" mentality might have negative implications:

But it isn't the form [genre] that's changing, it's the principle behind the form.
Okay, the form itself is a symbol, that's all it is. The reality behind the symbol
is more accountability and higher numbers, and greater turnover, and more
productivity. Not productivity in terms of quality, but in terms of quantity .... I
feel that the sentiment behind the form is to have much more of a turnstile
business going ... you know, I keep hearing the slogans, like "Wake up and smell
the coffee, this is a new age, we're in a depression, we're in a recession." ... In
the financing of social programs ... there is a very short term view.
130 CHAPTER6

It was widely accepted that demanding a progress report every 3 months

would encourage workers to reevaluate their cases. When workers carry a heavy
load of unnecessary or dormant cases, it is difficult to assign new ones. A
legislated, regular review of each case would, in theory, result in "closings," or
case terminations. As the director said, "the forms will require them, will make
it incumbent on them, to rethink ... keeping cases open." The new "focus"
would encourage changes in practice. Again, workers were divided on this
change in the genre's motive: "If there are malingerers in either the user field
or the social work field, then we have to try to get motivated and get through
that, because the public isn't as tolerant at spending vast sums of money for
little result, you know?" But the same worker saw a darker side: "I hope it
doesn't make me more impatient with clients .... this could be a very negative
thing where you start ... whipping [your] clients into improving faster."
These multiple, overlapping, and subtle exigences-accountability to them-
selves and each other, to their managers, to the administration-operated as one
constellation of motives and placed writers and texts in a particular network of
interests and activities. The changes to generic forms and activities brought the
social workers' practice in line with the needs of those above them in the
institutional hierarchy. In an institution dedicated solely to social services, with
a single genre set, the managerial and administrative network might constitute
most of the workers' universe of discourse, but another set of exigences grew
from the social workers' collaboration with other members of their multipro-
fessional team, in particular the medical personnel.

Accountability to Medicine
Social work genres in a hospital must produce activities, including texts, that
support the efforts of the medical staff. It was widely agreed that the doctors and
nurses were not reading social work records before the genre changes, because
they were too long. Narrative is often considered an occupational hazard of social
work; when you deal in people's lives, stories are what you get. The changes
were designed to correct that situation. As the director said, "we don't want
biographical information ad nauseam." Nor do doctors or nurses want the
"balderdash" or "psychobabble" found in social work's traditional "psychody-
namic interpretations," because they are too long and technical and "have no
business in a medical chart." She summed up social work's position:

And I think that's an important thing: this is a medical chart that we're writing
in. We're invited to give our opinion. We should give it and thank them .... More
than that, I don't think is expected.
SOCIAL MOTIVE 131

As with other areas of accountability, workers were not always in agreement

with managers on this question of responding to the social motives of medicine.
The speed at which the medical staff worked, and the resulting need for brevity
in record-keeping, alarmed some writers: "I find ... that in talking to medical
people, especially now when everybody's so pressed, that ifl can't give it to
them in 25 words or less, then they tune out." Social work discourse, if such an
independent discourse can be said to exist, frequently occurs in conjunction
with, and at the service of, other more powerful discourses: legal, psychologi-
cal, medical, bureaucratic (Pare, 1993; in press). For many, this service to
medicine represented a conflict of interests, as these workers explain:

I find the new recording system is useful for a doctor who may be ready to
discharge someone. It's useful for the organization. I don't find it useful for social
workers. So, so I guess I kind of feel like I do the hospital recording for the
hospital; that helps the doctors clear the bed or make appropriate discharge
plans .... I feel that my role is much more than that, and I require extra things,
and it's almost like the recording doesn't fit into that.

*****
We have the chart, and that's very much medically-based; and I find for social
work purposes, there are things that I like to have a record of that I don't believe
should be in the chart. So I do the recording, but it's almost like something I have
to do that's not central to my work.
*****
We have a policy in this hospital that we just have one chart, and it's the medical
chart. So it means that if a social worker is careful about what they put in the
chart, which they should be, in fact there is nothing there of value to me.

The social motive of accountability to medicine shaped particular texts, texts

that were brief and helpful to doctors. As members of a department of social
work in a hospital, the workers recognized the inevitability of this focus, but
they struggled with the loss of their own discourse and the practice it promoted.
The alternative, however, was a form of invisibility and eventual extinction; to
coin a phrase, better read than dead.

Accountability to Clients
A fourth broad area of accountability was created by the social workers'
responsibility to their clients. Access to information laws have made it possible
for clients to read their files, thus creating a considerably altered rhetorical
situation. Increasingly, client access to documentation has created pressure in
132 CHAPTER6

social work to write to and for clients, rather than just about them. The director
of social work explained:

The influence of clients having access to records I think has been good for the
profession in terms of making them look again at what they have written, and
how other people perceive it. ... you can come to a mutual understanding with
your client and use it [text] as a tool to have the client say, "Well, where are we
at this point?" [And you can say,] "Do you agree with this or not? And how do
you want to change it?" There has been a reluctance on social work's part as a
profession to do that. I think we're moving into that much more; the people have
a right to know what's being written about them.

On the one hand, this move to include clients as readers has clinical justification:
recording becomes part of practice, rather than external to or postpractice.
Using the text as a clinical tool allows both worker and client to "focus" on
interpretations and interventions that previously had remained covert. On the
other hand, greater access to records has increased the threat of legal action.
The director again:

At the same time that people have access, there are many more places where they
can complain. And so you have to sort ofride a middle ground that you protect
yourself as a professional from litigation.

In virtually all social work writing, questions oflaw create a tension between
too much and too little, between the need for rich detail and the fear of legal
consequences. Consider the dilemma faced by this worker, who must weigh
the value of recording a client's extreme anger against the possible legal
ramifications:

I've had a parent tell me that he wanted to kill his wife he was so mad at her. He
didn't mean that, but I can imagine what would have happened ifl had put that
on the chart, and then this chart was subpoenaed to court. Because some of us
have been subpoenaed in family battles, and you have to be so careful.

The imposed brevity of the genre changes made it possible to be "careful"

about reporting, and thus avoid legal complications. However, that tighter focus
was welcomed by the workers for another reason as well:

Okay, parents bring a child to the hospital because that child is sick. And so our
responsibility is to help them adapt to the situation of the sick child and the impact
on their family. Not because they, the parents, want to be fixed up, which in the
past there seemed to be a heavy emphasis on. And so I think it helps us focus
better, and to respect that family's need for privacy, unless issues impact in the
SOCIAL MOTIVE 133

care of the child .... there's absolutely no question in my mind that it keeps us
better focused.

*****
I think also, many times, that we misjudge parents because we're seeing them in
situations of crisis, where ... nothing is right with the world, their world is upside
down, and their behavior sometimes is a response to what's happening to their
child. And I think that this [form] helps you focus on that.

Here the "focus" is determined by confidentiality, by how and how much

one needs to write (and think) about the child and family in order for the
collective to do its work effectively. The rich and detailed narrative of previous
recording, so helpful to the self as a heuristic and to others as "a full, dynamic
picture" of the family, becomes here an intrusion into the clients' private lives,
and the genre changes imposed a limit to that intrusion; in effect, the changes
constrained practice.
However, as with all of the other social motives that shaped the new genres,
there were subtle contextual variations in this exigence of accountability to
clients. One worker, whose specific area of concern was the Inuit in Canada's
far north, offered a compelling argument for abundant information:

I've made decisions that have been, you know, placing a child in the south is a
major, major thing .... Itend to overwrite, usually, and I make sure I send [records]
up north; every step of the way I let the north know about it. Partly to protect
myself, because the decision making is made up north, partly to reinforce that
it's their responsibility to make decisions. It's also to train the Inuit workers,
show them how I'm thinking .... And they have requested that, too, that they want
to see what, what we think, what we write. And then I guess some of these kids
one day may wonder, "Well, why did that happen to me?" And I want there to
be records. And I want them to see where we were all headed and what the
arguments were.

Like many statements made by the social workers, this last one points to the
rhetorical complexity of these genres and to the competing social motives that
struggle in and through them. It also indicates the rhetorical sophistication of
participants in the genres. This worker resisted the administrative, financial,
legal, and medical interests that sought brief accountability, in favor of a more
detailed account that exposed her own thinking and the institutional forces that
created an individual's life story. But the conflict between social work's
professional social motives and the bureaucratic, medical, and other social
motives at play in this workplace creates a tension that a newcomer would find
hard to resist (or even to recognize as such).
134 CHAPTER6

In this chapter, we have offered a picture of the complexity of workplace

writing, of the intricate sociorhetorical activity in human endeavor. The situat-
edness of workplace texts-their inextricable relationship to particular ideolo-
gies, settings, times, people, other texts, and activities-renders arhetorical (or
under-rhetorical) any academic attempt to replicate them, no matter how
sophisticated or elaborate the sl.mulation, case study, or role play. Genre theory
predicts, and our research confirms, the presence of highly structured textual
rituals and patterns in the workplace, but those genres are inseparable from their
context. So, although it might well be possible and even desirable to show
students copies of workplace texts, and to have practitioners talk to students
about their participation in those texts, the lived experience of texts is impos-
sible outside of their enactment.
 7
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
AT WORK
As we have seen in chapter 2, distributed cognition is one term that is used in
that nexus of notions arising from the literature on situated cognition, activity
theory, and socially-shared cognition. These are overlapping notions emerging
from the same paradigm; however, at this point it is useful to separate out the
notion of distributed cognition, and to probe it as a way of differentiating what
happens in the classroom from what happens in the workplace. Specifically,
this term highlights the degree to which, within specific activities, knowing
and/or learning and/or thinking are often distributed among co-participants, as
well as mediated through the cultural artifacts available-artifacts which
include semiotic, technological, and organizational structures: the process is
dynamic and interactive, within a delicate, subtle, constant interplay among
participants and means as they operate in tandem (although often with friction)
toward the object of the activity.

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION DEFINED

As Salomon (1993) points out, the notion of distributed cognition is distinct

from the sense in which cognition is conceived in conventional cognitive
theories:

Traditionally, the study of cognitive processes, cognitive development, and the

cultivation of educationally desirable skills and competencies has treated every-
thing cognitive as being possessed and residing in the heads of individuals:
social, cultural and technological factors have been relegated to the role of
backdrops or external sources of stimulation. (p. xii)

In contrast, theorists and researchers working within the paradigm of situated

learning and practical cognition recognized that "people appear to think in
conjunction or partnership with others and with the help of culturally provided
135
136 CHAPTER 7

tools and implements" (p. xiii). Salomon points out that, in this more recent
work, "the social and artifactual surrounds alleged to be 'outside' the individu-
als' heads [are understood to be] not only sources of stimulation and guidance
but ... actually vehicles of thought" (p. xiii). Furthermore, as he explains, "the
arrangements, functions, and structures of these surrounds change in the process
to become genuine parts ofthe learning that results from the cognitive partner-
ships with them" (p. xiii, all emphases in original).
Salomon stresses the fact that distributed cognition is not the same as division
oflabor; nor is it the same as "mutual stimulation" (p. xv). Instead, as Cole and
Engestrom ( 1993) argue, distributed cognition takes socially mediated activity
in cultural contexts as the appropriate psychological unit of analysis. In their
words: "The combination of goals, tools, and setting (or perhaps 'arena,' in
Lave's, 1988, terminology) constitutes simultaneously the context ofbehavior
and the ways in which cognition can be said to be distributed in that context"
(p. 13).
The activity, the distribution, and the interplay are dynamic: "the continu-
ously negotiated distribution of tasks, powers, and responsibilities among the
participants ofthe activity system" (Cole & Engestrom, 1993, p. 7).

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION AT THE UNIVERSITY

In this chapter we focus on one particular workplace, a governmental financial

agency, the Bank of Canada (BOC), and use the notion of distributed cognition
to frame and understand our observations; however, we preface our analysis of
the BOC with a brief account of how distributed cognition applies to the
university. We hope thereby not only to define the concept in a familiar context,
but also to discover from this particular perspective how the university and
workplace compare as sites for writing.
If we perceive the university's primary purpose as to accredit or to rank
students, it is clear that the cognition involved in such functions is distributed
throughout the university. Each instructor's role is to know (inspect, rank) their
students according to the culturally mediated systems available (e.g., A, B, C,
D, FNS, INC, DEF). The final grade is based on the professor's and/or grader's
inspection of the students from this perspective on the basis of class perform-
ance, exams, and papers.
The grade for each course is reviewed and signed by the appropriate
authorities (which vary by institutions), and then the grades for each student
are amassed at some central registrarial office, where the student's performance
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 137

as a whole is monitored, and assessed according to institutional regulations

concerning progress: for example, number of courses required for specific
degrees, grades required for honors, et cetera.
Finally, as a result of a review of the records-typically performed in
departments by faculty as well as in registration offices (often monitored by
grievance and appeal committees), the president of the university officially
gives the student the diploma accrediting a certain kind of performance.
Different players all contribute to this analysis of the students' performance
over the school years. Note that there is a complex interplay among actors,
technology, and recording systems; that there can be variation by institution;
that grievances are possible; and that subversion too is possible-for example
when a professor decides to grant a de facto deferral (in contexts where that is
not allowed) by handing in an estimated grade and then allowing a student to
hand in a paper late and submitting a change of grade form if there is a
discrepancy between the estimate and the actual grade. All of this is maintained
through genres of records and documents, which establish and maintain certain
kinds of social interrelations and define the ways in which students are to be
classified and "known."
However, the distribution of cognition throughout the educational institution
of the university as a whole is of a very different kind from that which occurs
in the classroom where the term distributed cognition is better replaced by the
term socially shared knowledge. In the classroom, the teacher possesses knowl-
edge-some of which she intends to "share" with the students, in the sense of
enabling them to hold it in common with her. In fact, a goal of the class is
precisely the sharing of this knowledge; and the inspection and ranking of the
students takes place with respect to their ability to display their acquisition of
this knowledge. (Of course, this is not to deny that, as in most communities of
practice, teachers may learn as well-especially with respect to their craft of
teaching-and that learners may learn something else that is not known by the
teacher and incidental to the purported objective of the classroom.)

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
IN THE WORLD OF WORK

As described earlier (chap. 2), Hutchins (1993) uses the notion of distributed
cognition to describe and explain the management of the navigation of a ship.
This analogy, in its concreteness, provides a powerful way of understanding
and explaining what happened in the various institutions we observed. We
138 CHAPTER 7

begin our discussion by pointing to the comparison between the concrete

activity of navigation and institutional activities in the Bank of Canada (BOC).

Navigating a Ship and Managing Economic Policy

Just as in the ship that Hutchins (1993) described, the activity undertaken in the
BOC draws on the efforts of many participants-with different tasks assigned
to each, but all involved in and focused on the single objective of moving
forward toward a clearly defmed goal. On the ship, the focus is on reaching a
specific geographic, physical location. In the BOC, the goal is the achievement
of national economic well-being through price stability. (See specifics below.)
In both cases, there are one or two people at the helm who take direct and
final responsibility for decision making. At the same time, though, and this is
a point we wish to stress, all kinds of important judgments are constantly being
made at lower levels of the hierarchy, and these judgments are funneled up
through intermediate layers to the person(s) at the top. At the BOC, the person
at the helm is the Governor; aboard the ship, it is the captain.
In both cases, there are constant calculations being made at all levels to
answer the questions specified by Hutchins (1993): "Where are we? and If we
proceed in a certain way for a specified time, where will we be?" (p.39). Both
the ship and the financial agency map their progress using charts and graphs.
Hutchins points out that the maps used in navigation look more like coordinate
charts in geometry rather than like maps in an atlas; this is true as well of the
mathematical models and graphs guiding the progress of the BOC.
As suggested above, in both instances there is a clear movement forward
toward a goal. For the ship, the goal is its physical destination. At the BOC, that
goal has been defmed very specifically in recent years as price stability or low
inflation. 13 In reaching their respective goals, both the ship and the BOC must
pay constant attention to a host of external variables, many of them outside their
control: winds, currents, other ships on the one hand; world financial markets,
political uncertainties, market interpretations, on the other.
In both situations, there is considerable "overlap" (Hutchins, 1993) in the
knowledge among the players-partly because players often move up the
hierarchy, and partly because internal structures are established in such a way

13 This policy is not without its critics. Indeed, the BOC's focus on controlling inflation as the

primary goal of monetary policy has been questioned by some academics and financial journalists.
In fact, the initial formulation of the policy came about as a result of considerable internal discussion
(conducted extensively through writing, as is suggested later), and justification of the policy recurs
in many of the externally oriented genres, as our analysis ofBOC speeches will suggest.
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 139

that information is interpreted and reinterpreted by different groups. Errors are

more easily caught because of this overlap: more senior people often have an
intuition that something does not feel quite right in the analysis of data that is
being given to them-on the basis of their own work in the area earlier in their
careers. ("The management of the Bank is composed largely of professional
economists, most of whom have a long Bank history" [Duguay & Longworth,
1997, p. 1].) The overlap in knowledge and the possibility of reflexiveness
contribute to the robustness of the decision making.

Contrast with Ship Navigation

Of course, the situations also differ in some basic ways, and the differences too
are instructive. Navigating a ship, for example, is largely based on interpreting
physical realities, whereas, to a large extent, the world navigated by the BOC
is socially constructed in particularly complex ways. For example, central
bankers must continually monitor external market developments, which are
themselves being interpreted and constructed by traders and investors in the
light of hunches or instincts-that is, interpretative strategies that are not
necessarily consistent with those of, or even fully understood by, central
bankers.
Although it is true that the decisions of the BOC have material outcomes, as
the public and the media are quick to point out, nonetheless, the world in which
the BOC operates is far more textually constructed than that of ship navigation.
It can be argued that the very notion of an economy is an intersubjective reality
established through discursive practices, as Brown (1993) contends: "The 'real
economy' is not knowable as a direct or brute fact of existence independently
of its discursive construction. The 'economy' is represented as an object of
analysis by a set of discourses which constitute it as such" (p. 70).
In the end, the destination of a ship is fixed: the port of Montreal can be
counted on to remain at a certain fixed longitudinal and latitudinal position. In
contrast, whereas the overall aim of the BOC-to guide monetary policy-re-
mains the same, the precise specification of that objective is socially con-
structed. Indeed, the issue of price stability has been subject to considerable
debate within a range of discursive venues-the press, Parliament, and the BOC
itself.
In addition, unlike navigation, where most of the operations are fairly
routinized so that the cognitive load for each individual is quite minimal, the
economists at the BOC, from the most junior level, engage in sophisticated acts
of interpretation. At each juncture, they must-either jointly or severally-pro-
140 CHAPTER 7

duce extended pieces of reasoning. They do not simply record, for example,
navigation points, but instead analyze in considerable depth, using complicated
instruments of analysis, the significance of data transmitted to them. These
analyses, as we shall see, are presented textually according to the expectations
of genres specific to the BOC (which are themselves part of interlinking chains
of other genres in the larger sphere of public policy), and involve complex
extended trains of reasoning expressed in mathematical and verbal symbolic
systems.
Indeed, the traditions of navigation that Hutchins refers to in his analysis are
nearly all embodied for the BOC in the form of genres (primarily verbal, often
accompanied by tables sometimes involving numbers within their verbal syn-
tax, and in the most technical pieces, equations); it is such genres that newcom-
ers to the BOC must learn to acquire as an essential part of the enculturation,
even as they learn that new and changing circumstances will inevitably entail
adjustments to these genres.

Distributed Cognition at the BOC

The following paragraphs flesh out more fully the nature of the distributed
cognition that takes place at the BOC, pointing especially to an important
difference between navigating a ship and conducting financial affairs: that is,
the place of writing in the BOC, as the prime site for the distribution of
cognition, where knowledge is both shared in the sense of communicated and
collaboratively created. It is through complex webs of discursive interactions
and, in particular, genres, that the cognition of the BOC is accomplished
distributively.
The activity of the BOC is shaped by its primary role. This function has
traditionally been described broadly as one of conducting the country's mone-
tary policy. The Governor of the BOC, Gordon Thiessen, described the BOC's
goal to a radio audience as follows: the Bank's main purpose is to "make
[everyone's economic] life better through getting inflation down" (April 199 5,
interview with Peter Gzowski, Morningside, CBC).
In order to achieve this larger purpose, that is, "the gradual elimination of
inflation" (Duguay & Poloz, 1994, p. 196), the BOC has developed a highly
regularized and carefully orchestrated sequence of communal actions over the
course of the year, each enacted through cycles of genre production. These
communal actions include forecasting and projecting future trends; analyzing
incoming economic data; monitoring the projections regularly in the light of
incoming data; and, on these bases, determining short-term and long-term
policy. Here is how the annual cycle is described in a public document:
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 141

The Bank staff prepares economic projections of varying levels of detail through
an annual cycle. The cycle consists of semi-annual medium-term projections,
which focus on a 6-7 year horizon; two quarterly short-term updates between
medium-term exercises with a horizon of 7-9 quarters, mid-quarter reassess-
ments between each of the formal projection exercises, with a near-term focus
of2-3 quarters, and weekly updates based on newly-released data. (Duguay &
Poloz, 1994,pp. 192-193)

Significantly, each communal exercise described above involves the collabo-

rative production of specific and distinctive genres, that are so recognized and
identified by all the participants. These include formal and public documents,
such as The Annual Report and The Monetary Policy Report; formal and
elaborately produced internal documents, involving projections 14 for the future
(for example, the StaffEconomic Projection commonly referred to as the White
Book, along with the mid-quarter reassessments, The Inter-Quarter Information
Package); and the genres entailed in the monitoring necessary for the Tuesday
and Friday morning meetings (analytic notes and briefings). Table 7.1 sets out
these different genres, their social actions, and readerships.
In turn, these genres are linked to related generic meetings, often with
designated names. For example, the following generic meetings are associated
with the projection exercise: "The Issues Meeting"; "The Starting-Point Meet-
ing"; "The Projection Round Meeting"; and so on. (See Smart, 1998.) Written
genres thus co-ordinate much of the work of the BOC's economists and the
nature of their interactions over extended periods of time.
At the same time, the collaboration involved in the production of these
genres is a collaboration that extends outside the BOC to include the commu-
nity of central bankers, in general, and of contemporary economic thinkers.
Interpretations at the Bank are tacitly shaped by what Fleck (1935/1979; see
also Douglas, 1986) called thought styles: hence, the recurrence of certain
lexical phrases (which represent categories of experience) and argumentative
warrants. There is an emphasis on productivity and growth; the underlying
paradigm is one in which general well-being is equated with economic
well-being, and where the individual is understood to act in terms of rational
self-interest.
There are also other characteristic modes of argumentation. The presentation
of alternative scenarios, for example, so common in many documents (for
example, the Staff Economic Projections), reveals another facet of the thought

14 A projection in the BOC, as on a ship, is more than a prediction or forecast. It includes some

forecasting of outside events, but it also specifies the actions that the BOC will have to undertake,
in the light of the outside constraints, to achieve its monetary goals.
142 CHAPTER 7

TABLE 7.1
Bank of Canada Genres*

Genres Social Action Readership

Annual Report both account for policy external or public
& Monetary Policy Report decisions in context of world &
national economic events
White Book both "enable" and record internal
"projection exercise"
Analytic Notes, Briefings both monitor economic events internal
& projections on weekly basis

*These are only some of the genres observed at the Bank of Canada, specifically those that are referred
to in this chapter.

style shared by economists. Here we see an instantiation of the paradoxical

commitment of economists to scientific modeling, on the one hand, along with
an awareness of the indeterminate world of human actions and market forces,
on the other. As a result, there is everywhere evidence of a mode of thinking
that continually considers alternative eventualities. (Hence Truman's famous
plea for a one-handed economist.) The White Book almost always includes
alternative scenarios in its projections. And indeed, even when a specific
scenario is being presented, a negotiation between conflicting perspectives is
often presented. Here is an example: "X has happened. This may reflect ... ;
Alternatively, it may reflect ... The Staff chose an intermediate stance in
that. ... "
Modes of thinking, approaches to data, and categorizations of experience
are reified and institutionalized within the genres of the BOC. The genres
function consequently as repositories of communal knowledge, devices for
generating new knowledge, sites for enculturation, and forces to be resisted if
and when change becomes necessary.

Decision Making:
From Data to Policy Through Interweaving Genres

Overall, decision making at the BOC entails a complex, highly interactive

process of distributed cognition, in which many layers of analysts and analysis
are involved. One way of showing how the complicated process of policy
making is enacted and communicated is by starting with the most basic regular
analyses and tracking the weekly process. Of course, as suggested in the
preceding section, the weekly actions take place in the context of the annual
cycle (as described above by Duguay & Poloz, 1994)-a process that involves
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 143

long-term goal setting, regular projections, and constant monitoring with

respect to those projections. Nevertheless, there is a weekly process, and tracing
it is instructive.
As cited above, a major goal of the BOC is to keep inflation low; its tool in
doing so, as the Governor explained, is raising and lowering interest rates. Every
week then, analysts in each of the main divisions of the BOC, each with its own
specialty, look at the economic data provided largely by Statistics Canada with
respect to their area. The data themselves are neither collected by the BOC, nor
held in secrecy for the BOC. When asked in a radio interview, "Do you have
sources of information that are not available to the rest of us," the Governor
replied: "No. What I probably have in the Bank is a lot of very good analysts
who can judge ... how things are going to tum out."
This is crucial. What the Governor, and the BOC, depend on is the interpre-
tation and analysis of junior-level economists, whose interpretations and analy-
ses are filtered through to the top-through various layers of further
interpretation, synthesis, and evaluation by more senior analysts. (This is
reminiscent of Latour & Woolgar's, 1986 notion of inscription.) The whole
process will be described below, but a digression is necessary to describe the
BOC's major instrument of analysis: the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM).
QPM, as it is commonly referred to at the BOC, consists of a series of
equations intended to represent the economy. The model was developed within
the BOC over an extended period of time (based, of course, on standard
econometric techniques and widely accepted economic notions), and represents
consequently a repository of the staffs cumulative understanding of the work-
ings of the economy.
QPM is computer-run and was collectively produced. (See Duguay &
Longworth, 1997, for a discussion of the internal development of this
model.) As such, it is a classic example of the meshing of tool and symbolic
system that Engestrom (1997) points to in his pun on collective "instrumen-
tality." Especially interesting is the degree to which this "mentality" was
and continues to be achieved and expressed through interweaving genres.
Thus, the development of QPM, to replace an earlier model, was achieved
through a series of genres, each appropriate to the different stages of
development, occasions, and audiences: first, explanatory notes distributed
among the model-builders; then, persuasive internal memos to the senior
executives; and finally informative external papers, each at differing levels
of technical sophistication.
Furthermore, the model continues to be subject to constant monitoring and
revision as necessitated by changing circumstances-with the same kinds of
144 CHAPTER 7

explanatory, persuasive, and informative genres at work, geared both to com-

municating and to reshaping the model. (Many of our BOC informants attested
to the creative and constructive power of formulating notions in written
language.) On the basis of QPM, overlaid by the judgments of specialists, an
overall projection of the major economic variables is made quarterly in the
White Books referred to earlier, and the components are updated periodically
within the quarter (in the Inter-Projection Information Packages) on the basis
of incoming information.
To return to the weekly process, what happens, from the perspective of
an outside observer, is the following. As the Governor pointed out, infor-
mation is conveyed to the BOC regularly from Statistics Canada (the
government's data-gathering bureau) and other sources, with the data or-
ganized in tabular form. Table 7.2 shows a typical example of a text from
Statistics Canada
Although everyone at the BOC has access to this newly released data
(sometimes by electronic mail for new daily bits of information and, at regular
periods, in hard-copy volumes for more global and comprehensive statistics),
it is the staff economists responsible for each sector of the economy (e.g.,
housing, investment, consumption, government spending, etc.) who read it
and analyze it. Their analysis consists of interpreting the data and especially
of comparing the actual incoming data (the numbers, in this case) with the
projections that had been made earlier by staff economists, based on the
quarterly projection exercise described above. In other words, the data are
compared to what would have been the case had the projection been correct
in its forecasting. This analysis takes the form of"analytic notes."

TABLE 7.2
Consumer Price Index
]an-Feb Feb-Feb
unadjusted
%chan e
All-items 0.1 2.2
1.Food 0.2 2.4
2. Shelter -0.1 0.3
3. Household Operations, Furnishings 0.0 1.6
4. Clothing 1 .1 -0.3
5. Transportation -0.1 5.3
6. Health & personal care 0.4 1.5

Note. This is a truncated version of the actual table.

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 145

These analytic notes involve comparisons that are frequently presented in

tabular form, but always with an accompanying prose explanation, pointing to
and interpreting any changes and especially disparities between the actual and
projected figures. Such disparities occur with regularity, and a major function
of the analytic notes is to identify them, to contextualize them, and to suggest
possible revisions to the projections on their basis.
These explanations accompany whatever tables are presented and always
appear in prose form: there may be numbers, but the numbers are subsumed in
a verbal syntax. Here are some sentences taken from an analytic note (our
explanations are presented in square brackets):

• According to X, total Y rose 10.3% in March to attain a level of __ units

... This represents the highest level of monthly sales since .... [Here, the
data is being interpreted in the light of other data sources.]
• Final Y estimates for February from Statscan [Statistics Canada] were
roughly in line with preliminary X estimates with a very small downward
revision [i.e., to the projection].
• This strong growth in which sales (first indicated in Z) represents a
positive surprise ["surprise" is a heavily laden word at the BOC, suggest-
ing that results are inconsistent with QPM predictions]. As a result, the
monitoring for consumption growth for __ has been revised up to x%
from y% ....

In the BOC's parlance, these interpretations are "stories" (see Smart, 1985).
It is a commonplace in the BOC that what is expected in writing (and in oral
presentations based on written analyses) is more than elevator economics: that
is, this went up and this went down. There must always be interpretation,
analysis, comparison with forecasts, and possibly suggestions for revision to
these forecasts. This first layer of interpretation is enacted by staff economists,
who are sometimes technically more expert than members of the executive staff
and certainly more conversant with the data in their specifically designated
sectors of the economy. These interpretations offairly specific fields, the genres
of the staff economists (the analytic notes), however, are reanalyzed by mid-
dle-level executives, the department chiefs, in weekly briefings to senior
executives (i.e., members of the management committee). The genre of the
briefing involves verbal discourse and charts, and entails BOC "storytelling"
at higher levels of generalization. At this level, what is expected is an interpre-
tation of all the incoming economic data, particularly in the light of the most
recent projection exercise.
146 CHAPTER 7

For their part, executive members of the management committee examine

the sifted and interpreted data that are reported to them in the briefings,
reinterpreting what they receive in the light of the following:

• their understanding of, and experience with, the projection exercise;

• their own economic intuitions based on past experience: sometimes they
sense that interpretations of certain data cannot be right, based on their
own extensive experience;
• their own independent knowledge of information that is unavailable to the
staff economists.

The staff economists may make certain assumptions, for example, about
another country's current financial policies, while the executive committee may
have more recent information that might cast these interpretations into doubt.
"It should be noted that staff projections are only one input into the policy
discussions of senior management. Other inputs would include independent
private-sector forecasts, views obtained directly from outside contacts, and
conditions in financial and foreign exchange markets" (Duguay & Poloz 1994,
pp. 195-196).
Finally, a judgment is made by the management committee as to policy with
respect to the short-term interest rates, on the basis of a discussion following
the briefings made by different department chiefs. Until recently, this outcome
was delivered in a standardized press format (which was presented orally on
radio and TV, and in written form, in the press).
All in all, then, the BOC thinks and distributes its cognition through sets of
genres, each with its expected form. The original bases of analysis are the data
sets distributed by Statistics Canada and other data-gathering sources. These
are interpreted, sometimes individually and sometimes collaboratively, by
specialists in the particular area of interest in the first instance (as mediated by
the internally produced artifact, QPM), and the analyses are expressed in
familiar forms: analytic notes, which involve comparative tables plus brief
prose interpretations. These notes are collected, compared, and reinterpreted
by department chiefs, with the knowing similarly enacted through the genre of
the briefing. Each layer of interpretation involves fewer tables, and more prose;
the final genre, the press release, is almost entirely prose, with the exception of
the actual figure announced.
In addition, there are other genres, more public in character, which are
closely connected to these genres and this work. An example is the "Bank
speech." Speeches are written documents that are read aloud-after going
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 147

through several iterative rounds of writing and revising, involving economists

and managers at all levels of the hierarchy. The revising is extensive, and there
is extreme sensitivity to the potential import of every possible nuance in the
phrasing.
Ultimately, the speeches draw on the primary interpretations of the most
junior staff economists as well as the weekly briefings and policy recom-
mendations of department chiefs, but the material is presented at a much
higher level of generality, and with far less reliance on technical language
or mathematical evidence. Numbers are introduced sparingly, and tables
disappear.
An important feature of the typical speech is its opening, which inevitably
involves a few paragraphs outlining the basic goal of BOC: price stability.
Indeed, part of the social action implicit in each speech is to persuade the public
at large of the continued value of a policy oriented towards low inflation. Such
discussions of course rarely appear in internal documents, because the values
oflow inflation and price stability have become, at least for the moment, shared
norms in the institution.
The goal of the speeches is to explain monetary policy in a way accessible
to lay people, with little technical knowledge. As suggested above, the "story"
is presented at a much higher level of generalization, but is consistent with all
the information and analysis that has been passed on. Most speeches review
past economic trends (especially interest rates and exchange rates) and recent
economic developments, then look forward to general trends in the economy
especially with respect to inflation. Speeches never project or forecast interest
rates and exchange rates, and there is great sensitivity to and concern about
possible "entrail-readings," the fact that public pronouncements by the BOC
are inevitably probed for possible hints as to the BOC's future actions-probed
both by those reporting on, and especially by those acting in, the markets. (Note
that this is in contrast to internal briefing notes and the Staff Economic
Projection or White Book, where there is a great deal of what is called "forward
looking" in the BOC; that is, an attempt to forecast what might happen if the
BOC were to act in specific ways.)
To sum up, we have here an activity that involves the interaction of many
players, in which each plays a slightly different role. The activity is mediated
through a socially constructed tool of analysis (the QPM), which is itself always
being readjusted in the dynamic process of interpreting and reinterpreting
incoming data. The people at the helm make final decisions based on some
knowledge that they are privy to themselves, as well as on intuitions formed
within the traditions of central banking, but also initially framed through the
148 CHAPTER 7

various interpretation and reinterpretations offered by the set of genres consti-

tuting the staff projections. Of particular interest to our work is the role of verbal
discourse in the distribution of cognition-especially in the form of sets of
interweaving genres that are not just the media and shaping agents for the
interpretation but also, as we shall see, the sites both for social sharing and
communal creation as well as the sites for identifying and negotiating internal
contradictions.
From the perspective of distributed cognition, then, how close or far apart
are the worlds of university and of work?

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION AT UNIVERSITY

AND AT WORK COMPARED

The convention, the tacit assumption of schooling, is that the teacher "knows"
and that what she "knows" will be "learned" by the student-just as the
convention of, say, therapeutic work is that the therapist "understands" and that,
as a result of her interaction with the therapist, the client will gain some of this
understanding.
But note that we are now talking about a different kind of social sharing than
that which is at play in the institutions analyzed before. To encourage students
to take on the same stance-to share some of the same knowledge-as the
instructor is not the same as having them contribute to the work of the institution
in the way that employees at the various institutions do. To put it simply, the
captain needs the information provided by his most subordinate navigator. The
Governor of the BOC needs the lowliest analyst's report. The professor,
however, does not need any specific student's essay in the same way. A student
who does not hand in his work does not impede the operation of the university.
(In fact, he eases the instructor's task of grading.) 15
In pointing to these distinctions, we begin to get a sense of the radical
difference in the nature of the interactions between student and teacher-as
opposed to that among employees in even hierarchical structures. Certainly,
until the highest levels of schooling, and in most classes, there is little expec-

150f course, if there were no students or if none of the students handed in their essays, this

would indeed disrupt the activity of the institution-in much the same way as if there were no
incoming data from Statistics Canada for the BOC or if there were no incoming data, because of
instrumental breakdown and/or meteorological calamities, for the ship's navigators.
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION 149

tation that students will contribute to the ongoing activity of the classroom in
the way that fellow workers do. 16
Even the notion of shared knowledge differs in the two contrasting kinds of
setting: the classroom and the workplace. In institutions such as government
agencies (or universities qua degree-granting institutions), there is overlapping
or shared knowledge, a kind of necessary redundancy without which the whole
operation is in danger. At the same time, however, there is also a parceling out,
a division of knowing such that some people know (a notion that includes both
mastery or ownership of facts as well as interpretive power over them) that
which others do not. Furthermore, the latter need to rely on the knowing and
interpreting of the former. Finally, for the good of the institution, there is a
reciprocity so those higher up in the hierarchy depend on the knowing and
interpreting of those lower down at the same time that those lower down depend
on the summarizing and interpreting of those higher up for the maintenance of
the organization and for the achievement of its goals. In all these institutions,
a relationship of mutual need is established among all participants. All this
contrasts with the classroom, where any particular student can usually drop out
without doing damage to the workings of the class.
Finally, it is important to recognize that, in certain settings in some institu-
tions, the relations among individuals do not involve distributed cognition. For
example, it is often the case that the goal of the institution is such that one
category of individuals is operated on, or inspected or known by another. In the
workplace, such evaluation and inspection procedures are employed not only
for hiring, firing, and promotion, but also on occasions involving guidance,
entrusting, or task assignment. The difference is one of degree and of the
relative dominance of the function. Thus, patients in hospitals as their name
implies are acted on; so too are clients in social work agencies, as are applicants
who wish to be hired by personnel officers in most institutions. Students at
university are like patients and clients in this respect. The focus of the institu-
tion, and of those representing the institution, is to know and inspect them.
This reality is sometimes occluded because, as teachers, we focus on the fact
that the role of the student is to learn-as opposed to that of the patient, which
is to get better, or the data, to be interpreted. But, if we recognize that in each

16Some instructors are currently trying to organize their classes in such a way, that is, by making

them into communities of practice, so that cognition is distributed among students. Insofar as this
is a successful pedagogic or epistemic strategy-that is, insofar as it helps students learn more
effectively-it is desirable. In the end, however, such practices will be limited by the underlying
and dominant institutional imperative of schooling that insists on measuring the relative perform-
ance of each individual.
150 CHAPTER 7

institution there are actors, an activity, and objects of the activity, it is clear that
at the university, the actors are the teachers and the administrators, and the
objects of the institutional activity is the knowing and the inspecting of the
students. The "knowing" of the students, and their "learning" is measured-just
as automobile sales are at the BOC.

CONCLUSION

In other words, the relationship between students and teachers is radically

different from that among fellow employees (even when there is a different
status). For this reason, making the transition to the workplace, students need
to take on very different kinds of responsibility, with respect to cognition, from
that to which they have been accustomed in their classroom settings. It is this
transition that we wish to focus on in chapters to come.
 8
FROM WORDS TO BRICKS:
WRITING IN AN
ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE
When we think of what architects do, drawing, not writing, is the activity that
first springs to mind. Because drawing is its primary semiotic medium, archi-
tecture raises most strikingly the issue of what is distinctively and uniquely left
for writing to contribute, after everything that can be done through other more
(to architects) accessible means has been done. Speech (and its attendant
technologies of telephone and voice mail) are, of course, available to the
practitioners of all the professions we have studied in the research, but archi-
tecture is distinctive in the extensive use it makes of drawing. Here, uniquely,
writing is up against not just the ephemeral modes of speech and gesture but
another permanent, trace-leaving, record-creating inscriptional medium. When
writing is used, therefore, it has a particular significance that derives from the
constantly present alternative possibility of graphical representation.
In fact, writing in architectural practices is extensive and important, and
exists in varying relationships to drawing, relationships that are of interest in
themselves. As we saw in chapter 5, writing in the school of architecture
presented the phenomenon of implicatedness in bimodal or multimodal pro-
ductions in which the meaning communicated was a product of writiJJ.g and
other semiotic modes (notably drawing and photography) working together in
relationships of interdependence. Such relationships characterize some of the
work in the office also. However, it is for those characteristics that differentiate
it from school practice that writing in the architectural office is of most
relevance for this study. In our introduction to this section we singled out three
features that we identify as distinguishing workplace writing generally from
student writing in the university: complexity, multifunctionality, and implicat-
edness in power relations. Writing in architectural practices demonstrates both
further variants within that description and also certain features not shared with
writing in the other professional contexts we have studied. One function of this,
151
152 CHAPTERS

the final chapter in our workplace section, will be to demonstrate how diverse
are the practices of different professions. While the main import of the book
has been to leave beyond doubt the distinction between educational and
workplace writing, that emphasis should not be taken as implying that there is
any such thing as "workplace writing" as an identifiable and describable
species; there are only a plethora of widely varying activities.
In this chapter we describe architects' writing as we observed it in one
office. 17 We begin with an overview of the kinds of writing architects perform
in the .course of their work on a building, and then proceed to a more analytic
account in terms of function, genre, relations between participants, the place
of standardization and other issues that have concerned us throughout the
book. An illustrative case then follows, illustrating how a particular short text
was able to be effective in the context of its deployment. And finally we draw
together some of the salient differences that have emerged between workplace
and university writing in architecture.

THE STAGES OF AN ARCHITECTURAL PROJECT

AND THEIR ASSOCIATED GENRES

We begin by describing the range of what architects write-or, rather, of the

writing to which architects put their signature, because the architectural work of
a practice is performed in Canada by practitioners of 2 professions or special-
isms, architects and architectural technologists. The latter are trained in the
technical aspects of construction, the building code, the preparation of contract
documents and the coordination of the tasks of construction, and not in design.
In this firm, the status of the senior technologist, Dudley, was not inferior to that
of the architects; in fact he would allocate work to them and was an associate in
the firm, second in status only to the three partners. 18 In some offices the work
of architects and technologists is strictly separated, but here boundaries were
fluid and relationships nonhierarchical; on some aspects of the job the project

17 Our thanks are due to the firms who have allowed us such free and ready access to their work,

and to all those, architects and technologists, who let us observe and/or interview them. We are
grateful also to Scott Weir for assisting in the interviews, and to Scott and to Graham Smart for
some preliminary analysis.
18 The firm included eight architects of whom three were the partners, two senior technologists

and a number of technologists. It had a reputation in the city as the leader in terms of design quality.
Most of the office's work was public buildings such as schools, fire stations, transport depots,
community and leisure centers, and apartment blocks.
WORDS TO BRICKS 153

architect would say what was to happen, on others the senior technologist. And,
most relevantly for this account, the latter produced a considerable share of the
practice's written output and spent most of his time writing.
A project, as architects call the set of activities that center on the design and
construction of a building, goes through typical stages which in Canada are
broadly as follows. Each stage has its characteristic written genres:

Securing the contract, or getting the job: The firm usually has to work to
get work; few clients approach an architect directly
with a commission.

Once the firm has been appointed as architects for the job, the work typically
falls into three stages weighted, in terms of workload, in the following proportions:

Conceptual design (25%): This term refers to the development in broad

outline of a design that satisfies the client as a
basis on which to proceed toward construction.
The end point of this stage is the client's ap-
proval of the design and go-ahead to proceed to
the working drawings and specifications that
will enable a builder (contractor) to be ap-
pointed and the building to be built.
Working drawings and
specifications (contract
documents) (50%): This set of documents comprises the complete
instructions for building the building, and are the
basis on which a contractor will be appointed
and the fee for construction agreed.
Construction (25%): The architects have a continuing role right
through construction, supervising the work and
authorizing any changes that circumstances or
the client's wishes necessitate.

We now describe these stages in more detail.

Securing the Contract

This stage has characteristic documents for the different types of bidding
procedure in operation. The firm may be invited to submit a proposal, or it may
respond to an advertisement in a newspaper inviting an Expression ofInterest.
154 CHAPTERS

Public building contracts tend to involve extensive and tightly prescribed

documentation, sometimes in more than one phase. Typically, the first phase
(the expression of interest) comprises a written proposal that includes a corpo-
rate CV giving an account of the firm and its work and specifying who would
be working on the project. The second phase is the design proposal; public
authorities typically lay down precise rules about how this will be written,
specifying such aspects as length, the inclusion of a table of contents, whether
single- or double-sided, and manner of stapling; the criteria by which the
proposal will be judged are also given. Some 50% of the document will be
standard boilerplate or pre-cast text, and the rest will be adapted boilerplate
together with perhaps 30% of text specifically written for the purpose. The hard
work in putting this together is less the composition of the text than obtaining
and coordinating input from a number of consultants, whose contribution
amounts to up to half of the document.
Competition entries call for rather different sorts of document, which will
be referred to in the following.

Conceptual Design

This stage, the first in which the firm is acting in its role as appointed architects,
is also likely to be subdivided. A prerequisite for the physical design is a
program or brief that sets out what the building is required to provide and the
requirements it must meet. Clients with extensive experience of procuring
buildings may present the firm with a briefthat they have drawn up themselves
or commissioned from a specialist consultant. Otherwise it falls to the architect
to write the program or brief in consultation with the client. Either way there is
likely to be considerable communication with the client to clarify or develop
the description of the job, involving successions of drawings accompanied by
a lot of writing. The outcome of this phase is the program document that sets
out functions, rooms, space per room, et cetera, and that comprises schematic
drawings with text in list and tabular form.
Once the program or brief has been established, the architects proceed to
design, typically presenting their developing ideas in a series of face-to-face
meetings with the client. The main work at this stage is drawing. What writing
there is includes letters to the authorities (fire, city, etc.) to clarify what is
possible and permitted, and invitations to consultants to associate themselves
with the project.
There are great variations within this overall pattern. On one current job, for
instance, the firm had been appointed to design only the specialized high-tech
WORDS TO BRICKS 155

control room in a new building over which, as a whole, a different firm of

architects was in charge. The client had presented our firm with a design intent
manual on the basis of which the firm had made an oral presentation and, after
negotiations, secured the contract. The client then supplied a brief and the
architects developed and presented their design (orally, with drawings) in two
main stages, schematic and resolved.

Working Drawings and Specifications

(contract documents)

This documentation, half drawings and half written specifications, constitutes

a complete description of and instructions for constructing the finished build-
ing. There are typically four sets of drawings: architectural, structural, mechani-
cal and electrical, with on occasion an additional set related to the demolition
of existing structures. Two sorts of writing are involved: drawing notes written
on the drawings and specification notes in a separate document and referenced
on the drawings. Thus in one set of documents the phrase "patch and make
good" appeared as

a note on the drawings, but "patch and make good" in a written specification has
a two page description of what is acceptable as a patch and what is acceptable as
a make good. So these notes give a visual indication of the scope of the work,
the specifications give a very precise description of the nature of the materials,
the level of finish, the quality of the workmanship and the products that we use.
(Greg)

In any legal dispute, the written word will prevail over the drawings (see below).
The specifications are considered to be "technical writing," in contrast with
genres that need to be more evocatively descriptive or persuasive. They are
divided into a general section and subsections; in one current job there were 16
of the latter relating to the individual trades involved in .construction.
The contract documents have to be submitted to the authorities for approval,
often with accompanying letters that explain, for instance, why a particular
zoning regulation has not been observed; for example, because the occupants
of a low-cost housing apartment block were expected to own fewer cars than
usual, application was being made for a waiver of the regulations on parking
provision.
An invitation to tender is next put out to contractors who will propose a price
for the job on the basis of the contract documents. The negotiations with
contractors will involve the architects in considerable correspondence both with
156 CHAPTERS

them and with the client, leading to changes in the design that all need to be
recorded in writing. As the culmination of this process, the architects will write
a letter of recommendation to the client concerning the appointment of the
contractor, after which the contract for construction is awarded.

Construction

In this stage the architect spends 80 or 90% of the day writing: "it's all
paperwork, nonstop." Visits to the site to inspect construction in progress, and
reports from the contractor and consultants throw up queries and reveal prob-
lems that are addressed through a variety of relatively standardized written
genres such as Contemplated Change Notices, Change Orders, and Site Instruc-
tions. All changes have cost implications, and the preservation of these docu-
ments is essential in settling whether additional costs are to be met by the client,
the contractor, or the architect.

Renovation of Old Buildings

The stages and types of documentation detailed above apply to new buildings,
but architects are often called on to restore or modify existing buildings. This
task calls for different types of document. On a current project involving a
heritage building the firm had first produced a building study or condition report
describing the state of the building and establishing the scope of the work
needed to restore it, and then a design report specifying the action that the firm
proposed. According to Dan, a junior architect, the subsequent full working
drawings differ from those produced for new buildings in carrying far more
writing, reflecting the need for extensive procedural description:

If you want to make a single room where there were former washrooms and
other rooms, you may have exposed brick for a while, and you might have a
little bit of tile and you might have some drywall, and how it meets the ceiling
changes .... So you have to describe to the contractor, "Remove this tile, keep
this tile, paint this brick, expose this brick, match that"~that's what we're
trying to do now.

More will be said about this below.

Other document types occur throughout the process, most notably the
agendas and minutes that the architects must draw up in connection with the
various meetings they have to attend.
WORDS TO BRICKS 157

WHO WRITES WHAT?

THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE OFFICE

The division of labor between architects and technologists affects writing.

Dudley, the senior technologist in the office we observed, spent most of his
time writing. He was the one who knew the correct wording for specifications.
For this reason and because the work is too much for the project architect, the
technologist often comes in and takes the lead after the design has been done
to translate the drawings into written specifications (a switch that can lead to
problems, as we describe below). At the same time, some architects do much
more writing than others so that Greg, who was seen as writing easily and well,
had ended up doing the lion's share of the firm's proposal writing.

FUNCTIONS AND MODES OF COMMUNICATION

We now proceed to a more analytic account that seeks to identify the nature of
architectural writing in terms that relate to the theories we use and enable
comparisons to be made both with the other professions discussed in the book
and with educational writing in the school of architecture.

Functions

Halliday (1985) describes all texts and utterances as performing three

metafunctions: the text performs, first, an ideational (we could substitute the
term referential) metafunction in that it is inevit~bly about something and
represents some entity, process or state of affairs; second, an interpersonal
metafunction in enacting relations between communicating subjects and ex-
pressing the speaker's stance in relation to the ideational content; and third, a
textual metafunction, about achieving a coherent verbal construct. Whereas
Halliday does not speak of the relative weighting of the three metafunctions
within a text as variable, it is in fact illuminating to describe texts in terms of
their dominant metafunction, adopting Jakobson's (1987) notion of numerous
coexisting functions of which one is always dominant. In particular we find it
useful to identify certain texts as carrying a more ideational and others a more
interpersonal emphasis. (The textual metafunction is less relevant for our
purposes here.) We noted earlier that the documents written to secure a contract
tended to be clearly persuasive, which is to say that their metafunctional
158 CHAPTERS

weighting was interpersonal, although the presence of an ideational component

representing the design idea and the firm's reputation was also, of course,
unavoidable. Later in the process, after the job has been secured, we find many
texts that are more obviously oriented toward accurate representation than
effect on audience, although the ultimate concern, not currently foregrounded,
is still to affect the documents' users so that they will build the building
correctly.
In talking in such terms we acknowledge that we are taking liberties with
Halliday's system. His metafunctions are specifically related to linguistics and
the grammar of sentences, and not to utterances and social processes. A
speaker's or writer's communicative intentions and social purposes are quite
a different matter from the function-meanings encoded by a system of gram-
mar. We, nevertheless, find it useful to purloin Halliday's terms for discussing
the former.
We can now approach the diversity of office writing with those two func-
tional emphases, distinguishing texts in which the dominant functional orien-
tation is interpersonal on the one hand and ideational on the other. Underneath
those broad categories we can then group a number of more specific functions.
Thus, in texts with an interpersonal emphasis we can identify communications
that order or instruct and those that seek to persuade, in contexts where a
response of non-cooperation is a contemplated possibility. Examples of the
former are the spoken and written requests and instructions to the contractor to
diverge from the design in some respect. An example of the latter is the note
already referred to that sought to get the planning authority to agree to a waiver
of a zoning regulation. Also interpersonal in their dominant orientation, though
not primarily persuasive, are communications that seek to elicit information,
advice, or response from parties who are not subordinates but from whom
cooperation can be expected in the normal way of professional relations.
Ideational demands are clearly dominant in two sorts of communication that
need to be inscribed on paper rather than uttered by word of mouth. The first
is the precise graphical and written indication of the work that is to be done by
the contractor in order to bring the building or alteration into being; these
representations fall into two parts, working drawings and (written) specifica-
tions, which together constitute the contract documents and define the precise
job for which the price is to be agreed. Two sorts of ideational content have to
be unambiguously represented: the physical reality of the building to be
achieved and the processes to be performed to achieve it. Any subsequent work
required that departs from these descriptions will have be paid extra for by
somebody, depending whether the change is the result of an error made by the
WORDS TO BRICKS 159

architect in design or the contractor in construction, or of a change of mind by

the client. Any such change has to be authorized by the architect and placed on
record, the adequacy of the record (for subsequent accounting procedures or
for the determination of responsibility) being assisted by the use of a stand-
ardized genre (such as the Contemplated Change Notice, Change Order, or Site
Instruction mentioned earlier), often generated with a software package that
ensures the later accessibility of the information and keeps track of the alloca-
tion of costs.
The second main manifestation of the ideational concern is the creation of
a paper trail. Documents produced for this purpose do not have much obvious
addressivity; 19 their effectiveness resides in their existence, their demonstrated
authenticity (e.g., as having been written at the time when they claim to have
been) and their preservation. Their record-keeping function may be fulfilled in
two ways. The first is through the production of writing within a dedicated
record-keeping genre such as a log (which actually does have an addressivity
related to a currently unknown future reader who might have need of the
information within it).
The other form of record keeping does not involve a dedicated genre.
Ostensibly, the documents enact rather than record a transaction, as when a
Change Order instructs a specific other that

You are hereby directed to include this work below in the contract. ... 1.0 Floor
call in elevator car system to be Key Controlled @ the following 3 floors only:
Parking Level, 2nd Floor, 3rd Floor (not Ground Floor and Floor lA).

The record-keeping function appears to be achieved not by the writing, which

was done to effect a change at the time of writing, but by the keeping and filing
of a copy. In reality, however, most such documents are written primarily as
records, despite appearances; if there were not the need for a trace the transac-
tion would be carried out orally, as it often used to be in less litigious times.
Putting it another way, contractors, because they need the physical trace, will
not nowadays carry out an order without written instruction. Although the
contractor's staff may already know from oral communications both what the

19The Bakhtinian concept of addressivity is perhaps best explained in Marxism and the
Philosophy ofLanguage: "Utterance, as we know, is constructed between two socially organized
persons, and in the absence of a real addressee, an addressee is presupposed in the person, so to
speak, of a normal representative of the social group to which the speaker belongs. The word is
oriented toward an addressee, toward who that addressee might be: a fellow-member of the same
social group, ofhigher or lower standing (the addressee's hierarchical status), someone connected
with the speaker by close social ties (father, brother, husband, and so on) or not" (Voloshinov,
1986, p.85, emphasis in original).
160 CHAPTERS

architect wants done (the propositional content) and that they are to carry it out
(i.e., that a jussive, or ordering-and-complying, situation is in force), the
"felicity conditions" (Austin, 1962) for a valid order include the requirement
that it be written. Therefore, "everything stated verbally on site must be put into
writing." The essential record-keeping function is then fulfilled by placing
copies of the document on file. (We discuss a particular instance of this sort of
transaction, involving a Site Instruction, below.)
Interpersonal and ideational do not, in the event, exhaust the functional
emphases discernible in the communications of the office. Another purpose that
may motivate communication is the one we have called epistemic, that of
arriving at rather than communicating ideas or understandings. (There is no
equivalent in Halliday's formal system because such a function is not reflected
in the grammar of sentences, though the "mathetic" category that he proposes
to cover young children's heuristic or discovery-related uses of language is
relevant; Halliday, 1975.) It is a significant fact about the office that the
epistemic purpose, while clearly dominating preliminary sketch processes and
design discussions over the drafting table, hardly appears in the writing, a point
we will comment on when we later compare office and school writing within
architecture.

The Available Modes of Communication

For the realization of the purposes we have just defined, a variety of semiotic
means are available. The choice between drawing, writing, and speech is
determined partly by convention, partly by the representational strengths and
inadequacies of each, partly by considerations of convenience and time, and
partly by the attitudes and dispositions of the participants. Where the ultimate
motive-the Activity-is a general wish to communicate or record X, then there
may be an effective free choice between the media. In the more thoroughly
institutionalized aspects of practice, however, what often happens is that an
utterly familiar exigence is registered and an utterly specific medium-and-genre
response automatically activated. In such situations we may say that the experi-
enced need is a need for, specifically, a set of working drawings or an Expression
of Interest letter, and is not the more general need for the communication or
recording of X. (There is no point in distinguishing such general and unspecific
needs unless alternative means of fulfilling them are effectively available
possibilities.) In situations where established conventional practices rule, the
Activity is, quite directly, "meeting the need for a set of working drawings" or
"meeting the need for an Expression of Interest letter"; and the action that
realizes the activity is, in tum, producing the drawings or writing the letter.
WORDS TO BRICKS 161

Sometimes habit and what comes easily and sometimes practicality lead the
architect to have recourse to writing. There are things that only writing can do,
or that it does more conveniently. Writing's distinctive contribution is particu-
larly apparent in the labels and notes that are often added to drawings, where
they may describe the material or give an instruction. As Michael explained,

Say I want to make a change in a construction process, I want to eliminate a door

from a room. I could do a drawing that shows, "This is what we had," and another
drawing showing the room without that door. But really it's a lot easier to say
"Get rid of that door."

Conversely, of course, there are things that only drawing can do. Words are
"almost completely useless" in communicating complicated three-dimensional
configurations. But not all of the parties involved can read drawings. Sarah, a
junior architect, had found that not only some clients but some older tradesmen
have never acquired the skill:

I think it's just the way things were done in the past-everything was much more
hands on. You would come to the site and say "Do this" and "Do that" and you
know, you'd never really refer to drawings .... Like I've worked with ... Italian
tile layers "Just tell me what you want," like they don't really understand the
drawing.

One of the most powerful pressures to write derives from the fact that in law
writing overrules drawing. But there are a variety of other reasons why writing
may, on occasion, be preferred to speech. In communications between, for
instance, architect and consultant, a written request for information can be
consulted repeatedly and the data needed for the answer collected piecemeal.
Similarly, if the architect is accumulating a number of questions it is easier to
write them down and fax them in one batch than to phone them. The availability
of the fax has led to a shift from speech to writing in some types of communi-
cation. Tom, one of the partners, told us:

Generally, however, speech is preferred to writing because it is quicker. We could

write that, but there's no need to do it, and there's so many reasons to fill your
time doing other things that anything which is at all extraneous is not done.

And when persuasion is the purpose, in those situations in which spoken

communication is not ruled out (as it is in proposals to public bodies), speech
(in combination with drawings and models) scores by being more expressive.
In "architectural project getting":
162 CHAPTERS

the written response will determine your success, but not necessarily in imple-
menting, because once you've got the job you're drawing and talking and really
seducing your client into the idea that your ideas are worthwhile. It's not usually
to do with writing, it's usually to do with sitting and talking about the job and
saying, "I think this is better," or saying in this case, "What we want to do is
feature X because Y."

Alan, one of the other partners, explained the typical situation, in which the feel
and appeal of a design have to be communicated as expressively as possible:

So you're relying on pointing to this with a client and saying, "What I am

proposing, you can't really understand what it's going to look like, because--."
Anybody at an early stage looking at that is going to have to believe a lot of what
you're saying. Just look at it, it's just a nice little sketch, I don't really know what
that means. So the communication is very important with words .... the client has
to be excited about what we're doing. That's a very big part ofbeing an architect.

The preference for speech is reinforced by the architects' attitudes; they tend
to feel comfortable with drawing and speech and less comfortable with writing.
Sarah explained:

We're so used to expressing ourselves in drawing terms that when you want
to express yourself in written words, I find I'm not necessarily comfortable
all the time that what I'm saying is what someone is going to interpret
correctly .... I think that everyone feels a bit uneasy when it comes down to
trying to write something. You know, you always feel a bit, is it right, am I
expressing myself right. If it's something really important I always refer to
[one of the partners].

Our informants frequently represented writing and the management of written

documents as alien to the architect's sensibility: "Architects are not bureau-
cratically meticulous."

THE IMPORTANCE AND RHETORICAL DEMANDS

OF WRITING

Architects may not like writing but much depends on their doing it well. Getting
it wrong-interpersonally or ideationally, in persuading, instructing, or record-
ing-can cause big problems. For that reason, not only care but often consider-
able rhetorical skill are demanded of a writer like Sarah in architectural practice.

A large part of the writing architects do is simply to cover themselves: everything

has to be [written down] because there's always this thing, "Well, I didn't know
WORDS TO BRICKS 163

that's what you wanted," and so if you have to go back and say, "No, what I
wanted was this and this is what I said"-well, how can you make someone do
and redo unless you have actually proof of that in writing?

But writing is also fraught with dangers, as when a second practitio-

ner-often the senior technologist-is brought in to write the specifications
after the working drawings have been completed: "A lot of times we tend to do
the specs at the last minute and someone else might be helping you out doing
the spec."

Well, I find a lot of errors can be made between the spec and the drawings ....
that's one thing that actually tends to happen a lot is the discrepancy between the
drawings and the spec. I mean you put something on the drawing and someone
else is doing the spec and the two don'treally go hand in hand. The spec [prevails]
which is the unfortunate thing .... If you're not that familiar\\ :th the job [you,
the writer, are likely to make] certain errors around there, [like] getting the wrong
materials, so a lot of mistakes like that end up costing money because you want
to go with what's on the drawings but the spec overrides it.

Misunderstandings can and do lead to legal disputes. Contractors make their

profit by exploiting loopholes and ambiguities in the specifications and substi-
tuting cheaper solutions. There are many ways the specs can go wrong, as
Michael had discovered:

If you have completely screwed up a section of the specifications, it has all sorts
of potentially very serious ramifications, particularly in what's called the front
end which relates to contractual relationships .... There was an instance where
the salient point was that, because of some ambiguity in whether a certain item
was in or out of the contract, if item A was in the contract, then this contractor,
if it wasn't, then the other person was actually lower [in price], so there was a lot
of confusion, the lawyers got involved ... because obviously there's a lot riding
on something like that. The contractor's invested hundreds of hours in time and
it could mean, in this economy, the difference between the firm surviving or not.
So it gets hairy .... Or it might happen because you do something dumb like take
a spec section from another job and just throw it in because you thought it was
the same thing but it wasn't really. That can happen.

The problem can thus be compounded when boilerplate from other jobs is used
inappropriately.
Disaster can also follow from failure in filing-an aspect ofliterate practice
that, incidentally, has no equivalent in the world of the student. Every important
document is copied to a chronological file and a project file, and a computer
record is kept. Bureaucratic fastidiousness is a vital insurance policy for firms,
as Greg (junior architect) was able to exemplify:
164 CHAPTERS

We received a call over the summer for a project that we carried out in 1987. It
was carried out by someone who is no longer with the office and it was a survey
to go around various branches of a trust company and to do a quick survey ...
looking for the presence of asbestos .... We got a call back in the summer saying,
"We've sold this branch and the purchaser has found asbestos in the building,
and is demanding a rebate of X number of dollars, and he says you are liable for
that." So we went looking for the file and the file doesn't exist. We didn't even
have accurate dates for when it was completed, so we went through the chrono-
logical files which has all of the correspondence in chronological order, starting
back a year prior to when we thought it was going to be, going through every
piece of correspondence, looking for documentation, and after half a day we
found one letter that says, "We have visited these branches, Ia, Ia, Ia, and the
survey in this branch, we saw obvious traces of asbestos, and in conversation
with yourself, you have decided to undertake further studies of your own, blah,
blah, blah," signed off. So it's clearly says we found asbestos, and there's
evidence of it, we spoke to you, you have agreed to carry out further required
studies, and that was the end of our project. We said, "Do you want us to fax you
this letter?" and he says, "No that's ok,just keep it," (laugh) and that was the last
we heard of it. So that's how important a paper trail is.

Architectural writing is perhaps most demanding in its persuasive function.

Proposals invited by public bodies normally have to be in writing, so that the
persuasive arts of speech are not able to be employed. One recent failure to be
awarded a contract was attributed to a wording that had evidently failed to
convince. The need for persuasion arises not only with the client but also with
the authorities, with whom communications are mainly required to be on paper.
In their proposals for the renovation of a 100-year-old building (referred to
earlier) Dan and his colleagues had depended on their written and drawn
submissions to get the approval of the heritage authority:

What we try to do is work hand in hand with them, so we would explain to them
that we have to do the floors. Of course they come from the point of view that,
"Well, do you really have to do the floors because you're damaging or potentially
you could alter the structure?" So we have to convince them that the changes are
necessary to keep the building maintainable, that [the building] won't be aban-
doned if it continues to be usable by the client, that it will last, and also persuade
them that the infringes that we are doing are sensitive enough to the building.

Although to the outsider much of the writing in the architects' office seems
formulaic and the genres standardized, a more active rhetorical alertness is often
called for than may be apparent. The senior technologist, Dudley, was able to
attest that persuasion was regularly required:

There's several issues that it comes down to approvals with authorities and
getting things through out of the city of Ottawa or Ontario fire marshall's office.
WORDS TO BRICKS 165

You have to write letters to persuade them about the approach you're taking is
correct ... and also getting back to the client and telling the client, "Well, it
doesn't matter what you've done in the past, this is what you have to do now
because somebody's asking for it."

Dudley insisted that tact was often critical, and that persuasive strategies using
logic and reason had to be tailored to what one knew of the different authorities
in, for instance, arguing for a particular interpretation of a building code.

You have this building code which is that thick (demonstrates thickness with
fingers), the Ontario building code, and then you have a national building code
which is also that thick (demonstrates) and then you have the Ontario fire code
which is that thick (demonstrates) and then you have the plumbing code and the
electrical code and all these codes, and you say, well that's the code, I mean, you
just follow what it says. But it's not like that at all. I mean, I'll read the sentence
and I'll say, "Well, that means this." Well, somebody in the city of Ottawa will
read the sentence and he'll say, "No, that's not what that means, that means this."
And somebody in Gloucester will say, "No, no, no, it means this." And then you
go down to Toronto, and you can call down to Toronto and get an interpretation
from the head office of the Ministry of Housing who writes the building codes,
and they'll research and say, "Well what we really meant to say is this" .... but
the final authority would rest with the city that you're dealing with .... If you
can't convince them that your interpretation is right, or Toronto's interpretation
is right, then the only next way to go would be to take it to a hearing, and that
takes a long time, 3 or 4 months .... you have to use logic and reason in order to
read between the lines ... and argue for your reading, about why that's-[Inter-
viewer: Sort oflike biblical scholarship?] (laughs) Well, it is. And then trying to
convince a client of that is another step ....

Even the writing of the specifications called for careful judgment. On a

renovation, particularly, where the condition is not exactly known before work
begins, one must beware of assuming what is not known while at the same time
being as specific as possible; the trick, for Dan, is to make the contractor
responsible for checking the dimensions.

"Plus or minus" is a godsend .... If this is a new room, we can make this twenty
four hundred long, twenty four hundred millimeters. In existing conditions, if
you want something to fit in, these are existing walls so you have to describe it
as, well, it could be twenty four one hundred or twenty four ten, twenty,
or-Anyway, it goes back to the writing in the contract documents. You try to
be as specific as possible, and at the same time you don't want to tell them it's
twenty four hundred, because you'll be wrong, and you'll be [writing] Change
Order number five hundred and ninety nine. [So you write "plus or minus."] You
try to delegate responsibility so that you can't assume responsibility for certain
items and that it is up to the contractor to be responsible ....
WORDS TO BRICKS 167

The exceptional complexity of the heritage building job already referred to,
a 19th century drill hall still used by the military, was reflected in the quantity
of documentation that Dan and the other architects expected to generate:

I would say that this job ... is more complex because you have so many existing
pieces of the fabric of the building, and you're doing all these interventions. The
interventions range-normally a building has a program, say it's a hospital, so you
lmow you have operating rooms, and it's sort of the same genre if you will, there's
still sterilization procedures and things like that has to be involved in a hospital.
In this project it was very diverse. We had rifle range, which is a shooting range,
weapons vault, which is high security, storage of weapons, quartermaster stores,
which is a large military storage area, we had heritage messes which are officers'
messes which are bars, there was five of those. We had office areas, we have a
museum space ... and a large acoustic band room, so you can see there that you're
not doing an opera house, you're not doing a museum, you're not doing a shooting
range, they are all involved in the building. On top of that you have the heritage
concerns and what exactly you're doing to the existing fabric, and then the things
that must be done like the structural reinforcement of the building. So to bring all
of those pieces together in an existing fabric, I found it was quite difficult.

The renovation, recently completed, of a similar building next door had

involved 600 Change Orders instead of the usual 100. There were 4 separate
clients and instead of the usual 5 consultants there were 14, together with a
range of supervisory bodies. All these factors increased the paperwork:

If you look at any typical file [for a complete project], [it would be] perhaps the
length of this page (about 3.5 feet), and in that is the construction phase, working
drawings, design, the client files and disciplines. On this job we probably have
about this amount (about 3 feet), and we haven't gone to construction yet, so
we'll have double the amount if not more.

Most of his 3 years on the job had been spent by the project architect in writing
"fat reports in which every word is new," old buildings being unique and the
firm's resource of boilerplate descriptions thus being unusable.
Complexity also arises when the architects are in charge of only one part of
a job. For Michael, designing the high-tech control room in a public service
building (referred to above) involved working with a great many professionals
who were not under the architects' control, as well as with middlemen for the
various agencies.

It's a control center in the new [public corporation] headquarters .... It's a job
that we have on the second floor of the building, so we're not the architects of
the building, we're not the architects for any of the interior design in any of the
other areas except this one part of one floor, because of our experience having
168 CHAPTERS

done something like that before for them. So there's interior designers, we
worked with someone whose title was "interior design manager" who was
responsible for coordinating the design professionals, there's a project manager,
there's the developer, the client ... there's the contractor, anyway there's a lot of
parties involved.

A major problem for the architects in such a situation is keeping everyone

informed about and happy with what is being proposed, "resulting in copies to
everyone":

There's nothing to be gained by cutting someone out, so you might as well tell
everyone all the time, it's in your own best interests, and people like to be
informed as well. Even if they don't talk to you for 6 weeks, they like to find out
that things are actually happening here, you get a sense of the problems ....
Sometimes you feel like you might be wasting people's time by copying things
to them and then other times they probably up and ask you why they didn't get
a copy, so it tends to just be simpler just to spread it around. It's a protection
mechanism too, no one can say that you didn't tell them something. You know,
if you have a problem with this why didn't you respond to it 3 weeks ago when
I told you about it?

ARCHITECTS' EXPERIENCE
OF THE WRITING PROCESS

Writing in an architectural practice seems to afford a strangely mixed experi-

ence that includes both tedious routine and scope for creative flair. Repre-
sentative of the former is the use ofboilerplate, an essential element in the firm's
writing activities. Its careless use can lead to problems not only, as we saw, in
specifications but also in other documents. According to Alan:

You often find in documents ... certificates of payment and letters and things
like that, if it's come out of your computer, I don't know, there's a certain
tendency not to necessarily read it at all.

Technology has thus rendered widespread the strange phenomenon of a writing

process in which writers may not exactly know the content or wording of the
text they are writing, because they can avoid engaging with the individual words
and even sentences that they write, manipulating nothing smaller than entire
blocks of text. Without boilerplate, however, document production on the scale
required could simply not be achieved. To illustrate that scale, this small firm
puts out 300 proposals a year. Greg, who writes most of them, showed us the
typical breakdown:
WORDS TO BRICKS 169

So this is what they've asked for, a description of the finn, a description of who
we're going to put in charge of the project ... a proposed work schedule, and then
a list of our related experience, and we were asked to limit this to only 10 pages.
Everything here tends to be collegial, I would write the base text, it would be
edited by a partner. Any of these descriptions have been written over the course
of time. Whenever it was appropriate to describe a project, I would generate
written text for that and store it on the computer, then I would assemble an explicit
list for the job. So this was assembled for this job from existing text, and I would
go in and slant some of these descriptions to be appropriate for the project.

Likewise, the use of standardized formats, made easy by the computer,

affects letters, Change Orders, Change Notices, certificates of payment and
various legal documents as well as proposals. Specification writing, according
to Dudley, is particularly unexciting:

There's specification writing, it's a set format that you take, issued by the
government, it's all government standard numbers, and you're basically taking
a spec that you did from one job and editing it for the requirements of the new
job .... There's a set guideline of rules that you have to follow and technical
phrases, particular words that are repeated over and over and over again, so
there's not really a lot of thought goes into the writing. It's more, the thought
goes into the actual information that has to be imparted.

At the other extreme we have noted writing tasks that require the architect
to be rhetorically sensitive and adaptive. Such tasks presumably afford a degree
of satisfaction to writers who possess, or are acquiring, the necessary literate
resources. One satisfaction that is rarely available, however, is that of writing
the sort of critical and theoretical text (more "abstract and intellectual") that the
architects had experienced in some school courses, though some competitions
may call for it. When the submission is successful, excerpts from the architects'
own description may find their way into reports in the professional press.

HISTORICAL INCREASE IN WRITING

Architects currently spend a lot more of their time writing than in the past. The
original specification documents for the 1879 drill hall, for which the firm was
proposing renovations, comprised six pages. The contrast with even 50 years
ago had struck Sarah; the increase affects documentation in general, both
drawing and writing:

We tend to really detail our drawings here, especially the working drawings,
because now everyone's trying to undercut someone and it's very important to
170 CHAPTERS

get exactly what you want in a drawing so that you don't have to come back and
say that it wasn't on the drawings .... If you look at a set of drawings from 40, 50
years ago, you'd open a set and you know, like, 4 or 5 drawings for a whole
school where they have a plan, 4 elevations and maybe one typical wall section,
and a few notes, and very little dimensions because a lot of that kind·ofstuffwas
established once the job started construction. Whereas now if you want some-
thing it's got to be on the drawing, so now we have schools that have 25 or 30
drawings to a set. So you know you've got to go through the building and detail
everything, or else everything is going to be an extra once it goes out for
construction, so you're always trying not to have any extras which cost us and it
may cost our client, and it doesn't look very good for us, because it looks like
we haven't done our job.... The specs are getting thicker and thicker and thicker
all the time too.

One of our informants, Joe, had noticed an increase in writing even during
his professional life of some 10 years, ascribing it to an increase in litigation
(and hence a greater awareness of liability issues) and changes in technology
(particularly the photocopier and fax machine). Another reason, Tom told us,
is changed procedures for obtaining contracts:

The way work is allocated has changed. In the sixties there was a lot of work
going on but if you were a client and you wanted a building built, you might
inquire around and say "Well, I know that five firms have a reputation. Let's
interview them," and then we'd perhaps go along and be interviewed and show
you examples of our work and you'd choose one. What happens now much more
frequently is that the client will advertise saying, for example, "We are consid-
ering the construction of a headquarters office building for so and so and so and
so. Expressions of interest are invited from suitably qualified architects." And
they may advertise that nationally. In one case they did recently, for a building
on ... A venue, and they had over 90 replies, all written in books about this to this
thick (demonstrates) saying this is our experience, this is how we approach it.
They then short-listed, I think, 30 and called for more information, so there's
more writing, more intents. We got down to the last five who were then called
for an interview, so we need preparation material for an interview, and then after
that they chose an architect from Toronto, so we say "Well, that's gone." That
wouldn't have happened 5 or 10 years ago. It might have happened for something
like the National Gallery, but now it's happening for all kinds of tiny jobs.

In Greg's view, this obsession with documentation is excessive; so much time

and effort have to be spent on preparing the proposal that chances of making a
profit are drastically reduced.
This increase in writing has not been welcome to architects. They feel it has
not enhanced their ability to produce good buildings, and they experience it not
as contributing to a central and satisfying aspect ofthe architectural process but
as a tedious distraction. Their dissatisfaction recalls the responses to a similar
WORDS TO BRICKS 171

increase among the social workers reported in chapter 6, though the latter group
felt the demands for writing more as an oppressive imposition that was fraught
with dangers for themselves. As a result of these historical changes, architects
are now experiencing certain writing processes that are alienating. It is true that
architects by their own account don't much like writing anyway; but it seemed
to us that some of this work really was depressingly mechanical, an impression
forcefully communicated by Greg, the young architect who does nearly all the
proposal writing for the firm. First, the usual rewards of reader response are often
lacking; it is common for a text produced with care and long effort to receive no
reply. Second, the process is extremely laborious; Greg gathers the information
he needs by discussion with the project manager and consultants, collates the
material and then spends the weekend at the cottage writing the proposal. Finally,
the writing is not of a kind that one can take pleasure or pride in:

This is lowest common denominator writing. It's really, really dry writing ....
You want me to read some of it? I'll just read you a paragraph, you'll appreciate
this one. "[Person's name], professor of urban design at [university], is the senior
urban designer for [government department]. [Person's name] will advise the
team on urban design issues .... " You know, some ofthese go on half a page,
but they all read the same, "So-and-so is this, has this experience and has done
this in the past." It's really dry stuff.

Perhaps 2 pages of a 100-page document allow Greg to write in something like

the way he had learned in school and that he values. This writer feels distaste
for the writing he produces, and told us that he needs, when away from the
office, to compensate by writing for himself in more poetic vein, to keep alive
the sense of what writing can do.

LEARNING TO WRITE FOR THE OFFICE

None of the architects considered that they had been trained in the school of
architecture for the writing demands they were now meeting at work. {The
technologists, on the other hand, had taken at least one community college
course in technical writing, as had the three junior architects who had been
technologists before taking their architecture degree.) While the senior archi-
tects in the firm regret that their young employees generally do not always write
well and may produce texts that need editing for grammar, usage, and jargon,
they do not consider that schools of architecture should teach the specialist
professional genres of specifications, Change Orders, and the like; these skills
172 CHAPTERS

can be picked up on the job, whereas design skills, the correct focus of the
school, need to be established during education.
Correspondingly, all our subjects confirmed that the special skills of profes-
sional architectural writing were indeed acquired at work. Greg had been
steered into proposal writing because of his general writing skills (which he
attributed to the fact that his grandmother had been a grammar teacher and he
had been a great reader) but had learned the specialist genres since joining the
practice. Both the layout and relationships of this office were identified by Sarah
as facilitating the learning that novices needed to go through:

The good thing about this office is that it's an open concept. I think you learn
through watching other people also. You're doing your own work but you [pick
up] conversations or something that's happening out of sight, and you hear other
people's experiences. Even though you're doing two things at the same time you
always tend to learn from other people and I think that's the way that this office
is. We all tend to learn from each other ... we always have conversations and
talk about things that have happened and so I think you know we tend to learn,
I think all of us have learned a lot just from each other. There's some offices
where you go and it's falling into a [groove] and everyone does their own thing ....
Here you tend to get lots of opportunity to touch on all areas of the profession,
which is good.

Learning is promoted through "attenuated authentic participation" (see

chap. 9 below) with its opportunities for practice coupled with supportive
supervision procedures; one of the partners is responsible for each job and
provides whatever guidance and correction is necessary to the junior archi-
tects and technologists. Dudley, the senior technologist, explained how he
had learned the necessary genres from the revisions made to his work by the
partners-a procedure which, far from being ego-bruising, he had found
comforting:

I don't mind it at all. It's actually a bit more comforting (laughs), you know, when
it does come back it says, well, you had your shot at it too. No, it's fine, I don't
have any problem with that at all. Their comments are all welcome and very
valid, and actually it helps your writing in the future, I mean you learn. Alan and
Tony and Steve have so much experience amongst them to handle different
situations, and they're also very in tune with the client-for the most part they
know the client much better than you will ever know him because they've done
other work with him in the past ... and they know how that person is from a
personality point of view, so they know what will work and what won't work
and how best to explain things, so you just learn from their experience. They each
have their different way of writing and their different way of explaining things,
so you tend to borrow from each of them as far as you know, and developing
your own writing and how you handle the situations.
WORDS TO BRICKS 173

One of the things we found most impressive about this office, as Sarah
mentioned earlier, is the opportunity it affords for learning new skills. Dudley,
though trained in technical writing, finds himself on occasion engaging with
the demands of proposal writing-and enjoying the challenge:

You want to sell [the client] on a job, so there's quite a bit ofliberty taken as to
the writing. It's a descriptive thing but it has to be very positive, so you're taking
your own thoughts and your own ideas and any ideas from Tom, who's the partner
in charge, of what he was trying to get, and trying to describe that in the most
delicate, elegant way you can, to sell them on the job. So there, there's quite a
bit of artistic nature to the writing ... which I generally don't get into but there
are occasions when it's required. [Interviewer: Do you welcome those occa-
sions?] Oh yes, I'm getting more familiar with it. Writing has actually never been
one of my strong suits. So just through experience, getting more and more
experience into it, becoming more and more accustomed, and more, I don't know,
confident or able to do that sort of writing, because, I don't know, formal
education [e.g., in specification writing] is more like filling in slots.

What has to be learned by the novice is not exclusively formats and conven-
tions. Nothing about school writing, for instance, teaches the need that Michael
had found for reticence (in both speech and writing) within certain transactions:

Particularly when you're dealing with people who aren't familiar with the
building process generally or the normal sequence of decisions, it's not always
useful to raise issues that they're not really normally going to be concerned with
anyway. If you raise it then somebody has to deal with it. They shouldn't be
concerned with that. You only ask them questions that you need to know an
answer ... because if you ask them what kind of doorknob they want, they'll
think they have to respond to that, and they'll say "Well, show me what I can
get," so all of a sudden you're up to your neck in looking for doorknobs when
really there was only one that you had in mind anyway....
There's definitely a technique to it, but someone like Alan would be-because
it's definitely a skill and it has to do with a whole series of intangible variables,
just the personality of the person you're dealing with. Some people like to be
involved in a project in all the detail, and you try to keep them out of it and they
get irritated and wonder why you're blocking them out. So a lot of it's by feel,
intuition, and experience.

Once a design has been extensively developed, the natural impulse is to

communicate it to the client in its entirety, converting the contents of one's own
notes into public form, but the architect soon has to learn that the imparting of
information must be carefully phased, with as much emphasis on holding back
as on giving out:
174 CHAPTERS

The difficult thing for me was learning to do the steps in sequence. It seemed
more natural to do everything all at once, but you tell the client only as much of
the story as they need to know at one time.

A striking difference between school and work is in the degree of emphasis

placed on the verbal articulation of the ideas and principles that underlie a
design. Tom, who, like the other partners, regularly teaches and sits on juries
in the school, explained that in commercial practice there is neither need nor
time for making ideas explicit:

We seldom do that. I know they do it at the school of architecture .... the

professors have formulated an approach which gets the students to establish a
theoretical base for their solution .... We start at another place and solve the
problem in terms of all the constraints which come to bear on the problem. We
very seldom write a theoretical approach to our building .... There's no doubt
about it that ideas are in the buildings, the buildings don't grow without ideas
and ideas are what they are. But whether we articulate those ideas is something
else .... We very seldom sit around and talk about them as groups .... I wrote a
series of design ideas which were built into that school (discussed earlier in the
conversation), and I dashed them off only because [local architectural journalist]
was writing an article on the school.. .. I had intended to write a piece on the
design of the school and to put it-we provided 3 time capsules for the school
which are supposed to be refilled every 50 years, and the first one [was to contain]
7 drawings and the philosophy of the design of the school.. .. I never did that,
didn't have time to do it, I just didn't get around to doing it. Partly because there
[are] always other things cooking, partly because I'm a bit lazy.

What does have to be made absolutely explicit is "the physical reality of the
building." As Alan, one of the partners, put it:

If you spoke as per one might write an article on, say, high-minded issues about
where a project is standing in the historical framework of architecture, whether
it's impressionist modernism or associated with post-modernism or aspects to do
with where it is stylistically, what it's doing as a form of critical debate to do
with function .... Well, I haven't met a client who says "I want to hear all about
it." They don't wantto hear all that. Because they don't understand they get really
frightened by it. What they want to understand, is simple, clear, direct language.
At times you might touch on the fact that you understand a certain set of
complexities that you're working with, but in my experience don't try to describe
it to them, you're going to lose the project (laughs). So there's two sort of things
you're doing. One is working how you work with the client, and then in turn how
you work with consultants and authorities, to get approval and so on, which is
the majority or ninety per cent of practices' work. And it's only because you get
cases like Tom, Steve and I are doing a bit of stuff up at [the university] and
things of that nature, whereby the critical discussion can in any way become part
of our language. So other than that, you're reading it in magazines that you buy
WORDS TO BRICKS 175

and you're maintaining this life from your period oftime when you were a student
and you hit the high road, and you're trying to maintain this when only a tiny,
tiny percent of it is ever going to be used ... because people aren't interested in
that stuff, generally.

Complexity and Multifunctionality

Because the above account was mostly somewhat generalized, a closer look at
one written transaction may allow a more concrete sense to emerge of the
complex ways writing affects the situation. These could in no way be guessed
at by a simple inspection of the text. The following is an example of writing
that was successful in that it worked in its context-or, at least, it had worked
so far at the point when our study took place; for some texts the real proof of
the pudding comes years later when they are pulled from a filing cabinet in the
investigation of some issue of dispute.

Lower ceiling @corridor 327 as per attached sketch SK 26-01 and revise to
acoustical lay-in tile as shown.

This Site Instruction was sent by Joe to the contractor's site supervisor, Luc. It
conforms to generic type in its omission of the definite article, its simple
imperative form, and its reliance on an accompanying graphical representation
to convey the detail of what is required. The text looks like a fairly straightfor-
ward accomplishment; and, indeed, every project architect in the practice
routinely issues considerable numbers of similar Site Instructions. But there are
a number of ways in which this act of written communication could have been
wrongly enacted, and the way the text needed to affect the situation was quite
complex.
In the first place, the architect, Joe, a junior in the firm despite his several
years experience, would have been wrong to issue this instruction without
consulting his senior, Steve, the partner in charge of the job. This is not because
Joe does not have the authority to issue Site Instructions. He had been quite in
order, without asking Steve, to write an instruction to "revise location of
mechanical diffusers to be centered between light fixtures on undulated wood
ceiling." The difference is that the first instruction had substantial design
implications. A stretch of ceiling was to be lowered along a corridor to
accommodate unexpectedly bulky ductwork. This modification, unlike the
relocation of the diffusers, would have a highly noticeable effect on the
appearance of that part of the building; the ceiling would visibly change levels
in different parts of the corridor, dropping 100 mm at one point and resuming
176 CHAPTER 8

its original level at another. It was the firm's policy that in design decisions
affecting appearance the seniors must be consulted. Had Joe written the Site
Instruction without asking Steve, although legally valid, it would have been
unfortunate in lacking the partner's blessing.
Secondly, the instruction could have resulted in a damaging disruption of
good relations with the contractor if the instruction really had been what it
appears to be, the peremptory issuing of an order without justification or
warning. To avoid such an effect, the communication needed at one level to be,
as it was, almost redundant, Joe having already asked Luc and Luc having
agreed, in their conversation on the site, to effect the modification in question:

Joe: First of all what we're going to have to do, we're going to have to lower
3 inches anyway.
Luc: On the west side, the [inaudible].
Joe: Yes.
Luc: You'lllet me know the elevations.
Joe: Yes, I'll let you know the elevations.

The instruction does not, therefore, communicate new information to Luc; what
is to be done-the "propositional content" of the communication-is already
known, apart from the exact dimensions of the alteration (the elevations).
Converting the instruction into writing meets the "felicity conditions" for the
successful performance of the speech act of Site Instruction. What the writing
provides for Luc is essentially a piece of paper that he can produce to others,
as evidence, if it is needed, that he has the authority to proceed and that the
decision is the architect's and that the cost of the work can be allocated
accordingly. Joe is in a sense writing not to Luc but past him to an array of
future and possible readers, some of them faceless: the contractor's head office,
the client, the auditors, and potentially lawyers and judges in the event of a
dispute over responsibility. This text, then, appears to "work" within the
complex nexus of relationships inside and outside the firm only in so far as its
content is not original expression but something like quotation. The decision
needs to have been gone over with Steve, the senior colleague, and some
formulation like the one in the text already arrived at; similarly with Luc, the
site supervisor. These two parties will be happy with the instruction in so far
as they recognize it as what they have already agreed. Steve is part of the
audience, even though he is not addressed. So is the consultant, whose original
error in advising on the space his ductwork would require had created the
problem in the first place, and who can now breathe more easily-although he
WORDS TO BRICKS 177

was expecting this relief, having, like Luc, been in on the site conversation. For
him also the Site Instruction works less by conveying its meaning in clear and
unambiguous terms than by its intertextual reference-identifiable only to
insiders within this situation-to that earlier conversation, the text of which it
recognizably quotes and reaccentuates, in Bakhtin's term.

ARCHITECTURAL ACTIVITY
IN SCHOOL AND WORK

As we saw above, nobody in the office claimed that university taught them how
to write at work; all stressed the learning they had needed to do on the job. At
the same time, a minor note we picked up in some of our discussions was regret
at not being able to make much use at work of the habits of critical and
theoretical writing that had been acquired in school. In this section we want to
focus on this lack of crossover, and seek to understand the reasons for it.
First, in line with our general stress in this volume, writing in the two contexts
of the architectural education exercise and the commercial archi~ectural project
must be understood in terms of the overriding activities (using that term with
its full Activity Theory associations-see chap. 2) that are being pursued in
each, because from them follow many differences in the more specific needs
for which writing gets used. Architectural education as we described it in
chapter 5 is about the inculcation and assessment of individual capabilities, the
most important of which is design. Design is evaluated by specimens of design
work, architectural works realized spatially and visually, and not verbally;
assessment is based primarily on drawings, photographs, and models, with
writing (and speech) in supplementary roles only. It is true that designs are
expected to be rational and principled, and that the rationales and principles
may be essentially propositional in form and capable of verbal explication-an
explication that may have been extensively developed in written notes and
discussion during the work and that may be elicited orally in the final review.
The presence of this thinking is principally judged, however, not through its
verbal elaborations but through the coherence and intelligibility of the proposed
building or other structure. Thus any writing that occurs in the process is mainly
in aid of the writer's own epistemic purposes of clarifying intention and
constructing a publicly sustainable account; little of it is seen by anyone else.
Architectural education, in relation to the competencies required in the
profession is partial and selective. The price of an emphasis on design ability
is the relative neglect of other skills that are held to be best developed in the
office context, such as procuring buildings within particular cost limits, observ-
178 CHAPTERS

ing codes, avoiding legal and financial traps, and managing contractors. What
the student stands to secure by his or her design efforts is a university degree,
and not a professional ticket that has to be worked at over the first years of office
practice and that will be assessed by further examinations conducted by a
professional body. As we have seen, the architects in this office tend to feel that
the school's emphasis is right in that design needs formal education whereas
technical and communicative skills can be acquired in practice.
Because the development of design ability, and therefore its assessment, are
seen in the school as an individual matter, school design projects tend to be
individual and not group tasks. This feature, too, is in contrast with-and even
appears perversely to contradict-workplace practice, to which collaboration
is central, providing another instance in which it is only in a partial and indirect
sense that the school can be said to provide professional preparation. It further
reinforces our sense of disjunction between the overarching activities of the
school, which we have described, and those of the architectural workplace,
namely securing contracts and bringing about completed buildings. In the
securing of contracts, it is true, some convergence with the school project may
be discerned, because the task for both student and architect may be seen as
persuasive. The student's purpose is to convince a jury of his or her abilities;
the architect's, to convince a client of the firm's competence to produce the
design and manage the construction of a building or renovation, and of the
desirability and value for money of the building that would be the result.
What is involved in achieving such conviction is, however, very different in
the two situations. The student's case rests primarily on the visible artifact that
is essentially supposed to speak for itself, to be immediately accessible to
visiting critics who know nothing of the student's background and to constitute
evidence, through its physical configuration, use of materials, and anticipated
user experience, of the student's intelligence, vision, and knowledge. The team
of architects have, likewise, to produce a design that convinces as a sound and
pleasing physical structure and as an environment for activities, and present
their ideas by similar visual means. But they have to convince on many other
grounds, too, which require different sorts of presentation. The claimed cost
must be justified by the presentation of itemized pricing and calculations, and
the time line for completion by the presentation of evidently realistic estimates
of the time needed for the stages of the process. Ability to manage the project
must be demonstrated by a display of knowledge of what is involved. The
professional team, therefore, need to deploy different sorts of warrants (Toul-
min, Reike, & Janik, 1979-see chap. 3) in support of their case for being
awarded the contract; in Aristotelian terms, the nature of their proof needs to
WORDS TO BRICKS 179

be different, and this implies the production of different sorts of manifestations

for presentation: figures, lists, and schedules, for instance, as well as drawings.
They also do what the student neither could nor would be allowed to do, namely
make a strong appeal on the basis of ethos (in rhetoric, the speaker's own
character) by creating a sense of their credibility, reliability, and trustworthi-
ness. They do this by various means, including the professionalism and, where
appropriate, visible expensiveness of their presentation, but principally by
appeal to track record. A great deal of work typically goes into a document,
mainly written but often illustrated, that enumerates the firm's successful past
contracts, competition successes, awards and so on, and seeks to establish a
proven ability to deliver buildings that are pleasing and that meet the three key
criteria: "on time, on price, no leaks."
Of the two main branches of professional activity, therefore, the securing of
contracts and the bringing about of buildings, the one which appears to share
with school activity an ultimately persuasive purpose is actually very different
in the means deployed. The student's presented "proof' has to stand or fall by
its internal character, without much chance of deriving advantage from appeals
to his or her character and experience or from artfully speaking to the known
emotional disposition of the critical audience (Aristotle's pathos). The profes-
sionals typically make both those appeals; their activity might accordingly be
said to be more comprehensively rhetorical than that of the student. To put that
more generally, the professional activity is more social, not because the school
project is not embedded in social relations but because in making their case the
professionals address their persuasive task by working on a wide range of
interpersonal motivations and histories, rather than relying solely on the idea-
tional content of their proposal.
A greater degree of sociality is, thus, evident in the professional activity,
securing the contract, which most resembles student work. It is inescapably and
pervasively evident in the other main activities that take place after the contract
has been obtained, namely the designing of buildings or modifications and the
management of construction. This work is social mainly in requiring the
contributions of many individuals and institutions for its accomplishment. The
activity also enacts a different mode of the practical. If securing the contract is
a practical pursuit in the sense that rhetoric is always practical (in seeking to
affect a social state of affairs), designing and constructing the building are
practical in the sense of bringing about physical rather than social and personal
states. The collaboration involved in that achievement is still dependent,
however, on skilled rhetorical action on the part of the architect, both within
and outside the practice and through both spoken and written means.
180 CHAPTERS

CONCLUSION

Unlike students and unlike writers in the government financial institution,

architects have considerable formal power, exercised through language: for
them, "saying makes it so," at least at certain critical points. Much of their
interpersonally oriented writing has performativity, bringing about the states of
affairs it names; architects "hereby" advise, recommend, and order. But language
with this sort of legitimate effectuality does not inherently have to be written,
and not so long ago often was not; the architect would go on the site and simply
say what needed to be done-if the builders did not already know from their
craft knowledge and experience. Writing has reached its present inflated scale
largely as a result of the relentless progress ofbureaucracy as the dominant mode
of organization in modern times, and comes at times to resemble the "iron cage"
that W eber20 described in this connection. Hence the proliferation of systems
of genres, the whole days spent writing and the rows of filing cabinets full of
preserved papers that will mainly never be looked at again.
If anything, however, despite the mindlessness of much of the writing they
have to do, the architects we observed seemed to be less oppressed by their
writing tasks than do many students in their university courses. We attribute this
to certain qualities that the participants pointed out in this particular office; we
have little idea how widely they are found in other practices too. Role definitions
here are fluid and personnel move between a variety of responsibilities. Formal
qualifications and titles (such as "technologist") seem minimally constraining.
Thus, somebody trained in specification writing as a technologist finds himself
or herself engaged in the delicate work of"architectural description" in proposal
writing. Consequently, we think that all the players in the office have a wide
know ledge of and considerable commitment to the overall project of "the firm's
work." We can put this in Activity Theory terms. Working in this office seems
to mean, to the participants, getting good buildings made, whereas in more
alienating environments the activity may be more narrowly defined as, for
instance, plowing through this pile of specs. In the sort of office we studied,
intrinsically uninteresting writing doesn't get more interesting but may become
more tolerable when the writer identifies with some larger purpose.
If the office seems a good environment for motivated and productive work,
it is also, and by the same token, a good place to learn; and the opportunity to

20 "Feeling, spirituality, and moral values would shrink in importance as societies constructed

an increasingly restrictive 'iron cage' of BUREAUCRACY in every area of social life, from
religion to education to work to the Jaw." From the entry on Max Weber in Johnson (1995).
WORDS TO BRICKS 181

learn in tum enhances motivation and commitment. The junior architects

universally mentioned access to the diverse skills and experience of the three
partners as a great advantage for their own professional development, not least
in writing. None of the younger practitioners seemed to have had an education
that seriously attempted to prepare them for the range of writing they would
have to do at work; but this did not matter because the office was a good school.
Novices learned by practice, by eavesdropping, and by having their drafts
reviewed by more experienced writers. Principles of writing were, it seems,
rarely made explicit, and what the junior would learn in an exchange about his
or her text with one of the partners would be as much about the personalities
and sensitivities of clients and other addressees as about getting the genre right;
but from these experiences of collaboratively adjusting texts to the acutely
observed characteristics of the various recipients, the younger writers would at
the same time be absorbing more general lessons about the rhetorical fine-tun-
ing of documents for audiences, things that it would probably be impossible to
extract and teach in propositional form.
The role and forms of writing in the architectural workplace could hardly be
more different from writing in the school of architecture, or indeed in the
university in general. For the students whose activities were reported in chap.
5, writing was the vehicle of the epistemic work of thinking through design
problems and learning to think within an architectural discourse. Much of the
work in the office is necessarily epistemic also; a great deal of thought goes
into the production of a design. The difference is that in the office this work, in
so far as it involves language as well as sketching, is done either in the head or
in conversation, and hardly ever in writing. And whereas students have to work
out and present their theoretical ideas in more formal papers, the practitioners,
although their work no doubt draws tacitly on theory and critical argument,
rarely have the time or the pretext to write their thinking down in extenso.
The scale and range of architects' writing, however, impress us as far more
significant in their contrast with school. Students get little experience of
collaboratively writing long documents of great complexity (often through
collaboration with other parties outside the office, such as consultants based in
different firms around the city), of writing that impacts on a situation in
multifunctional ways, saying different things to different readers, or of writing
that is implicated in power relations, either as the vehicle of the exercise of
power or as the hostage to fortune that draws financial and legal retribution
from others in power. Students do not give orders to others, go on record as
making recommendations, sign certificates of payment for thousands of dollars,
adjust their writing in the light of the known backgrounds and foibles of a whole
182 CHAPTERS

cast of important other players, put documents meticulously away for indefinite
storage, or get out of trouble by retrieving 5-year-old documents from dusty
files. They do not have to insert their writing into the middle of tangled
intertextual webs and chains of speech, writing, and drawing, nor, above all, do
they see writing, fed into a situation, instigating massive financial flows and
titanic physical operations with cranes, trucks, earthmovers, tons of materials
and armies of differentiated workers. The writing done in the architects' office,
tedious and fiddling though much of it is, always seems to absorb meaning and
dignity from the grandeur and buzz of the whole enterprise, those characteristics
that keep the junior practitioners turning up and working late night after night
for little pay. Architecture finally seems satisfying because it is felt to be "real
work," an evaluation that works it way down into all its contributory activities,
including writing.
 IV
TRANSITIONS
How, then, can students move successfully from the academic writing de-
scribed in Part II of this book to the complex rhetorical environments of the
workplace portrayed in Part III? What school-based or on-the-job experiences
might help students make the transition?
Many students, of course, appear to have no bridging experience; they move
from term papers, essays, book reviews, examinations, and lab reports to
professional writing without benefit of much explicit or formal instruction.
Their rhetorical acumen allows them to relearn writing when they switch from
the epistemic social motives of academia to the instrumental social motives of
the workplace. They learn, it seems, by jumping into the rhetorical pool and
swimming.
A veteran social worker and current faculty member in a school of social
work offers this succinct view of how students learn to write workplace texts:

I think the way they learn to do it is in their field of practice, because they learn
what they need to write for whatever they need to write wherever they are ....
Certainly, I learned my writing skills in practice. I mean, I had to. I've had to do
case reports, I've had to do briefs to the government, I've had to analyze policy,
I've had to apply for grants. You know, you look at your audience, and look at
how one presents to that audience, and then you learn how to write for that
audience. You learn from experience, I think that's the way you learn it. I don't
know how much of that can be taught.

183
184 PART IV

On the other hand, we have often heard complaints about this tacit process
of instruction by immersion or osmosis. Many practitioners seem to feel that
students should already know about professional writing, and frequently decry
the lack of attention to workplace writing in professional training programs,
and complain about the time it takes to teach newcomers how to write on the
job. Students, too, criticize universities for failing to prepare them for the
demands of workplace literacy. For their part, many academics, unfamiliar with
nonacademic texts and contexts, argue that it is the responsibility of the
workplace to provide the appropriate setting for learning about professional
documentation. Yet others recommend the use of case studies to introduce
students to the rhetorical demands of the workplace.
In our research, we have observed several university-based writing experi-
ences that helped bridge the gap between school and work. We have also
observed workplace-based writing experiences that allowed newcomers to
develop quickly and effectively the professional literacy required on the job. In
the chapters that follow, we consider a number of such experiences, in which
students moved toward workplace realities by experiencing approximations of
professional practice. These experiences may be seen as points on a continuum
of situated learning that describes a movement away from school and into the
workplace. Though all learning is situated, the examples we present demon-
strate the profound and varied ways in which context influences the activity
and outcomes oflearning. In chapter 9 we present in finer detail those theoretic
notions alluded to in chapter 2 that are relevant to understanding the contextu-
alized learning of new genres, and in chapter 10 we describe in some detail a
range of transitional experiences between academic and professional life,
experiences shared by many who take a traditional route through school to the
workplace.
 9
STUDENTS AND
WORKERS LEARNING
As described in chapter 2, a new field in psychology has emerged in the past
decade, variously called situated learning, socially shared cognition, everyday
cognition, or situated experience. A primary focus of this new field has been
on knowing and learning, but these terms have been redefined so that they carry
very different meanings from those held within traditional studies of cognition.
In fact, this new field is not so much cognitive science as a response to cognitive
science as currently conceived. Fundamental to this work is the notion that
knowing is social, not in the sense that one mind transmits knowledge to
another, but rather in the Vygotskian (1978) sense that the source of intraper-
sonal cognitive functioning is the interpersonal.
The field of situated learning, however, is not unitary. Although the impor-
tance of both social and collaborative performances in learning is commonly
recognized, scholars and researchers understand many of the key notions
differently. The commonalities underlying this field are these: learning and
knowing are context-specific, learning is accomplished through processes of
coparticipation, and cognition is socially shared. Given these commonalities,
however, there are different streams within the literature. Lave (1991) has
specified three different theories of "situated experience." In the first, the
"cognition plus view," researchers simply "extend the scope of their intraindi-
vidual theory to include everyday activity and social interaction.... Social
factors become conditions whose effects on individual cognition are then
explored" (p. 66).
The second, the "interpretive view," "locates situatedness in the use of
language and/or social interaction" (p. 63). Furthermore, "language use and,
thus, meaning are situated in interested, intersubjectively negotiated social
interaction" (p. 67, emphasis added). Individuals work together hermeneuti-
cally, through (largely verbal) interactions, toward a shared understanding,
within contexts where they are each or all actively engaged.

185
186 CHAPTER 9

Both the first and second theories are limited, according to Lave, in that they
"bracket off the social world" and thus "negate the possibility that subjects are
fundamentally constituted in their relations with and activities in that world"
(p. 67). The third theory, "situated social practice" or, where appropriate,
"situated learning," includes the interpretive perspective along with an insis-
tence that "learning, thinking, and knowing are relations among people engaged
in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured
world'' (p. 67). A qualified version of this latter perspective informs our
analysis.
Fundamental to that perspective is the recognition of the degree to which
human activity is mediated through tools, especially that most powerful semi-
otic tool, language. In his discussions, Wertsch (1991) emphasizes the need to
complement situated learning with Bakhtinian notions. W ertsch emphasizes in
particular the way in which speakers ventriloquate portions or aspects of their
ambient social languages in attempting to realize their own speech plans. All
our words are filled with, and are echoes of and responses to, others' words.
(To quote Bakhtin, 1986, "No-one breaks the eternal silence of the universe"
[p. 69].) Our utterances are dialogic responses to earlier utterances as well as
anticipations of our listeners' responses. The relations are multiple, complex,
shifting, and dynamic. They demand and reward engagement and attention.
They involve notions of complex interplay between an individual's free speech
plans and the speech genres available, between an individual's own utterances
and the ambient social languages.
The literature on situated learning has produced (at least) two analytic
perspectives from which such learning can be viewed: Rogoffs (1990, 1991)
"guided participation," and Lave and Wenger's (1991) "legitimate peripheral
participation." Although these two perspectives have not been developed as
alternatives to each other, they do in fact foreground different aspects of the
learning process. In our analysis of instances of situated learning, the two
perspectives mark the beginning and ending of a continuum of learning that
plots a movement out from the home to the school and into the workplace.
Rogoff (1990) uses the term guided participation to describe the learning
process or cogniti+e apprenticeship that primarily middle-class children expe-
rience in their homes. (Elsewhere, Rogoff ( 1993) contrasts guided participation
with aspects of child rearing in non-middle-class homes ["Guided"; see also
Heath's 1983 Ways with Words].) In Rogoffs (1990) view:

Guided participation involves adults or children challenging, constraining, and

supporting children in the process of posing and solving problems through
material arrangements of children's activities and responsibilities as well as
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 187

through interpersonal communication, with children observing and participating

at a comfortable but slightly challenging level. The processes of communication
and shared participation in activities inherently engage children and their
caregivers and companions in stretching children's understanding and skill ....
[and in the] structuring of children's participation so that they handle manageable
but comfortably challenging subgoals of the activity that increase in complexity
with children's developing understanding. (1990, p. 18)

This perspective echoes notions like scaffolding and Lev Vygotsky' s ( 1978)
"zone of proximal development" (pp. 84-91 ): that space where a learner can
perform an action (cognitive or rhetorical) along with a skilled practitioner but
not alone. The assumption is that, by so performing the act along with the
practitioner, the child will later be able to operate alone: the intersubjective will
become intrasubjective.
Guided participation can be contrasted with the learning that Lave and
Wenger ( 1991) call legitimate peripheral participation, a process that charac-
terizes various forms of apprenticeship, from that of Vai and Gola tailors to
Yucatec midwives, and butchers' apprentices to newcomers in Alcoholics
Anonymous. Central to all these forms of apprenticeship is their focus on
something other than learning. Apprentices and masters, or rather newcomers
and oldtimers, are both involved in activities that have a purpose above and
beyond the initiation of newcomers. The tailors, for example, learn by becom-
ing involved in making real garments. In all the instances, the activity as a whole
has an end other than the learning of its participants.
In both processes, however, the newcomers do learn. The two processes are
similar in three very important respects:

1. Both are based on the notion oflearning through performance or engage-

ment, "learning through doing," as one of the instructors in our research kept
repeating, as opposed to earlier cognitive notions oflearning through receiving
bodies of knowledge. "The individual learner is not gaining a discrete body of
abstract knowledge (s)he will then transport and reapply in later contexts.
Instead, (s )he acquires the skill to perform by actually engaging in the process"
(Hanks, 1991, p. 15, emphasis added).
2. Both processes are social: instructors and learners collaborate, in a broad
sense, and one result is that learners are able to do something at the end that
they were unable to do before.
3. In both, learning is achieved through sociocultural mediation of tools and
especially linguistic and other semiotic signs. Also, in both kinds of learning
the learners do not fully participate. The conditions for performing are attenu-
188 CHAPTER 9

ated; only some of the task is given over to the learner, and this attenuation
(generally a subtle and highly nuanced attenuation) allows for the learning.

On the other hand, there is at least this radical difference between the two
processes: in guided participation the goal of the activity itself is learning; in
legitimate peripheral participation the learning is incidental and occurs as part
of participation in communities of practice (COP), whose activities are oriented
toward practical or material outcomes. This difference has important conse-
quences, as we shall see.
In this chapter and the one that follows, we compare various contexts and
conditions that support processes of situated learning. We use the termfacili-
tated performance to refer to the circumstances and activities that facilitate
learning in university, and to distinguish it from Rogoffs guided participation;
we use attenuated authentic participation to refer to the closely supervised
learning opportunities that students and newcomers experience when they first
enter the workplace, and to distinguish that experience from the near-profes-
sional practice of legitimate peripheral participation during apprenticeship.
We should note that the movement from guided to legitimate participation
does not describe a necessary developmental trajectory (although many people
will experience this movement as a sequence as they move toward autonomous
professional practice). Rather, facilitated performance and attenuated authentic
participation mark occasions or modes of situated learning that fall between the
learning focus of guided participation and the institutional pragmatics that
govern legitimate peripheral participation. The echo in the names is intended
to acknowledge their sources; the difference in wording is intended to reflect
the fact that we use these terms in more specialized and possibly narrower ways
than those intended by the originators. In what follows, we contrast the contexts
and conditions that allow for different types of learning.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CONTEXTS

FOR LEARNING

Object of the Activity and Place of learning

The most striking difference between learning at school and learning at work,
one with far-reaching implications, is that the object of the activity in the school
context is clearly and explicitly for students to learn (with learning to write as
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 189

a route to, or specialized instance of, learning). In contrast, the workplace

operates as a COP whose activities are focused on material or discursive
outcomes, and in which participants are often unaware of the learning that
occurs.
Freedman, Adam, and Smart (1994) illustrate the degree to which learning
and the learner are the foci of the writing tasks assigned in a university class,
even when these tasks were presented as simulations of workplace situations,
and the reports elicited ended with recommendations for action. As shown in
that article, the real goal of the writing was neither action nor policy, but rather
the demonstration that students knew the appropriate arguments to make in
order to ground appropriate claims in the relevant arenas (as circumscribed by
the nature of the course content). Both students and instructors understood that
this demonstration oflearning was the goal of the writing. This was contrasted
with the action- or policy-orientation of workplace writing produced in the
research unit of a government institution.
One consequence of this difference in the goals for the writing is that, in the
workplace, our own research and that of others has repeatedly shown that it is
often unclear to newcomers that they must learn, let alone what and how they
must learn, and from whom they can learn. In the government agencies where
we observed, newcomers often asserted that they did not think that they would
need to learn to write differently. (See also MacKinnon, 1993.) And when the
supervisors were asked whether they considered the novices' learning to be one
goal of the tasks they assigned them, their response was an unequivocal: "Hell,
NO! They can learn on their own time." (As it turned out, these very supervisors
were expert masters and mentors; they simply did not think of learning as
implicated in the enterprise because it was not their explicit focal goal.)

Role of Authenticity

Another way of illuminating this difference in orientation is suggested by the

following. A key criterion of success in an internship relates to the degree to
which the learner sees the task as authentic-that is, one that has consequences
in its context. One intern we observed expressed his frustration over being
assigned a "make-work project," one that his coworkers did not see as relevant
to the operations of the office and whose ultimate audience was as undefined
for his supervisor as it was for him. In chapter 10, we hear disaffection expressed
by an intern in social work whose supervisor gave him work that seemed
unrelated to the real work of the department. "I was essentially isolated from
the team," he complains, and thus he cannot see the work as authentic. In the
190 CHAPTER 9

school context, in contrast, any task is seen as authentic insofar as it is assigned

by the instructor. From the perspective of the classroom, simulations are as
authentic as academic essays or lab reports or book reviews.

Attenuation

In the workplaces we have observed, the assignment of appropriate authentic

attenuated tasks to newcomers required skill, subtlety, tact, and imagination on
the part of the oldtimer, especially given the complex and multifaceted nature
of the work environments. Not every mentor was up to that challenge. Some-
times, newcomers were given routine tasks at the outset, much to their frustra-
tion. At other times, however, tasks considerably below the ability and
professional orientation of novices were assigned as a way of allowing them
enough time to observe the complex operations. More imaginative oldtimers
were able to provide interns with authentic and more challenging tasks imme-
diately on their entry, tasks that were both within the competence of very green
newcomers and that engaged them in processes that ultimately enabled fuller
participation. For example, one intern was asked to take minutes at a round of
negotiations; the task was authentic and necessary, it was in her ken, and it
allowed her to observe the complex dynamics of the negotiating process as well
as giving her an overview of the whole activity in which her work was to play a
part. Observing the negotiations helped her understand how the different parts
of the task she would be involved in related to the whole. It also opened her eyes
to the dynamics of negotiating as well as to the competing value systems at play.
Reflecting on this initial task in her placement, this intern emphasized the
value of this experience in that it was relatively easy, familiarized her with a
"government format" (notes to file), emphasized the importance of accuracy,
"showed them you know when to ask for help," and provided an opportunity
to find out about the context of the meetings. A second intern was asked to
compare in detail different sets of land claim agreements: the point-for-point
careful (and later collaboratively performed) comparisons introduced the new-
comer to the whole activity, and engaged the newcomer in thinking through
andreorganizing the relevant issues by operating on the discourse that was one
material outcome of the activity.
The necessity to involve newcomers in authentic attenuated tasks, however,
has certain consequences for the nature of the involvement, consequences that
distinguished such learning sharply from school learning. These include both
the improvisatory quality of the learning opportunities in the workplace in
contrast to the carefully sequenced curriculum possible in the classroom as well
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 191

as the relative messiness of the workplace context in comparison to the

simplified and facilitated context of the classroom. Further consequences arise
as attenuation is decreased and newcomers engage in the near-autonomy of
legitimate peripheral participation; for example, learning opportunities often
occur after performance of tasks, when newcomers and oldtimers review work
already completed.

Improvisatory Quality of learning Opportunities

One consequence of the necessity for authentic participation is something noted

by Lave and Wenger (1991) and observed frequently in our work: the highly
improvisatory character of the interns' tasks (as opposed to those in the
classroom, where a curriculum can be more or less planned in advance-allow-
ing for some degree of improvisation and responsiveness to learners). Conse-
quently, we saw the intern described being pulled away from one task in order
to prepare a briefing note for a newly elected government minister.
A negative consequence of the opportunistic quality of learning in the
workplace is that, because the tasks are authentic and respond to external
demands unrelated to a learner's needs, there are moments when the delicate
apportioning of parts of the task must be truncated, and-even in the best
internships-the master must take over. Sometimes, there are deadlines to be
met; at other times, the supervisor will suddenly find herself short-staffed. And
often, the supervisor cannot be certain that the intern can operate under the
added pressure. As one intern reflected, "he [the supervisor] would always think
about it first before he would ask for my involvement-to see if he thought that
I could function under that pressure. And ifhe thought I couldn't, he would do
it himself alone."
To put it another way, there is no possibility for carefully sequencing and
designing the course curriculum. The institution of schooling gives instructors
a degree of control, allowing them to sequence activities and to simplify tasks.
(For example, in an undergraduate law course, we were struck by the sophisti-
cation ofthe sequence of the tasks, such that-among other things-the textual
analyses showed increasing degrees of syntactic complexity and genre realiza-
tion over the course ofthe year (see Freedman, 1990, 1996).

Messiness of Work Context

As suggested in other studies (Freedman et al., 1994; Dias & Pare, in press) and
in the next chapter, even in a university course in which case studies are used,
192 CHAPTER 9

and even when the case studies are not invented but based on actual histories,
there is enormous simplification and abstraction from the untidy realities of the
everyday world as experienced. No matter how much irrelevance and ambigu-
ity these case histories include, they are still abstractions from the experience
of the workplace-abstracted in order to facilitate learning. As Corey (1976)
writes:

In spite of [their realism], it is true that they are not, after all, actual business
situations. First, the information comes to the student in neatly written form.
Managers in business and government, by contrast, accumulate facts and opin-
ions through memos, conversations, statistical reports, and the public press.
Second, a case is designed to fit a particular unit of class time and to focus on a
certain category of problems, for instance, marketing, production, or finance ....
Third, a case is a snapshot taken at a point in time. In reality, business problems
are often seen as a continuum calling for some action today, further consideration,
and action tomorrow. (p. 3)

In other words, the noise is removed and the task is simplified and focused;
something like Bereiter and Scardamalia's (1987) procedural facilitation is taking
place. The tasks cannot be so simplified in the workplace. It is true that mentors
will often model their thinking about issues in such a way as to reveal to novices
how to limit and defme the problems. It is also true that newcomers may be assigned
only a part of the task. The task itself, however, cannot be simplified.
For example, the social and political relations in the workplace context are
considerably more complex than in schools, as we demonstrated in chapter 6.
Tensions between COPs and among oldtimers must be discerned and then
navigated. Some of the complexities of relations are evident in the following
extract where a supervisor explains to an intern why the two of them have been
having such a difficult time obtaining feedback on a document from a superior:
"She was not too concerned, because she was ticked off that she wasn't invited
to the meeting. That's why she wasn't consistent. ... So that was an obstacle to
my getting out of [her] what I was looking for." In fact, novices not only have
to determine whom to trust as a guide (as we will see), but they also must learn
to make that choice without alienating other would-be guides.

Guide-Learner Roles

A further difference between the two contexts for learning derives from the
differences in the roles of, and interactions between, guides and learners in the
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 193

two settings. The roles are more clearly defined in the school setting. The
teacher is designated as the authority for the duration of the interaction (recog-
nizing that this duration is relatively short). During internships and apprentice-
ships, roles are more fluid and indeterminate: there are new oldtimers and
old-oldtimers; fresh newcomers and more seasoned newcomers. Furthermore,
the expectation is that newcomers will become oldtimers; a possibility enter-
tained only in the fantasy of schoolchildren (in the context of specific classes).
One consequence of this phenomenon for novices in the workplace is that
they must learn to discern what their role is to be and from whom they can learn.
A phenomenon we observed in a number of settings was the resistance felt by
novices or interns to their would-be or could-be guides. Because in some cases
there was no clearly sanctioned institutional teaching authority vested in their
superiors, and because their supervisors were often relatively new oldtimers,
interns often resisted and consequently missed opportunities for learning. One
intern, for example, refused to acknowledge the opportunities for learning
offered by his supervisor, because of her relative "greenness." That is, he
incorporated her revisions to his draft of a document because he had to, but he
refused to acknowledge the appropriateness of, and hence to learn from, such
editing changes as "land claims" to "land claim agreements," which he kept
insisting to us were really synonymous.
Furthermore, as the different terms connote, the relations between oldtimers
and newcomers are far more complex, subtle, shifting, and nuanced than the
relatively stable and straightforward relations between professors and students.
The longer a novice remains in the workplace, the less attenuation is provided
and the more attention is shifted from learning to the performance of profes-
sional duties. To quote Hanks (1991 ), "legitimate peripheral participation is not
a simple participation structure in which an apprentice occupies a particular
role at the edge of a larger process. It is rather an interactive process in which
the apprentice engages by simultaneously performing in several roles-status
subordinate, learning practitioner, sole responsible agent in minor parts of the
performance, aspiring expert, and so forth-each implying a different sort of
responsibility, a different set of role relations, and a different interactive
involvement" (p. 23).
Our observations showed one intern taking on a range of these roles, all in
one morning: with respect to the use of technology, he was the expert; when
time constraints forced his supervisor to take control of the whole task, the
intern's role as a status subordinate was clear; for most of the morning, he
operated as a learning practitioner, working collaboratively, but in an attenuated
role, with his supervisor; at other points, he was named sole responsible agent
194 CHAPTER 9

for specific tasks (e.g., finding, and contracting work out to, a map-maker).
Later, in an interview with us, his supervisor kept stressing the degree to which
he, as mentor, learns from newcomers: not only the most current academic
theory but also different approaches to complex internal social and political
relations.

Evaluation

Earlier we emphasized the fact that school writing is learning-oriented and

learner-oriented. To be fair, one must acknowledge the equally pressing insti-
tutional reality: to evaluate and hence to rank students. While the instructor's
focal goal is that her students learn, that goal is limited by the equally pressing
need to grade and rank. This means that, in the end, the university professor has
a vested interest in a quality spread, something that necessarily qualifies and
limits the degree and the nature of the mentoring and collaborative performance
possible. The guide-learner roles in the university are affected by the fact that,
in the end and at every point, the guide evaluates the learner.
In the workplace, the shared goal of both newcomer and oldtimer is the
production of the best texts possible. There is some evaluation in the workplace,
of course, but it is far less frequent and pervasive. And as the newcomer moves
toward professional practice-that is, from attenuated to legitimate participa-
tion-the oldtimer's role as evaluator is gradually diminished. Eventually, for
specific tasks, newcomer and oldtimer are on the same side, working inde-
pendently or together on a task that will be evaluated by some outsider, and
evaluated often in terms of its rhetorical or material success-in persuading
others, in effecting action.
One consequence of this is that there is no use of tests and grades, and sparse
use of praise and blame. Performance is evaluated by the overall success of the
endeavor-the success of the writing, for example, as a rhetorical or social
action. One of the interns recognized that his success in producing an initial
document had earned him his supervisor's trust and he was then given more
significant tasks. "So it was a big test," he said. The reward for success was that
novices were entrusted with more responsibility and riskier tasks.

Sites of Learning

Perhaps the most striking distinction between the school and the workplace as
contexts for learning, however, is that the sites and moments for learning in the
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 195

two settings are quite different. Consequently, when students move from
university to workplace, because they are alert to one kind of learning, they do
not necessarily recognize the opportunities for learning in the new setting.
In the classrooms we observed, the performance was always facilitated as
follows: there was a great deal of careful stage managing of the prompt, of the
task, and of the discursive context. The writing itself took place either alone,
or occasionally in collaboration with peers, with an occasional visit to the
professor or teaching assistant for advice. The final submission of the paper by
the students almost always meant the end of their involvement with the task.
In the workplace, the initial task itself was less controlled and shaped by the
guide; typically, it was initiated and constrained by external sources. There was
some collaborative interpretation of the task and often collaborative perform-
ance of the task at some stages of the writing. But the most significant difference
was that completion of the draft meant the beginning of a long process of
iteration.
The most important site for learning in the workplace, as a result, comes
during the kind of extensive feedback described by Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller
(1985) as "document cycling": "the editorial process by which [supervisors]
helped staff members restructure, focus, and clarify their written work" (p. 285).
Smart (1993) describes the typical process in a government agency that we
observed:

In all genres, composing processes are structured by a similar cycle of writer/re-

viewer collaboration. Typically [after composing a draft for review], the writer
incorporates rounds of spoken and written feedback from the supervisor into
successive revisions until the latter is satisfied. At this point, another round of
collaboration usually occurs, involving the writer, the supervisor, and a more
senior reviewer. As the collaborative cycle continues, unnecessary technical
detail is filtered out, key concepts are defined, and the argument becomes
increasingly issue-centered, coherent, and succinct. When the chief of the depart-
ment decides the text has been refined sufficiently, it is sent to its executive
readership. (p. 131)

The intensive and extensive nature of the feedback offered at each stage is
suggested by this description offered by a senior executive at a government
financial institution we observed:

When you do things at [this agency], it's a process that someone writes a paper
(and it's an important paper-other than a one-pager or two-pager), when they
write you a paper, you read it first from a high level-find out if the ideas are
there, are the arguments consistent. So, when someone does something for me,
I say well, "yeah, you're kinda on the right track." And I say, "Go back and try
196 CHAPTER 9

this, try that." So, it doesn't get down to the nitty-gritty ofthe writing at this point.
You're still at the, almost the methodological stage, trying to deal with the
question that's being posed. And so you go through a number of iterations. The
person will come back with the paper answering a different question or adding
another question to the analysis and it's not until the very end that we'll say,
"Now I know all the ideas are there, now I'm going to read it from the perspective
of how it's written, are the ideas now expressed clearly."

Another way of looking at the differences between the two settings is this:
in the university context, most of the contextual shaping and co-participation
took place before the preparation of the first draft; at the workplaces we have
observed, although some collaboration took place during the generating and
planning, the draft handed in to the supervisor marked the beginning of a long
and intense process of responding and revising, a process during which attuned
learners could intuit the expectations of the genre in that context and institution.
The important point to note is that all the comments are collaborative, not
evaluative. The revising itself is an intense period of co-participation where
learning could and should take place.
Complicating the fact that the site for learning is different, especially at the
revision stage, is the interference from their previous learning patterns that
suggests that anything written in response to a draft by a grader is evaluative
and final. For these novices entering the workplace, then, the comments written
on their drafts often meant negative evaluation and evoked resistance, rather
than being recognized as opportunities for learning (and further collaborative
performance). The implication of this is that workplace newcomers need to
learn to learn again.

LEARNING TO LEARN AGAIN

There is considerable evidence in our research (Freedman, 1987, 1990; Freed-

man et al., 1994) and that of others (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Herrington,
1985; McCarthy, 1987; Walvoord & McCarthy, 1993) that university students
are expected to learn new genres as they move from class to class. Such learning
is both so inevitable and so naturalized that it is hardly commented on by the
students (Freedman, 1987). Consequently, in moving to the workplace, the
same expectation seems to hold: there may be new genres to be learned, but the
modes of learning will be the same. (See initial assurance expressed in Anson
& Forsberg, 1990; MacKinnon, 1993.) However, after some time on the job,
there are commonly reported feelings of disjuncture and anxiety quite different
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 197

from those experienced in their schooling (Anson & Forsberg, 1990; Freedman
& Adam, 1995; MacKinnon, 1993). It is our claim that these feelings are not
so much due to the need to learn new genres (such as memos, briefing notes,
reports)-something they have been doing regularly throughout their school-
ing-but rather due to the need to learn new ways to learn such genres.
Popken (1992) writes about the particular problems associated with dis-
course transfer. What we observed was a related problem: inappropriate transfer
of learning patterns. Many newcomers we observed did not think that they
would have to learn at all-and certainly not in new ways. For example, one
intern, Julie, viewed each task as though it was set in a university context, with
its clearly defined beginning and end, and its clearly demarcated occasions for
learning (in class and through assignments). Consequently, she consistently
insisted on "getting on with her work," rather than availing herself of the
learning opportunity offered her every day by the supervisor who invited her
to take a short walk with him and another intern. Every day she refused the
opportunity for shared reflection on and learning about what had been happen-
ing in the complex political and social rhetorical context of their workplace. It
was during these walks that a previous intern had learned how to "read" and
interpret the meetings, the interactions, as an insider.
Julie consistently missed these opportunities, misconstruing them as new
assignments, rather than as occasions for learning. "I didn't know I was
expected to go to that meeting," she said resentfully, when invited to a meeting
that would have given her a broader picture of the activity as a whole, and thus
would have clarified her specific task. "Was I supposed to come?" she asked
under her breath in annoyance. In other words, Julie was still mentally situated
in the school context, where specific tasks are set out in clearly defined ways,
in the context of clearly defined discursive environments (i.e., the assigned
readings and the three or four hours a week of lecture and/or seminar).
Another kind of "failure to learn" was evinced by Curtis, who, as described
earlier, resisted learning from his supervisor because he felt that she was too
"green" an oldtimer, and that her comments in revising were simply matters of
personal stylistic preference. Thus, Curtis refused to recognize the legitimacy
of changing "land claim agreements" to "land claims," a distinction central to
the operation of that particular office. "I'm not making an effort .... They' re
going to edit it anyway."
This theme was echoed by a number of interns. Rather than learning from
the revisions suggested to their work, revisions to wording that often signified
a great deal about how this particular culture viewed the world and the
distinctions that were important there, the interns chose to see these changes as
198 CHAPTER 9

idiosyncratic personal preferences that they were being forced to accept but that
they could resist learning from. Asked about what she had learned from her
supervisor's comments, one intern reflected: "I don't feel so much that it's the
government way versus my way. It's just my way and Gill's way and Sandra's
way. And my way isn't wrong, and when I'm the Director, I'm gonna write the
memo however I want to." One fundamental difference in the two contexts
studied, and a key to understanding the learning disjunctures experienced by
some newcomers, is the value placed on individualism in the university culture,
as opposed to the more collaborative ethos of government agencies and other
workplaces. (A negative view would substitute the words "anonymous" or
"leveling" for "collaborative.") In the end, all university students are graded
individually, even when they collaborate on specific assignments. Transfer of
this individualist ethos sometimes interferes with the kind of collaboration
necessary for performing and learning in the workplace. There was a kind of
egotism in the early interviews with novices or interns: "It's my style, why
should I have to change it?" This is exacerbated by the fact that studen~s are not
expected to revise their papers in response to their professor's written comments
accompanying the grade. The comments are there to justify the grade, rather
than serve as an invitation to revise and resubmit.
Furthermore, there is a difference in the nature of the ownership. At least in
theory, students' ideas belong to them. Writing a paper is not a shared enterprise
between student and professor, and professors are often criticized for plagia-
rizing from students in a way not conceivable in a workplace. As suggested in
Freedman et al. (1994), writers in the government workplace we have observed
rely heavily on intertextual references to each others' work (sometimes cited,
sometimes not). Employee writing is kept on file, often for frequent consult-
ation; student writing is filed, if at all, at home, and rarely consulted thereafter.
To sum up: in both contexts, the learners learn new genres. The two processes
are similar in very important respects: both are based on the notion oflearning
through performance or engagement-learning through doing, as opposed to
earlier cognitive notions of learning through receiving bodies of knowledge.
What is entailed for the "teacher" in each setting is, in Hanks' (1991) words,
"not giving a discrete body of abstract knowledge" but, instead, creating
opportunities where people can learn "to perform by actually engaging in the
process" (p. 14).
Common to both contexts as well is the careful control of the learners'
involvement and engagement. In each case, the conditions for participation are
attenuated: in school, the curriculum is sequenced in terms of order of difficulty,
and student performance is facilitated in myriad ways; in the work place, at
STUDENTS AND WORKERS LEARNING 199

least initially, only some of the task is given over to the learner, and it is this
attenuation (and generally a subtle and highly nuanced attenuation) that allows
for the learning. That is, what is learned is learned through activity and through
social engagement: instructors and learners collaborate, in a broad sense, and
one result is that learners are able to do something at the end that they have
not done or been able to do before. In addition, learning in both settings is
achieved through sociocultural mediation of tools-especially linguistic and
other semiotic signs.
On the other hand, there is this radical difference between the two processes:
in one case, that of school-situated facilitated performance, the goal of the
activity itself is learning; in the workplace, through processes of attenuated
authentic participation, the learning is incidental, and occurs as an integral but
tacit part of participation in COP, whose activities are oriented towards practical
or material outcomes. The upshot is that, whatever the commonalities, when
students leave university to enter the workplace, they not only need to learn
new genres of discourse, they need to learn new ways to learn such genres. The
two kinds of processes, while sharing certain fundamental features, are different
enough that the transition from one setting to the other poses particular
problems and senses of disjuncture, anxiety, or displacement. These feelings
are inevitable, given the nature of the institutions, and not signs of student or
school failure.

CONCLUSION

The distinctions we make in this chapter and the next between facilitated
performance, attenuated authentic participation, and legitimate peripheral par-
ticipation allow us some degree of precision in categorizing and analyzing
incidents of situated learning, but the differences between these categories often
blur. Thus, if we focus only on the relationship between, and the actions of,
newcomers and oldtimers in work settings, we may very well find a kind of
collaborative guidance through performance that is at least broadly similar to
such guidance in school settings. And more formal learning opportunities in the
workplace may place apprentices in situations that are virtually indistinguishable
from classroom situations. Alternatively, one can find examples of school
interactions that attempt to approximate more closely those of COPs, where the
learning is intended to be like that found in instances of attenuated authentic
participation or legitimate peripheral participation (see Gutierrez, 1994, Rogoff
1994). There are, after all, classes in which tasks with real-world consequences
are selected and where students work in collaborative groups of peers.
200 CHAPTER 9

Without denying the value of such experiments, nor the possibility of seeing
in some mentor-novice relations in the workplace interactions that resemble
facilitated performance, our claim is that it is very useful to continue consider-
ing facilitated performance, attenuated authentic participation, and legitimate
peripheral participation as distinct in important ways, and in ways that privilege
no one above the other, but rather reflect the institutional constraints and
societal needs expressed in each.
From the perspective of institutional constraints, we must acknowledge,
however uncomfortable it may be, that the institutional realities of schooling
militate against a total appropriation of the apprenticeship model. A pervasive
goal of schooling (not the only goal, but an inevitable one) is that, by the end,
students be ranked or slotted. Hubboch (1989) and Petraglia (1995) have each
commented on our discipline's deep discomfort with that reality: but denial is
a poor refuge. At the very least, this need to grade and evaluate contaminates
the relationship between students and teachers, at least to some degree. They
may be locked in Elbow's (1986) "embrace of contraries," but at least one pole
of the contraries is a push against the kind of collaboration and shared intention
that is possible in the workplace.
On the other hand, although we may chafe at these constraints and seek different
kinds of interactions, we should acknowledge as well the advantages of schooling,
which also have become normalized through their tacitness. Schools do offer the
opportunity for an uncontaminated focus on learning and the learner-uncontami-
nated by concerns for results or material outcomes. This allows for a kind of
teaching that is perhaps not possible in the workplace, one which involves
sequencing of curriculum and close attention to the learner's pace.
Our choice of the terms performance versus participation has allowed us to
highlight an important contrast. Schools indeed do provide occasions for
students to perform, with the attendant implications of display and attention.
We must remember, though, that the attention is directed to the learner and the
learning-so much so, in fact, that the nature and the degree of facilitation and
orchestration are often invisible, even to researchers.
In contrast, the workplace privileges participation: collaborative engage-
ment in tasks whose outcomes take center stage, and where the learning is often
tacit and implicit. A subtly different alignment and attunement is at play. Guides
and learners play different roles, with differently nuanced strategies for the
necessary attenuation of tasks. Our use of attenuated participation and legiti-
mate participation allows us to distinguish between levels of autonomy, and
points to the newcomer's gradual and subtle move toward professional practice,
a transition we explore in the following chapter.
 10
VIRTUAL REALITIES:
TRANSITIONS FROM UNIVERSITY
TO WORKPLACE WRITING
In this chapter we consider contexts for learning that further exemplify the
theoretical discussion provided in the previous chapter. We have argued that
learning is a situated and contingent experience, and that school-based simula-
tions of workplace writing fail to prepare students for professional writing
because they cannot adequately replicate the local rhetorical complexity of
workplace contexts. By this we do not mean to suggest that course-based case
studies are a waste of time, but the goals of such learning opportunities need to
be reexamined, especially as they relate to the development of professional
writing ability. We believe that course-based case studies provide an essential
introduction to the ways of thinking and knowing valued by disciplines and
encouraged by the rhetorical practices of those disciplines. In order to learn
about professional writing, however, that introduction must be followed by
more extensive and integrated workplace experiences, such as work-study
programs, internships, on-the-job training, and other forms of transition be-
tween school and work.
The learning continuum proposed in chapter 9 describes a range of
experiences that provide ever greater distance from the deliberately fash-
ioned educational contexts of the school and ever greater integration into
the improvised and often spontaneous learning opportunities of the work-
place. (Note: Although the movement from facilitated performance to le-
gitimate peripheral participation does capture the professional development
of many who pass through school and into the workplace, it is not a required
sequence; some people learn their practice entirely within the workplace,
without benefit of the careful scaffolding of facilitated performance.) In
describing that transition, we have used the terms facilitated peiformance to
refer to the conditions and contexts for teaching and learning in universities,
attenuated authentic participation to point to the early stages of closely moni-
201
202 CHAPTER 10

tored and supervised learning in the workplace, and legitimate peripheral

participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to describe the activities that lead to
learning for newcomers who have achieved some degree of autonomy in their
workplace involvement.
As the learner moves out from the classroom toward professional prac-
tice, the moments and sites of learning become less clearly defined, and
certain key features of learning and teaching change. There is a gradual
increase in the authenticity of tasks; that is, their consequences and their
influence on others and on activity escalates, and there is a parallel growth
in their complexity or messiness: workplace tasks lack the exact moments
of beginning and ending, the stated evaluation criteria, and the sharp divi-
sions of labor that usually characterize school work. At the same time, there
is a steady decrease in explicit attention to learning and in the degree of
guidance or attenuation provided; students move from close supervision to
autonomous practice as they make the transition from school to work. There
are, too, subtle shifts in authority and expertise between learner and teacher;
in school, the power and knowledge imbalance is marked, obvious, but
newcomers to the workplace often bring certain kinds of expertise (technical,
theoretical) that oldtimers who supervise them do not have. A similar shift
occurs in terms of evaluation; in school contexts, the learner is evaluated by
the teacher, but in the workplace the apprentice and supervisor are assessed
together, because newcomer and oldtimer often work as a team. Underlying
these changes is a shift from the epistemic function of school writing (the
individual student's construction ofknowledge) to the collective epistemic and
instrumental goals of the workplace (the construction and application of insti-
tutional or community knowledge).
In this chapter we look at students learning to write in and for different
contexts, some in school, some at work, and some in between. Although the
writing tasks in the first two contexts attempted to simulate or suggest aspects
of the rhetorical contexts of professional writing, neither could escape their
ultimate location within an academic setting. And, it should be noted, neither
was presented as an opportunity to learn how to write professionally. Writing
in the school contexts was at the service of learning the discipline's values,
beliefs, and ways of knowing. Learning occured in the workplace as well, but
there writing was at the service of the community. The first three settings
described below mark points on a trajectory away from the school and into the
workplace; the last, which we describe in greater detail, represents a final stage
on that continuum. Our analysis of each stage demonstrates the extent to which
learning is contextual and contingent.
VIRTUAL REALITIES 203

LEARNING TO WRITE AT SCHOOL

As explained in the previous chapter, the theoretical frame that accounts for
how students learned to write in the university disciplinary classes we observed
is best captured by the term facilitated performance. Our argument is that this
frame, based on Rogoffs (1990) notion of guided participation, accounts for
how university students learn discipline-specific writing in much the same way
as guided participation accounts for early child language acquisition or cogni-
tive apprenticeship in middle-class homes.
The most salient commonality is that the guide in both cases, caregiver and
teacher, is oriented entirely to the learner and to the learner's learning. In fact,
the activity is being undertaken primarily for the sake of the learner, and
although the conventions of neither writing nor language are explicitly taught,
they are learned because of the carefully shaped context. There is a focused and
centered concentration on the learner and the activity which is quite different
from what we see in the instances of workplace-based learning described below
(and that, as we noted in the previous chapter, is quite different from what
Rogoff [1993] and Heath [1983] reported in non-middle-class child-rearing).
Not only is the guide's attention focused on the learner, but the whole social
context has been organized by the guide for the sake of the learner. Rogoffs
caregiver organizes the storytime experience in much the same way that the
instructors we observed orchestrate their courses (within certain temporal,
spatial, organizational constraints): readings are set, lectures are delivered,
seminars are or are not organized, working groups are or are not set up,
assignments are specified-all geared toward enabling the learners to learn
certain material.
Further, students did not, in the courses observed, learn to write new genres
on the basis of explicit direction by their guides (the instructors and teaching
assistants), except in the crudest terms with respect to format, length, and
subject matter (Freedman, 1993). Nevertheless the writing was shaped and
constrained from the first meeting of the course-that is, from its specification
on the course outline and, more significantly, from the first words uttered by
the instructor.
Our observations of these classes, and the students composing for them,
revealed that learning new genres in the classroom came about as a result of
carefully orchestrated processes of collaborative performance between course
instructor and students: the students learned through doing, and specifically
learned through performing with an attuned expert who structured the curricu-
lum in such a way as to give to the students more and more difficult tasks. The
204 CHAPTER 10

instructor both specified the task and set that task in a rich discursive context.
Both the collaborative performance and the orchestration of a richly evocative
semiotic context enabled the acquisition and performance of the new genres.
At the beginning of a course in Financial Analysis, for example, the instruc-
tor assigned cases to be written up at home and then he himself modeled in class
appropriate approaches to the data, identifying key issues and specifying
possible recommendations for action. As they attempted to write up the cases
themselves at home, the students were "extremely frustrated" because "you
have to do a case before you have the tools to know how to do it." "It's like
banging your head against a wall." However, the modeling in class, especially
in the context of the students'struggles to find meaning in the data themselves,
gradually enabled the students to make such intellectual moves themselves. At
the beginning, "when he would tell us the real issue, we're like-where did that
come from?" Then "When you're done and he takes it up in class, you finally
know how to do it!" Modeling what the students would later do themselves, the
instructor presented a number of cases at the beginning of the course. Like the
mother with the storybook, the instructor showed the students first where to
look and then what to say, picking out the relevant data from the information
in the case:

"What's the significance of7 and 8 in the text? Did it add to your thinking about
this case?"
"At what market share restriction would that growth strategy not work?"
"Assuming best case scenario, what will this company look like in 5 years?"

He constructed arguments, using the warrants of, and based on the values
and ideology valorized in, the discipline. Drawing on the simulated purposes
for the case, he pointed to the importance of looking at and presenting infor-
mation in particular ways:

"As a consultant to the bank, is this a critical value to know?"

"In real life, you have to quantify this relationship between business risk and
financial risk."

After students began presenting the cases themselves orally in class, he pro-
vided corrective feedback:

"Walk people through how you thought about the problem."

"Let people know what the agenda is and your role."
VIRTUAL REALITIES 205

Gradually students were inducted into the ways of knowing, that is, the ways
of construing and interpreting phenomena, valued in that discipline. That is,
although they were learning a school genre that bore little resemblance to
workplace genres, they were beginning to participate in the type of thinking
encouraged by the rhetorical practices of their discipline.
We see in facilitated performance many of the elements specified by Wood,
Bruner, and Ross (1976) as functions of the tutor in scaffolding (as quoted in
Rogoff, 1990, pp. 93-94). The task is defined by the tutor; the tutor demon-
strates an idealized version of the act to be performed; and the tutor indicates
or dramatizes the crucial discrepancies between what the child has done and
the ideal solution. These processes of collaborative performance offer part of
the answer to how the students learned to write the genres expected of them. In
addition, the instructor set up a rich discursive context, through his lectures and
through the readings, and it is through the mediation of these signs that the
students were able to engage appropriately in the tasks set.
Wertsch (1991 ), drawing on Bakhtin, talks of the power of dialogism, and
of echoing (or ventriloquating) of social languages and speech genres. The
students that we observed responded-ventriloquistically-to the readings and
the professor's discourse, as they worked through the tasks set for them.
Initially, they picked up (and transformed in the context of their preexistent
conversational patterns) the social language or register they had heard. Here
are oral samples culled from the students'conversational interchanges as they
worked on producing their case study:
Allison: I figured this is how we should structure it. ... First, how did they
get there is the first thing.
Peter: So that's ...
Allison: Business versus financial risk or operations versus debt. Whatever
... Then ... like we will get it from the bankers' perspective.
Peter: Yeah, that's pretty much like what I was thinking too.
Allison: So, right now I have their thing before '78. How do you want it,
pre-'78 or post-'78? This is what I did. I went through all ....
Peter: Internal comparison and stuff.
******
Allison: I guess the biggest thing is the debt-to-equity ratio. Notice that? X
has way more equity. If you look at Y, their equity compared to
their debts is nowhere near, it's not even in the ballpark.
Peter: Which company is it that took a whole bunch of short-term debt?
Then, in the writing of their papers, the conversational syntax, lexicon, and
intonational contours of their conversational exchanges disappeared, as they
206 CHAPTER 10

reproduced the discipline-specific terms in the context of academic written

English, achieving, thus, the written social register designated by their professor
as that of a "financial analyst" (see Freedman et al., 1994). In the final draft of
a case study, we find the following:

Short-term debt restructuring is a necessity. The 60% ratio must be reduced to

be more in line with past trends and with the competition. This will be achieved
by extension of debt maturities, conversion of debt to equity, reduction of interest
rates, as well as deferral of interest payments.

In other words, through the mediation of and appropriation of the social

languages provided by the professor's discourse and the readings, the students
created the new genres expected of them: ways of knowing became ways of
saying. The epistemic social motive of school is met when the professor
determines that the discipline's knowledge and ways of knowing are satisfac-
torily displayed in the completed text; then, a grade is assigned and the text
reaches closure.

BETWEEN SCHOOL AND WORK

It is possible to distinguish between school-based attempts to introduce students

to disciplinary ways of knowing, such as the case-study assignment described
above, and those fuller immersions that occur when students balance their time
and attention between the classroom and a workplace. Various forms of such
an arrangement may allow students to make forays into work settings, receive
visits from practitioners, handle professional documentation, and address actual
workplace issues and problems, all in the context of a particular course.
Evaluation in these situations, even when there is consultation with practitio-
ners, is primarily an instructor's responsibility. Typically, students in this type
of course prepare reports for the workplaces they visit, and representatives of
the workplace may be invited to hear and respond to oral presentations of
student research results. (Such an assignment is described in chap. 4.)
One of the most successful of this kind of learning experience that we have
observed occurred in a 4th-year course in systems analysis. The course engaged
students in writing that, in contrast to the simulation of a case study, succeeded
in giving them a real experience of workplace discourse, though it was a highly
scaffolded and protected introduction. However, as with the case study, there
was no explicit writing instruction in the systems analysis course, and no stated
intention to teach workplace writing.
166 CHAPTER 8

The construction phase, too, requires tactful writing and "delicate phrasing,"
as when Dudley has to tell a client that he needs to pay extra because some item
was missed in the specifications:

When you get into construction, that's when you're writing letters to the client
explaining why he's got to pay an additional $10,000 on a job [because of some]
omission on the contract documents or something has developed on site that
wasn't anticipated, so you have to revise things. "It's going to cost you even
more," so you have to explain to him why.... So there you have to get into a bit
more delicate way of phrasing your information.

Writing is a demanding challenge for architects in part because of the

complexity and extensiveness of the social relations in which their work is
implicated. Architects have to deal not only with each other and the technolo-
gists within the parameters of seniority (partner, associate, other) and the
permanent and ad hoc (i.e., project-specific) division of labor, but also with
outsiders, the numbers and roles of whom vary with the type and size of job,
and transactions with whom vary according to the party's relative status in the
project. Thus clients and public authorities who call the tune and have to be
dealt with tactfully and persuasively constitute one category. A second is
co-participating professional colleagues such as other architectural firms, en-
gineering consultants and lawyers, and independent actors such as materials
suppliers who provide information and advice. A third group comprises parties
who are under the architects' authority, such as contractors and their subcon-
tractors. The speech acts, spoken and written, that issue from the architect
reflect these relationships and vary from delicate solicitation and artful persua-
sion of those with power, through businesslike consultation and negotiation
with equals, to the direct instructing of subordinates. The contrasts are most
stark in the written documents; in spoken exchanges between, say, the architect
and the contractor's supervisor on the site, the peremptoriness of the written
instruction (as we shall see later in the chapter) is considerably softened; tact
and courtesy need to oil the wheels even when formally the architect is in a
position simply to give orders.
Although architects generally do a surprising amount of writing, some jobs
involve far more writing than others. What makes the difference is not just the
size but also the complexity of the job. In this office the most complex jobs
were modifications of existing buildings. Unlike a new building, of which only
the final aimed-at state need be represented in the documents, modifications
involve drawing and writing to show both the current and the final intended
state of the building and the procedures that will lead from the one to the other.
VIRTUAL REALITIES 207

The systems analysis course was organized as follows: every year that she
teaches the course, the instructor finds six client-organizations who need to
have their systems analyzed and redesigned; a total of 30 students are allowed
to register, and students are selected by competition; the students are divided
into groups of five. Criteria for nomination to specific groups include the
following: each group is assigned someone with a background in accounting
and another with a background in computing, as well as someone who has a
car. A cardinal rule is that friends are to be separated, so that students gain
experience working with people that they are not already familiar with or even
fond of. Each group is assigned to a separate place of work, and must conse-
quently solve the specific problem in that work environment. In order to do so,
and in the course of doing so, they produce the following three kinds of
documents:

1. a problem definition document (on the basis of a feasibility study);

2. systems specification document (on the basis of their systems analysis),
which includes several alternatives as part of the structured specification;
3. a general design document.

In order to perform these tasks, students must go to the workplace to

interview a range of practitioners there, the range determined by the needs and
possibilities of that specific work environment. At the first interview, they are
accompanied by the course instructor, who guides the interview when necessary
and spends considerable time going over what was learned with the students
involved.
In addition, each group reports back to the class as a whole three times, giving
oral versions of their drafts of each of the three key documents. After these
presentations, they receive feedback from the class, hand in their written
document to the instructor, and then, at a separately scheduled interview,
receive intensive feedback from her as to appropriate revisions. Sometimes
further interviews with her are necessary. When she is satisfied, a written
document is presented to the client, sometimes accompanied by an oral pres-
entation, if the client so desires. The course is a half-course, the timeline is
carefully spelled out at the beginning, and nothing is handed in late.
Clearly, this is school work with a difference, and that difference is the dual
exploitation of both the academic and workplace settings. The workplace adds
some critical features to the learning context. Perhaps most importantly, it
provides authentic tasks. As the professor said about this course (Duxbury &
Chinneck, 1993), "the process involves coping systematically with the com-
208 CHAPTER 10

plexities of the real world, including both human and technological limita-
tions." Students have to "limit the area of study, abstract essential features,
subdivide a complex whole into parts of manageable size and model a real
system to show the relationship among its components." As opposed to tradi-
tional lectures in systems analysis and design, which give the students a
tremendous amount of technical information, this course conveys the real-
world people skills needed to be a good systems analyst. The communication
skills, diplomacy and other human issues are not easily transmitted in a book
or in the classroom.
Students gain experience in handling ambiguous situations and in develop-
ing solutions subject to real-world constraints. Working with actual problems
also develops analytical skills and problem-solving abilities, gives an under-
standing of the importance of organizational influences on systems design and
the impact that a user-requested change has on the analysis and design process.
More specifically, the instructor lists some of the strengths of the program
as follows:

students gain a "more global perspective on the systems analysis process";

students "learn to work cooperatively in groups"; students learn to "critique each
other"; the task "enables students to integrate the knowledge gained from other
business courses."

In comparison to case-study writing, the writing in this course is situated

quite differently along the continuum that is mapped in Table 10.1. Like
case-study writing, this course is situated in an institutional context, to the extent
that it has a course number, it counts as credit toward a degree, and it is
constrained by the time limits of a single semester. But there are important ways
in which it is different, ways that are revealed especially when we think in terms

TABlE 10.1
Changing Aspects of Writing in Three Contexts
Case-Study School/Workplace Internship
1. audience: instructor; colleagues client; instructor supervisor;
2. social motive: epistemic epistemic; instrumental epistemic; instrumental
3. reader's concern: writer's knowing (value writer's knowing; value value to collective
to student) to client
4. knowledge: shared shared and new new
5. reader's goal: evaluation evaluation; ensure best ensure best text; apply
text knowledge
6. reader's comments: justify grade revision-oriented; revision-oriented;
response response
7. closure grade grade; indeterminate indeterminate
VIRTUAl REAliTIES 209

of the writing's double social motive, one served by the rhetorical exigences of
school work, the other by the exigences of the workplace.
Our analysis of student interactions, composing sessions, and drafts, shows
how the systems analysis course offered an interesting hybrid offeatures, a kind
of bridge across the gap between school and work. The audience was both
instructor and client. (The instructor was always the first reader and her views,
as evaluator, were always important. At the same time, the students always
referred to their clients and to their clients' needs and goals in their composing
sessions.)
One textual indication of the hybrid nature of this transaction was that
students kept having to adjust the amount of shared knowledge they provided:
as they went from presenting their documents to class and teacher to preparing
the document for their clients, they needed to revise the amount and kind of
shared information. A recurrent feature of their revision was the removal of
information that they could assume to be shared with their clients.
The social motive of the writing, like that of the workplace, was to recom-
mend real-world action. (On the other hand, an incidental or possibly auxiliary
purpose was always kept in mind: an epistemic goal for the writing was
recognized by both the instructor and the students in their discussions.) The
whole exercise was undertaken in order to learn how to perform in a real-world
setting, with real-world constraints. Contrast this with the response, cited in
chapter 9, of officers in a government agency who said with some degree of
irritation that their novice employees could "learn on their own time." (It's not
that learning does not occur; it's that no one sees this as an institutional goal.)
Perhaps the most revealing difference was the changed role of the teacher.
Rather than teacher as evaluator, the instructor functioned in the role of
supervisor: she collaborated with the students extensively. She accompanied
them to the first interview, and discussed the interview with them afterward,
carefully pointing to key features and eliciting appropriate understanding. For
each piece of writing, she both evaluated (gave a low grade at the beginning)
and wrote extensive suggestions for revision, insisting that they revise until they
produced the best possible text.
This points to a larger kind of difference. This writing that the students were
doing in the systems analysis course was different from typical student writing
in that the instructor regarded it as reflecting on her (and the institution) in much
the same way that a subordinate's writing in the workplace reflects on the
manager. This stands in sharp contrast to most instructors' attitudes toward their
students' writing, which is considered to reflect on the students' rather than the
teachers' competence.
210 CHAPTER 10

A related point, explored more fully in chapter 4, is that instructors have a

vested interest in a quality spread: it is indeed important that there be some A's
(as confirmation that the appropriate teaching has taken place), but it is equally
important that there be many B's and C's. Something that underlies all univer-
sity activity, and that so easily becomes invisible to us in its normalcy, is the
institution's function as a gatekeeper. This function is not incidental, something
that we must contend with from time to time and can ignore until the actual
time for reporting grades; it is pervasive and powerful, shaping the dynamics
of the rhetorical exigence in ineluctable fashion.
The writing we observed in the systems analysis course describes a midway
point in the gulf between academic and workplace settings. Though based in
the university and shaped by some ofthat institution's epistemic motives, the
writing was very much like that of the workplace-in the social roles taken on
by writers and readers, in its sense of audience, in its textual features (e.g.,
shared information, surplus of corroborating detail), and most markedly in the
responding and collaborative reading practices of its first reader, the instructor,
who served as a guide to the realities of workplace rhetoric, much as a
supervising practitioner might. Finally, to return to our comparisons in Table
10.1, we have observed that case-study writers feel closure when the grade is
given, and the texts cease to have importance (and often physical existence) at
that point. For the systems analysis course, the writing was graded as well, but
its existence was not entirely shaped nor ended by that grade: the documents
led a continued and indeterminate existence in the clients' workplace. Like
written documents we had observed in other workplace settings, their comple-
tion indicated their entry into a larger arena where their continued physical
existence as documents along with their potential for material consequences
could only be guessed at.
The systems analysis course provides a useful perspective into workplace-
university differences. At the same time, it points as well to other kinds of
programs (not so directly university-based) that might allow for easier and more
easily scaffolded transitions to authentic workplace writing contexts: sheltered
co-ops, work-study programs, and internships like those described below.

LEARNING TO WRITE AGAIN:

ATTENUATED AUTHENTIC PARTICIPATION

Another step away from the university typically locates students in an actual
workplace, and involves them in what we have called attenuated authentic
VIRTUAL REALITIES 211

participation. During this stage, students work alone, in pairs, or in small groups
with a single supervisor. In some cases, interns are evaluated both by university
and workplace supervisors, but for the most part the work they do and the texts
they author belong to the workplace community. The interns that we observed
learning the genres appropriate to the government agencies and social work
settings to which they were assigned went through processes that, in some ways,
were fundamentally similar to those entailed in the university settings. Common
to both kinds of learning was the fact that learning took place as a result of
collaboration, in the widest sense, or shared social engagement, as well as the
fact that this learning took place through the mediation of sociocultural tools
(primarily, but not solely, linguistic signs). There were important differences,
however, and these differences are all the more significant for being tacit and
implicit, complicating the transition into the workplace, and requiring that
students learn in ways quite different from the ways they normally experience
in classrooms.
The attenuated authentic participation that characterizes initial workplace
experiences includes certain essential components: real but limited tasks, timely
assistance, a grasp of rhetorical purposes, and a big picture or overview of the
community. In addition, such participation, based as it is in the workplace rather
than in the university, must offer the newcomer a sense of membership or
belonging and the opportunity to play multiple roles in a variety of workplace
relationships. When all these factors are in place, the newcomer is drawn toward
mature practice.
We have noted that the participation of newcomers influences the workplace
community in ways at once more obvious and more subtle than do course-based
work projects, such as the systems analysis course described above. We believe
this is a defining characteristic of situated learning in the workplace, marking
it as essentially different from school-based learning experiences. A frequent
form of influence can be found in the interaction between newcomers and their
workplace supervisors (the oldtimers who usually volunteer to work with
students). Eileen, one such oldtimer, said: "I still enjoy the feedback from the
students and the sharing. I don't really see it as a one-way .... I feel I get a lot
back in return." Other comments from supervisors:

I also find that [supervision] helps me to keep fresh in a way. Students obviously
see things in a new kind of way and when you've been working in the field for
30 years you tend to see things in one way, so that I find that it keeps me thinking,
stimulated. (Risa)
I told her [a social work intern] that I felt when we had joint interviews that I
learned from her because it was a different perspective. Questions that she may
212 CHAPTER 10

have thought of asking I just haven't. And also when you're in practice for so
many years, sometimes you get quite stuck and you handle interviews the same
way. And she was fresh and new and just out-just in school, actually-and the
theory is so down pat. (Eliza)

Newcomers also influence the workplace community as a whole. Whereas

the work done as part of course-based projects, including student-authored
reports, may well be ignored or little valued in the workplace, the work of
interns generally contributes to the community's efforts. Newcomers bring new
ideas and theories, new approaches and practices, and these can alter the
community. When newcomer participation results in a contribution-a mean-
ingful contribution, one that affects and changes the community-newcomers
experience a sense of belonging, a sense of membership. This last point is
critical. Along with Lave (1991), we see a developing sense of membership as
essential to effective workplace learning: "Developing an identity as a member
of a community and becoming knowledgeably skillful are part of the same
process, with the former motivating, shaping, and giving meaning to the latter,
which it subsumes" (p. 65).
The following scene, reconstructed from field notes, is authentic and cap-
tures this process of joining the community, as well as many other significant
features of workplace learning. Any extended analysis and commentary is in
square brackets. The setting is a Canadian government office; Douglas is the
learner and Richard is his mentor or supervisor.

Douglas and Richard are observed as they respond to a sudden request to prepare
a briefing note on the state of a particular set of negotiations for a new government
minister. [Political events such as the appointments of new ministers often
interrupt the anticipated flow of business in Canadian government offices.
Mentors or supervisors must improvise, if they are to include the learners in the
new tasks. Both must be agile.]
Douglas and Richard are standing in front of a desk which has a pile of previous
briefing notes and reports on these negotiations. Their task is to develop a new
briefing document, summarizing succinctly what the new minister needs to know.
The two discuss the potential content in global terms, brainstorming on a
whiteboard, and then they sit down to write. Richard suggests that they work
collaboratively. Douglas understands this to mean dividing up the task in two,
with each taking responsibility for one half. [Presumably this reflects his notion
of collaboration, based on what passed for collaboration as it was undertaken in
university.]
Richard corrects this misconception, explaining that he means that they will
actually produce the whole text together: the two of them sitting together to
VIRTUAL REALITIES 213

generate and compose text, with one person assigned to do the actual inputting.
There is some joking and jockeying about who will do the inputting, but Richard
decides that Douglas's superior expertise in word-processing (he can use Win-
dows) warrants his taking the seat in front of the computer. [It is not untypical
in the workplace for novices to display superior expertise in relevant skills.]
The two proceed to formulate and reformulate text together, with Richard taking
the lead and providing feedback to each of Douglas' suggestions, but at the same
time constantly eliciting suggestions and listening carefully to Douglas' com-
ments about his own suggestions. The two respond to each other conversationally
in a series of half-sentences, which reveals the highly interactive nature of the
interchange. Each half-sentence responds to and builds on the previous, so that
the product becomes more and more jointly generated. [This kind of interactive
generating and composing between a guide and Ieamer is hard to imagine in a
school context, even in a tutoring center. The co-participation often reaches a
flow at which it is difficult to determine who is suggesting which words.]
Complicating this interactiveness further is the interaction with already extant
texts. Each suggestion for the new text is based in large part on the briefing notes
and reports that are already available in the documents in front of them, with the
words and phrases being modified, echoed, reaccentuated, qualified. [These
earlier texts are cultural artifacts, which have been shaped by, and encode, the
cultural practices and choices of the organization as it has evolved to that point.
In Bakhtin's terms, the words in the new evolving documents are being echoed
from the earlier ones, and reaccentuated in the light of the current "speech plan,"
so that the words become reinfused with slightly different meanings. This
dialogism and mediation through cultural artifacts is true of university writing
and hence learning as well, but without the complicating factor of the intersub-
jective activities of guide and Ieamer.]

What we are seeing here is persons-in-activity-with-the-world as medi-

ated through the technological tools (word-processing software) and the
cultural artifacts available. The newcomer joins the network of distributed
cognition. There is a hermeneutic grappling with notions, and it is some-
times difficult to discover where one thinker's processes ends and the other's
begin, and where the new speech plan begins and the influence of older
cultural artifacts recedes.
In order to begin feeling like a member of the community, especially in large
institutions, social work student interns must quickly gain a picture of the entire
collective endeavor and their own place in it. This picture includes the intricate
and subtle geography of place and politics: the physical and organizational
structure of the community. In the complex world of a large general hospital,
for example, this geography includes all of the areas of specialized care, the
laboratories, the wards, the hierarchy of the disciplines and individuals that
214 CHAPTER 10

inhabit the institution, and the community's network of complementary and

conflicting interests. Eliza, a hospital-based social work supervisor, explains:
"I find for the first ... month there's an enormous amount of time spent really
just orienting [students] to a hospital situation because that in itself is a complex
world." She continues: "What I do is have them go to as many staff meetings
and as many of the structured kinds of things that are going on on the unit as
possible at the beginning, both staff and patient things, so that they're sort of
inundated with people and things happening."
The. key to this orientation process is total immersion in the community's
activities. Initial learning happens while newcomers are simply observing, or
"sitting by Nellie," as it was called when apprentices observed veteran factory
hands in the early days of industrialization (Clews & Magnuson, 1996).
According to a social work newcomer, Natasha, "my first two weeks was a lot
of observation: attending rounds, being introduced to people, and a few meet-
ings." Newcomers are not told what to look for or what to learn; instead,
"they're sort of inundated with people and things happening." The questions
that arise belong to the students, and the supervisors answer them when the
students need answers.
But early in their field placements, most social work students become more
than passive observers at meetings or interviews: they respond to telephone
calls, research available community resources, speak to medical staff. In short,
they are included in community life, rather than studying it from afar. The
supervisors we have interviewed spent little or no time preparing students
before sending them on errands, giving them small tasks, bringing them to
meetings or other events, and asking them to observe elements of practice.
Indeed, most had nothing that could be called a deliberate curriculum, or even
a set sequence of activities that constituted a learning path.
It is within the workplace community's public settings and in contacts with
individuals from other professions in the hospital that the social work newcom-
ers begin to feel like members of their own social work community and of the
larger institutional community. They begin to learn the rituals and dynamics of
community practice, the subtle tensions of institutional power and influence,
and-most importantly for our purposes-they begin to learn about writing.
That is, they begin to learn how, where, what, when, and why language occurs
in the multiprofessional context of the institution. They participate in the
heteroglossia of hospital life, the many specialized discourses about patients.
They begin to learn what doctors, nurses, therapists, lab technicians, and
psychologists care about, and how their own concerns are in concert or conflict
with others. They begin to learn who can speak, when they can speak, and what
VIRTUAL REALITIES 215

they can say. They begin to enter the complex social world in which social work
texts must operate, the world described in chapter 6.
When supervisors sense that this process has begun, they increase the
newcomer's participation by turning cases over to the student. This case load
is authentic, because newcomers work with actual people who have real
problems, and attenuated, because the cases are not critical or overly difficult
and supervisors step in to do or help with some aspects. As we noted in the
previous chapter, learning is incidental and occurs as part of participation in the
community of practice (COP), whose activities are oriented toward practical or
material outcomes. Instruction is secondary to, or a byproduct of, institutional
activity. In a sense, there is a reversal of the traditional order of instruction;
rather than preceding performance or application, as is usual in school, teaching
in the workplace often occurs during or even after the accomplishment of new
tasks. As Eileen, a supervisor, noted: "After we do things, particularly do things
together, [we] sit down and try to dissect things and I tell him, When I did that,
this is what I was thinking." For such teaching to be successful, the oldtimers
who act as field educators must carefully engineer and monitor tasks.
As social work interns move out of the initial stage of orientation and
observation, and take on the beginnings of a case load, they must begin to
produce the regular and occasional documents required by mature practice. In
most agencies and institutions, this includes referral forms, assessments, pro-
gress reports, transfer and closing summaries, and all the usual rhetorical flora
and fauna of institutional life: memos, letters, government forms, and so on.
According to Colin, a supervisor: "Students who come here . . . should be
expected to write all the different reports. It shouldn't be that they're following
these cases but don't take on the paper work side of it and only do the clinical
side. They should take on ... all the different dimensions of what it means to
be a social worker."
Newcomers receive very little advance assistance with this sort of task,
although they receive as much feedback as they need, when they need it. Some
scaffolding is provided, in the form of a format and some detail, but the
newcomer is left to write the report, which must then be cosigned by the
supervisor (following a collaborative revision process described below). Inter-
views, information searches, telephone calls, and other information gathering
is done by the newcomer, closely monitored by the supervisor. Much of what
is learned in this process is not addressed explicitly. Although we have seen
workplace settings where some discourse practices are codified as guidelines,
most rhetorical lore is implicit: for example, perhaps no one uses first-person
pronouns in certain documents, but that interdiction is nowhere in print and
216 CHAPTER 10

cannot be traced to an authority. A major means of passing along this sort of

rhetorical regularity is the practice of sending newcomers to the files to look at
previous examples of required documentation, usually under the guidance of a
supervisor. A supervisor in a group home for adolescents, Colin, describes the
place of files in the abrupt transition from school to the "real world":

[Students would] be assigned anywhere from three to five cases within the first
week or two. And then they'd be told to go and look at the file and to pull the
file and to look through and they would see the different~ kinds of reports that
they're expected to do in there .... We basically try and get the students to handle
the normal responsibilities of the social worker .... I guess the way I see it, you
have to. In some ways, this is a kind of experience to the students of what it's
like in the real world.

Reliance on existing texts realizes some of the key criteria for a successful
transition, both for the individual and for the community: the newcomer gets
to model the texts produced by oldtimers, thus emulating mature practice, and
the community gets to reproduce itself, while being revitalized by the unique
contributions of each newcomer. Again, no explicit discipline-wide, or even
agency-wide, policy on training appears to be in effect, and yet supervisor after
supervisor does the same thing: sends the student newcomers to the files.
Supervisors are careful to exploit the newcomer's early struggles with aspects
of practice, because they offer what teachers often call "a teachable moment":
a fortuitous opportunity to offer guidance. Eliza, a supervisor, explains: "Well,
I think my basic philosophy is that you, as much as possible, try to allow the
student[s] to go with it on their own, to have as much freedom-unless they
run into, or you feel they're going to run into, real snags, at which point you
intervene, or help, or support, or do for, or whatever." Again, opportunities to
write appear to be apt moments for introducing newcomers to the subtleties of
community life and practice, and a form of "document cycling" (Paradis,
Dobrin, & Miller, 1985; Smart, 1993) provides plenty of opportunities, as this
excerpt from an interview with Natasha, a student, indicates:

I would do my assessments, [the supervisor] would look at them and then give
me her feedback and suggestions and, uh, areas that might be reworked or what
have you. So it was essentially like that: [the supervisor] sort of like corrected
me, "here's it back, and let's talk about it and discuss."

In the workplace, as Natasha points out, the emphasis is different: "Some-

thing that we highlighted as a goal, in our initial contract, was to look at my
writing and improve my writing skills. You know, not so much the grammar
VIRTUAL REALITIES 217

and the spelling, but the skill of writing in the field." Certainly, the rhetorical
sophistication described by Glenn, a student newcomer, in the following
interview excerpt seems tied closely to particular workplace circumstances:

I began to learn how to be more concise, more focused in my writing. My

supervisor at the [agency] tried to teach me how to say a lot but not very much,
meaning, you know, there are certain innuendoes to what I was saying, urn, while
protecting certain things of confidentiality between myself and my client.

To "say a lot but not very much" demonstrates a rhetorical skill that cannot
be taught outside a context and practice in which those measurements make
sense. What constitutes an "innuendo"? For whom will the text "say a lot"
without saying "very much," and what is too much? What is the worker-client
relationship, and how would it be affected by breaking the standards of
confidentiality, some of which are universally prescribed by law and others
which are local and largely tacit? These are questions that have no answer
outside of particular circumstances, and the generalities about confidentiality
that are offered in a school setting are likely to mean little in the field, where
each worker-client relationship is different, and where the secrets of a person's
life are defined by who reads reports and for what purpose. These lessons, the
subtleties of culture, are learned in the centripetal pull of authentic attenuated
participation, as the newcomer gradually transforms into an oldtimer.
To sum up: typically, early in the newcomer's workplace experience,
learning takes place through engagement in active processes, guidance by
mentors, and mediation through cultural tools. In this respect, the learning is
like that of the university setting. What is different is the nature of the interactive
co-participation and collaboration between mentor and learner; the improvisa-
tory nature of the task; its authenticity and ecological validity in a larger context
(the institution and indeed society as a whole); and the varied and shifting roles
played by mentor and learner. Furthermore, there is no deliberate attention paid
to the learner's learning; all attention is directed to the task at hand and its
successful completion.

LATER STAGES: LEGITIMATE PERIPHERAL

PARTICIPATION

In a final stage between school and full mature practice, students in the
workplace begin to work autonomously. Even in their initial forays into the
field as undergraduates, social work students are often expected to take on a
218 CHAPTER 10

version of mature practice. Colin, a supervisor we interviewed put it this way:

"I'm a believer in trying to engage a student immediately in terms of doing and
participating in clinical work. So as soon as the student comes in, literally the
first day of placement, I have two cases on my desk waiting for her.... I think
that the most important thing to start off with is the case right away." When
social work students reach the senior undergraduate or graduate level and enter
their final field placements, or when they complete their programs and enter
the profession, their experience even more closely resembles traditional appren-
ticeship in professional practice. Guidance is decreased, responsibility in-
creased, and the newcomer blends into the community. This is the stage of
legitimate peripheral participation:

Once I began, my supervisor said, "Here's a case," gave me some background

and said, "Go ahead." To me that was great. ... I wanted to learn to ... have my
own style and this was a great way for me to do it. It was a learning experience
and I have achieved my goal. So, for me, that autonomy was good for me. (Kate)

As we note in the previous chapter, Hanks (1991) describes legitimate

peripheral participation as "an interactive process in which the apprentice
engages by simultaneously performing in several roles-status subordinate,
learning practitioner, sole responsible agent in minor parts of the performance,
aspiring expert, and so forth-each implying a different sort of responsibility,
a different set of role relations, and a different interactive involvement" (p. 23 ).
These factors were conspicuously missing from the following negative experi-
ence, a field placement that did not engage the newcomer Spiro in legitimate
peripheral participation:

In my experience at [agency], I was essentially isolated from the team. There was
no team to go to. Even though I was a "member" [gestures to indicate quotation
marks] of the team, I was not officially interacting with any ofthe team .... I think
that to feel you're on side you need to be with colleagues and to exchange clinical
impressions, to learn from others ... with their vast experience, I think, is
essential.
Q: Did you do any writing?
A: [Yes, but] it was very confusing because it wasn't clear as to what exactly
they wanted. So I would get back, you know, I would submit [the report] to my
supervisor and my supervisor would look at it and most of the parts were okay.
There were some parts that just needed total revision. Why I couldn't know this
beforehand is beyond me .... the expectations of my field work, my written work,
was I would say, generally unclear. So I think the demand is left up to trial and
error, I suppose .... But it never really clicks in until the time comes when you're
VIRTUAL REALITIES 219

actually writing it yourself and you know the family or you have a good
impression of where the family is at.

Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that learning is "an evolving form of member-
ship" (p. 53); learning is thwarted when the learner is isolated, as was the student
quoted above. He wrote a report and even received guidance from a supervisor,
but the writing was out of context, he was not a member of a community and
therefore had no role or responsibility, and the activity involved no authentic
interaction. Compare this to another internship experience (excerpts from two
interviews with the same student, Raymond):

The first two weeks I was completely disoriented. The hospital was very
intimidating to me. I was lost. I didn't know where to go and I didn't really feel
grounded at all, so I felt lost. ... But then when I got my first case, I was able to
feel a little more oriented and more like I had a role here.
[By] participating in rounds ... I'm understanding I guess the culture of it all.
I'm feeling a part of it more than an outsider.... The culture, you know, it's a big
system, and there's a culture that goes on; like in rounds talking about patients,
and the language that's used.... And I guess I feel validated in a way I guess, you
know, that what I'm doing, it's not just superficial, on a superficial level. ... now
I just feel more involved and more part of it.

Like Lave and Wenger (1991 ), we see this movement toward membership
as critical to the workplace learning experience. Knowledge is inseparable from
a sense of identity and a sense oflocation within a group; and knowledge-mak-
ing is always a collaborative activity. Engagement in the activities that produce
the group's specialized knowledge leads to membership in the group. Spiro, a
social work student we cited earlier, describes the collaboration:

Q: How are you learning to do [assessment reports]?

A: There are several ways .... assessment workers do the same thing: gathering
your information; gathering your data from the file material; doing interviews
with people that have been involved with the child-whether it's a child care
worker, a social worker, you get a different perspective on the problems; team
feedback, because I present the case and get feedback on it, and based on the
feedback we try to address the problems or the issues; and individuals-consult-
ation with [fellow student], for example.

Note the changes that occur in this student's account of! earning how to write
a regular agency document: initially, he reports what others do; then he switches
to the generic "you"; next he presents the case and gets feedback; and, finally,
220 CHAPTER 10

the team ("we") addresses the problem. Consider, too, the extensive interaction:
with other texts, with child care and social workers, with team members, and
with a fellow student. There is a sense here of membership, of working with
others in partnership. Spiro elaborates on his field experience:

We would have assessment team meetings, and there were various aspects within
the assessment process that needed some clarification. Besides, I did the first
couple of them with [fellow student] .... We basically shared a lot of ideas and
that was a very interesting process, that was. And we would pull our supervisor
aside, too, and bounce off ideas, and other colleagues. So we had resources. We
could access our team. We could access our supervisor. ... I was put, and [fellow
student] was put, in a situation where we have to respond ... not only to the family
but ... to the Director of Assessment-what the requirements, policies, and things
of that nature need to reflect. We have to respond to the Director of Professional
Services .... I think it's very important to respond to what the social worker needs
to know and what the child care worker needs to know. So, we're writing
basically to a family of professionals that need to know where to go with this
case.

Here, unmistakably, is a newcomer engaged in legitimate peripheral partici-

pation. He is a member of a team, operating as an equal (but still under
supervision), and he is situated within the network of actions, interests, and
individuals that constitute this COP. His tasks are no longer attenuated, and
though reports are still cosigned at this late stage, they are rarely much revised
by supervisors. The student's focus is on achieving a goal, on doing something
with his text, on performing mature practice.

CONCLUSION

Our observations of school and workplace learning and writing have made us
cautious about making generalizations. Clearly, learning is profoundly situated, as
is writing: learning to write in particular contexts is indistinguishable from learning
to participate in the full range of actions that constitute the activity in those contexts.
As we argued in the previous chapter, students who move from university to the
workplace and fail to recognize the differences in learning contexts and conditions
risk missing the point. However, as the discussion in this chapter makes clear, there
are ways to help student newcomers experience the practitioner's rhetorical life
and, in so doing, learn something about workplace writing.
A condition central to the experiences of professional writing described in
this chapter was their authenticity, or virtual rhetorical reality: the students in
the two workplace settings had a real impact, they actually influenced action.
VIRTUAL REALITIES 221

Another important and closely related condition was the primacy of instrumen-
tality. The students obviously learned something from their experience, but the
learning was secondary to, or a by-product of, the instrumental purpose of their
writing. Perhaps most importantly, the students' experiences were carefully
monitored, scaffolded, and controlled by oldtimers who took advantage of
specific moments of uncertainty or confusion to offer relevant advice. It is this
careful balancing between actual practice and timely instruction that we feel
characterizes successful transitions into workplace writing.
 11
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING:
UNIVERSITY AND
WORK COMPARED
In this closing chapter we return to the question we began with. What are the
relations between writing in university and writing in the workplace? It may
have struck readers that for a book about writing, surprisingly little writing, in
the usual sense of texts, gets quoted and discussed. But that, of course, reflects
the way we have had to refocus our operating notions of what writing is, in the
way that we explained in our first two chapters, toward a vision of a complex
network of activities in which composition represents only one strand. Even
the texts themselves, we have found, derive their meaning as much from the
activity systems in which they are embedded as from their denotational content.
Most of our attention and discussion has, therefore, focused on what surrounds
writing. Given our question, we should be concerned with writing-in-place; but
place takes on richer dimensions than we generally visualize: physical and
temporal location; social space (other actors immediately present and impli-
cated to various degrees; past or future actors, interested, mediating, on and off
the page), cultural-historical settings, institutional ways; the page itself, its
appearance and its place alongside other pages; text accompanying or within
graphical displays, texts as records in filing cabinets and on library shelves; and
virtual space, transient on screen but etched on disks and CDS and retrievable.
The theoretical concepts we have relied on for our explanations hint as well
at location: concepts such as situated learning, distributed cognition, genre as
social action, genre sets, legitimate peripheral participation in communities of
practice, and activity systems-concepts that contextualize writing. Writing, it
turns out and in a manner of speaking, will be known by the company it keeps.
Because writing is so bound up in situation, the title of this book is not as
hyperbolic as it appears. Writing at school and writing at work are indeed worlds
apart; and the lesson that can be drawn from that realization is on the face of it
considerably disconcerting. It seems reasonable to us that universities should
222
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 223

be expected, among other things, to prepare people for the world of work, and
not least for writing at work. Because with few exceptions writing is a medium
deployed in both worlds, such preparation is not an unreasonable expectation.
And it is precisely such an expectation that makes acting, the second term in
our title, critical. Writing is acting; but in Activity Theory terms, writing at work
and writing in school constitute two very different activities, one primarily
epistemic and oriented toward accomplishing the work of schooling, and the
other primarily an instrumental and often economic activity, and oriented
accordingly toward accomplishing the work of an organization. In that light,
one activity, writing in school, is not necessarily preparation for successfully
undertaking the other activity, writing at work. In such light also, we can argue
that both activities can function effectively in their respective systems without
necessarily bridging their two worlds.
One might legitimately argue that whereas the two worlds of school and
work are indeed apart, it is the people who cross between them who transport
and translate what they have learned as writers from one domain to the other.
Our book is an argument against (at least the facile versions of) such notions,
what Joliffe (1994) calls "the myth of transcendence." It helps here to recall
and adapt the phrase we cite from W ertsch in chapter 2 and to speak of the
writer not as an isolated agent (or of writing not as an isolated act) but as
person-acting-in-context-with-cultural-tools (primary tools such as language,
but also architectural drawings, scholarly journals, word-processing programs
and analytical software, clients' records, the telephone, and fax). Such tools
carry with them stored knowledge, ways of acting, generic information that
prescribes or makes convenient certain ways of writing and precludes others.
Such tools again place the writer: whether writing alone or with others, the
writer is in a role, is situated in an organization or institution, among people, in
a dialogic relationship with other texts, constrained or extended by the writing
instruments-on computer within an electronic network, for instance-or by
the physical setting, at a desk within an institution with supervisors who oversee
one's writing, within a cultural setting where writing is one other means of
making one's mark or the sole means, within communities that impose a history
of genres, institutional values and habits; in social settings with other writers
where text is communally created; or on the borders of intersecting and often
conflicting activity systems or communities of practice (COPs). As one of the
titles of a chapter in Dias and Pare (in press) suggests, we write where we are.
Location, it would appear, is (almost) everything.
But people do move between those worlds of school and work; so we need
to ask how we might act in university settings to ease the transition from writing
224 CHAPTER 11

as a school-going activity to writing as a work activity, and as well how

workplaces might change to help newcomers accomplish those ends. In con-
sidering those questions, we need to recapitulate how these two worlds compare
as contexts for writing.

COMPARING DOMAINS
IN TERMS OF READING PRACTICES

For our purposes here, we need do no more than draw on our observations from
previous chapters. School writing practices, we have argued, are dominated by
the epistemic motive and the need to rank. Such motives also ensure that
school-produced texts are read very differently from the ways in which work-
produced texts are read by their intended readers. Thus school texts will
ordinarily receive no more than one reading. While teachers may provide
written comments with or without a grade, those comments generally have the
effect of justifying the grade rather than suggesting a reworking of the text.
Notions of writing to inform one's readers and of reading as dialogic are largely
inoperative or subverted within the teacher-student relationship. We know that
many conscientious teachers try to establish something more like normal
"life-world" communications by the way they set and respond to assignments;
but this minority is working against the grain of prevailing expectations. In the
workplace, on the other hand, "document cycling" (Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller,
1985; Smart, 1993) is common practice. Many texts have multiple readers, all
of whom may have different reasons for reading, and each of whom may read
selectively. Texts produced for school, however cursory the reading, are read
more or less in their entirety. As well, such texts have, so to speak, a limited
shelf life. They must be produced, read, and graded within a specified time
frame, and unlike workplace texts, they will not likely enter a process of filing,
referencing, and cross-referencing, or be inserted into a documentary record.

COMPARING DOMAINS
IN TERMS OF "INTERTEXTUAL DENSITY"

We hypothesize that workplace writing, by contrast with students' writing in

universities, is marked by complexity and density of intertextual connection, a
connectedness that is just as real and significant between writing and speech,
where there is no visible evidence for it, as it is between co-inscribed writing
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 225

and drawing, where there is. Workplaces emerge from our study as dense webs
of intertextual connections, some of them signaled and explicit (or manifest,
Fairclough, 1992, p. 104) and some implicit (or constitutive, ibid.), with new
texts echoing or following the conventions of existing ones. To trace these
connections is to make visible both the epistemic (knowledge- and idea-mak-
ing) and the interpersonal structures that constitute central elements of a work
context.
The most school-like of the work settings we have studied is the central
financial institution. It is school-like in the central role accorded to the evalu-
ation by superiors of the written papers of subordinates, and also in that the
material for the papers, the content that undergoes written analysis, is itself
already a symbolic artifact. The writers work entirely from charts, tables, and
written text and never from observation of economic activities O'lt in the world.
The symbolic media employed, moreover-mathematical notations, graphs,
and computer codes-are ones that are central also to mainstream academic
disciplines. And although the quantity and thoroughness of the supervisor's
feedback on the writer's draft are greater than most students could expect, the
relations obtaining between the two texts of the draft and the commentary
(whether written or spoken) are similar in some respects to those one would
find in the university. They may draw attention, for instance, to weak logic or
ineffective ordering, or to the need for different emphases or more frequent
"signposting."
Further, while the written texts are ultimately action-oriented-they are
needed for decisions in which the institution will exercise vast governmental
power-they are not individually intended to instigate action. Rather, they build
the knowledge on which informed action may be based, and in that, too, they
resemble academic texts.
What seem radically different are the other sorts of consideration that inform
the supervisor's commentary. Whereas the professor's sense of what is neces-
sary and appropriate derives from "the literature," or from the curriculum, or
from a sense of what is currently valued in the written transactions of the
discipline, the intertext on which the supervisor draws i~ more varied and more
diffuse. On the one hand she, and perhaps her immediate work team, may have
a particular view of the economy and policy that they are keen for top
management to espouse. On the other, she knows what is wanted in the
institution, its current concerns, agendas and sensitivities, by "having her finger
on the pulse," and that in tum means being au courant not only with the
documents that are currently central to policy-making but also with feelings
and attitudes that may be communicated through informal conversation,
226 CHAPTER 11

through gossip and through facial expressions, sighs and the like at meetings
and cocktail parties. In order to contribute effectively to the writing of a text
that will leave her in a good light when it passes up the line, she needs to be an
effective reader of the signs that are circulating in the institution in many media.
The text, moreover, must be shaped with an eye to the range of responses it will
occasion and the emotional, interpersonal, and political as well as strictly
informational reverberations it will cause throughout the network. It is in this
sense of its implicatedness in a complex multisymbolic communicative web
that the written workplace text is, despite its superficial similarities as a paper
that gets evaluated, very different in essence from a student's economics paper.
If this schooVwork difference is so apparent in the professional sphere that
seems closest to school, it seems likely to appear even more markedly in our
other professional disciplines-in social work, for instance, where the practi-
tioners are writing about real people and interpreting the entire constellation of
symbolic performances through which they present, and in architecture, where
the practitioner is involved in a vast symbolic web that encompasses technical,
legal, professional, and financial spheres and embraces large numbers of
players and a great variety of communicative means. It is because of this depth
of intertextual allusion and this range of association with other communicative
processes that the sparsest-looking workplace texts may mean more richly than
the most densely-referenced student paper. Student interns and newcomers are
unlikely to gain easy or immediate access to what may pass as "common
knowledge" within workplace communities. Learning to manage the relation-
ships that enable fuller participation in such communities, moreover, may be
one of the crucial transitional learning tasks for novice professionals.

WORKPLACE FUNCTIONS
OF WRITING NOT FOUND IN SCHOOL:
THE COMPLEXITY OF WORKPLACE WRITING

Because most of the purposes and necessities of work are absent from the
classroom, there are numerous functions that academic writing is never called
on to serve. First, students have no need to produce legally valid records, nor
occasion to perform acts for which they will be held to account. Their writing
rarely serves purposes of record in any sense that relates to legal or financial
accountability. Nor do their texts have performativity, in the sense of realizing
speech acts such as orders or requests.
At work, written texts regularly serve as records, in at least three different
ways. The recorded information may be what counts; thus, an architect's diary
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 227

may confirm in later dispute that the initial error in the placing of a steel wall
had been 100 mm. Or the written text may constitute evidence of the architect's
professional activities; so notebook entries, along with sketches and date-coded
photographs, might establish that the architect did indeed visit the site on a
certain date. This is the sort of record commonly referred to as a paper-trail.
Alternatively, the text may have been the vehicle by which a speech act was
performed, such as an instruction to the contractor. The surviving text is simply
a trace of the act, the linguistic material and not the utterance itself, which was
an event in history; the text's performative work was accomplished in its
original delivery. The function of the preservation of the signed and dated text,
however, is to provide legally compelling proofthat the act took place.
Secondly, both students and professionals use writing to keep track, but there
are major differences in what has to be tracked, arising from the circumstance
that a professional's dealings may be with many individuals, institutions, and
jobs whereas a student's are largely with one client per course (the teacher) and
multiple sources of learning material, such as notes made in class, class
materials, textbooks, library books, and journals. Whereas a student's Post It
notes and slips of paper may mainly represent bits of information (e.g., points
noted from books, references, etc.), the professional's notes often represent
individuals, agencies, and involvements with whom he or she has some inter-
active relationship. The professional is required to take action that will affect
the people and states of affairs that the bits of paper represent; and those external
entities are also liable to change without notice, occasioning new and unpre-
dicted demands for action.
These conditions of professional work have time and space implications.
The action that the professional has to undertake in relation to the different jobs
and responsibilities often has to take place in a particular sequence. This has to
happen before that can; what happens in relation to involvement B depends on
what first happens in involvement A; and in the meantime Party X may do
something quite unexpected that will affect both. The tracking problems faced
by professionals may involve more intricate and shifting representations than
those faced by students. Both groups have recourse to writing to help them, but
the demands on professionals result in specialized uses of writing that are more
developed and elaborated than anything we may observe in a student's study-
bedroom.
This writing behavior is not unaffected by the fact that the physical space in
which professionals write is not their own but their employer's. Whereas
students write for the most part either in libraries that are an open resource
outside the supervisor's (the teacher's) surveillance or in their own accommo-
228 CHAPTER 11

dation, the professional has a workspace or room in the institution's building,

alongside his or her colleagues. This proximity naturally increases the density
of communication within the domain, in ways that affect writing: drafts may
be casually passed around and discussed, for instance, so that the written text
readily becomes part of the shared network of meanings and may readily
surface, in quotation or allusion, in the speech or from the pens and printers of
colleagues. Writing may also circulate as part of the process of its composition
and authorization. Those who pass it, from their own desk to that of a colleague,
have thereby participated in the production of the text even though they may
not have added anything except their initials, and become in part answerable
for it ("has that been across your desk?").
We have already noted in chapter 8 how the professional's office space itself,
including wall and furniture surfaces, is co-opted in the production, organiza-
tion, and dissemination of text.
In general the social and multiparticipant nature of professional work gen-
erates a multitude of writing behaviors that occur with great regularity in the
workplace but are more or less unknown in the university. An example would
be when someone photocopies an incoming fax (of which classrooms, inciden-
tally, experience rather few), highlights a passage, scribbles a comment at the
side and passes the document to a colleague, who may write a further comment
and pass it on again. Photocopying in general performs very different functions
in the two environments. Bear in mind that for A to photocopy a document
written by B and to pass it to C is a fresh act of written communication, even
though no new text has been generated. In the office, copying everything to
everyone is a simple way of keeping everyone in the picture and confirming
continuing common membership in the task. But although the recipients receive
the same text, they do not necessarily receive the same message, first because
their different locations within the activity system lead them to read from
different perspectives, and secondly because the intertextual connections in
terms of which meanings are constructed may be different for different partici-
pants. Individuals bring different discursive histories to the framing of the text
because they have previously been involved in different dialogic exchanges.
This is a situation that skillful workplace writers can tum to their advantage (as
we saw with the example of the Site Instruction in chap. 8).

Genre and the Pressure to Conserve

Given the complexity and liveliness of the workplace, we might expect that
there will be exigences that call for improvisation; yet the likelihood of such
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 229

inventiveness is often diminished by institutional guidelines for certain conven-

tional features, in-house formal structures, and readers' expectations that en-
force such observance. Those several readers and multiple readings within the
workplace may not only support but also police the production of texts. In some
organizations such readings are intended primarily to ensure that the design and
content conform to company policy as outlined in company documents. When
Ledwell-Brown (in press), a research associate on our project, examined the
responses of managers to the written reports of their subordinates in order to
determine the extent to which those responses reflected company goals and
values, she concluded that managers' responses were indeed closely tied to
those goals and values, which included the company's goal to maintain its status
as the leader in its manufacturing field, its pride in its long institutional history,
the company's expectation of employees' loyalty and dedication to its goals, a
strong hierarchical line of authority and decision making justified by tradition
and past success, and bolstered by company procedures manuals and regular
performance appraisals. As one manager said, "One of the things that makes
the company what it is ... we try to do the things that brought us where we
are-and we do them the same way ... not that we don't ever want to change."
In other words, genres in this organization are the genres that have worked in
the past and apparently continue to get things done.
Allied with such concerns is company-wide practice to record and document
decisions and the several steps toward them. "What's not on paper doesn't
exist!" is an oft-cited maxim of a former vice-president. Putting it on paper
"makes it official." Such documentation, in tum, serves as the memory of the
company for newcomers and provides models for current reports. It can also
provide justification for past decisions if and whenever such decisions are
reviewed, and can be an instrument, however benign, of regulation and surveil-
lance. Newcomers must know the lore of the company, particularly a widely-
held belief that its success is related to "the way we do things here," before they
decide such controlling practices merely deny individual creativity and initia-
tive (see chap. 6 for a description of the complex accountabilities at work in
professional contexts).
We may recall, however, that students learn in school to submit to and
accommodate a variety of such expectations and sometimes contradictory
(among courses) demands as a matter of expedience. More often than not school
writing genres are tightly specified, designed to further certain learning goals,
monitor learning, and standardize grading. And even when the specifications
are not spelled out, they are often implicitly operative. Such expectations
provide the basis for most of the writing done in school and generate stable
230 CHAPTER 11

structures for the specifically school-related tasks of defining, shaping, and

displaying knowledge. Modifications of the genre are unlikely to occur at the
initiative of the students. Unlike workplace writers, for instance, the economists
in the Bank of Canada who began their formal report to the governor of the
Bank with an epigraph from the Rolling Stones (Smart, 1998), a conspicuous
shift from the format of preceding reports, the abbreviated tenure of students
within a course and their overall subordinate status as such, do not afford them
easy familiarity with a discipline and its conventions or the degree of comfort
and freedom to experiment that comes from fellowship and full participation.

UNIVERSITY AND WORKPLACE

AS ACTIVITY SYSTEMS

Activity theory has helped us identify a key distinction in the way we regard
writing. We need to distinguish in our discussion between writing as an
activity-an ongoing activity as it is generically conceived when we speak, for
instance, of scholarly and non-scholarly writing, or literary writing, or written
communication, or the history of writing and so on-and writing as an action
or an operation in an activity system, be that activity system work, school-go-
ing, recreation or law-making. It is easy in discussion to conflate writing as the
generic activity with writing as an action (or as an operation, which is how we
most often know and practice writing). It is writing as action that we have
largely been concerned with in this book. What we have observed at the variety
of sites we have studied is writing as an action, contributing to and, therefore,
defined by a larger ongoing activity (be it economic forecasting in a central
bank or ensuring the social and medical good ofhospital patients) and embody-
ing place, time, history, tools, situation, cultural, disciplinary, institutional
knowledge and conventions, and especially, the several agents in the situations
that occasion the writing: the writer, current and prospective readers, cowriters
and other collaborators, all part of a larger activity system and driven by motives
that are not necessarily identical and drawn by objectives that may often
conflict. Thus, we have not generalized from actions of writing in the activity
system called social work to designating an activity called social work writing,
because we have observed no such activity as a cultural reality; the actions of
writing in social work within their social surround contribute rather to other
activities, ones that are recognized and named within the culture, such as
record-keeping, child protection in the justice system, or hospital care.
Writing by students in university as an action can be directed variously by
the goals of getting a good grade by conforming to set guidelines, or defining
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 231

and exploring a new concept in a satisfying way, or ensuring completion of the

task by a set deadline. Thus, when our analysis reveals that students' motives
(the desire for higher grades, for instance) lead to actions that subvert teachers'
desire to promote learning through the writing tasks they design and assign, we
may plan to forestall such contradictory actions by considering them in the
context of the larger activity system called the university. Taking that wider
perspective, we may find, for instance, that competing demands from other
courses and tuition costs that force students into part-time employment may
necessitate some students bypassing the built-in learning processes and writing
primarily to meet the letter of the assignment.
Such an analysis when extended to transitional (university to workplace)
situations may help explain how student interns in the workplace, or new
employees for that matter, may not recognize that they need not only to modify
their writing as action but to redefine the goals and criteria for their writing by
locating it within an entirely different activity system. So they may not realize
how much of workplace knowledge is tacit rather than explicit, how much the
written text is implicated in a complex, multisymbolic communicative web, and
that their moving into full participation may be much more a process of
enculturation and much less a matter of transferring school learning or receiving
deliberate instruction. Interns and newcomers as they participate in shared
activities internalize that culture's way of doing things, norms as well as
knowledge, embodied as well in the mediating tools, which include language
and technical artifacts such as computers and accounting systems. These are
points to be considered when university programs are evaluated in terms ofhow
well they prepare graduates for the workplace.

PRACTICAL CONS IDERAliONS

Probably because it seems so obvious, we have not sufficiently emphasized a

central function of writing, a dimension of writing's epistemic function, the
way that writing makes inner speech overt and functions as a means of thinking.
It may also be because people who talk about writing seem to be talking most
often about writing as an outcome, a product, something to be read by others,
a record to return to. Perhaps we need to shift the balance by pointing to how
writing is not only the end product of thinking but also the means; and as such
writing may contribute to the realization of an architectural drawing, as we saw
in chapter 5, or help marshal arguments for a key decision without figuring as
such in the final outcome. When we ask then what might be learned in university
232 CHAPTER 11

about writing that is transferable to the workplace, it is this use of writing that
we need to value highly. It is this use that can be cultivated as habit and engaged
across the curriculum rather than in specialized courses on writing: using
writing to register fleeting impressions, sketch transient ideas, notebooks for
and of the mind, texts not always intended to be revisited and, having accom-
plished their immediate function, out of the way and seemingly superfluous.
Case-study writing is often proposed as the kind of university exercise that
is likely to have carry-over effects. While case studies help students learn key
concepts and apply general principles to very specific situations, those situ-
ations are defined as instances-for-practice-in-education. Situations that stu-
dents are likely to encounter in the workplace are not only experienced quite
differently; they are often less sharply defined; they are dynamic, in flux, and
very much located in institutional histories, personal relationships, and local,
temporal events. What else is portable regarding writing in the transition from
university to workplace? Certainly, skills related to portable tools: computer-
related skills, including keyboarding, word-processing, and spreadsheet skills,
language fluency, abilities related to using and designing forms, charts, and
other kinds of graphic displays. Oral skills and the social skills valued in group
work ought to carry over as well. Again, we need to remind ourselves that such
skills will be modified in transition; for instance, an individual's fluency will
be severely retarded in the workplace if he or she lacks rhetorical savvy.
Although we must concede that producing English sentences is something
students ought to be able to do, a failure to do so is less of an issue with students
in their final years. Their problems are less sentence-level problems and more
ones of rhetoric. Schools by the very nature of the epistemic demands they make
on language may effectively promote general language development: a high
level of syntactic and lexical sophistication, the ability to produce continuous
text and manage flow and difficult transitions, adjusting to different rhetorical
contexts and therefore some degree of stylistic flexibility and sensitivity, a
concern for verbal economy.
However, there are certain assumptions about the portability of writing skills
from university to workplace that need to be rethought because they ignore the
ecology of the workplace. The workplace does not enact the values of a liberal
civil society that are often proclaimed as guiding principles for the classroom:
a place where vulnerable people are afforded protection, are free to speak and
given space to speak whether they are contributing or not; where people are
required to listen to everybody; where the criterion for discourse is authenticity
with a minimum of distortion. Taking an idealized, global view of what we do
may not work in an organization. Thus, when we advocate teaching problem-
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 233

solving strategies and techniques for collaboration as preparation for work-

place writing, we may be assuming too easily a workplace setting imbued
with a corporate ethic of working in teams and sharing, where bosses
welcome new ideas and are not wary of being outshone by upstart juniors.
Moreover, workplaces do not afford the time or incentive for the tentative-
ness that is encouraged in classrooms. At the same time, the political
dynamics of classrooms are very different from those of the workplace:
achievement in school is measured by how much better you perform than
your competitors, and non-performance in collaborative groups is not likely
to be penalized.
Despite these differences, we ought not underestimate the value to the
workplace of what happens in schools. Schools afford space and time to acquire
and fully understand theoretical concepts required for the workplace, concepts
that can be learned, if at all, only on the run in the workplace and in the context
of other work. Schools provide the opportunity as well, at certain levels at least,
for learners to be critical of received notions, to consider alternatives, to
speculate and hypothesize-options that are likely to be regarded as disruptive
or simply unwarranted in most workplaces. Our experience is that such benefits
of schooling do not go unrecognized in the workplace: interns are valued in the
workplace for their awareness of recent theory, and encouraged to share their
knowledge with full-time professionals.

learning in University and in the Workplace

There is scope for really fruitful partnerships between people in university who
are reflexive about writing, teaching, and learning processes and those people
responsible for education and training in the workplace; however, we have to
first admit certain kinds of complications.

• Can we subject oldtimers and the work they do to critical analysis?

Workplace writers are far more skilled and accomplished than they
themselves or their managers acknowledge. Because writing is, in Activity
Theory terms, most often operational (or as Polanyi puts it, held in subsidiary
rather than focal awareness), workplace writers are not deliberately attentive to
their writing habits or practices. Such inattentiveness might result from what
Fairclough (1995) calls the "naturalization ofideology"-a process by which
the values and choices involved in particular discourse formulations disappear
through habit or familiarity. Or it might work against the interests of participants
234 CHAPTER 11

to "notice" discourse practices, either because they are in no position to change

them or because they benefit from them and do not wish to expose or alter the
power imbalances the practices engender and maintain (see Segal, Pare, Brent,
& Vipond, 1998).
• Novices and interns who enter workplaces with critical attitudes can be
disruptive and even abrasive.
Whereas universities encourage and provide time for dissenting voices and
debate, as well as consideration of alternatives, workplaces may consider such
practices unproductive, if not disruptive. Interns and novices should proceed
cautiously, aware of the conservative nature of most institutions and the
function that discourse plays in that conservation process. There is also a danger
in introducing novice employees too early in their training to critical approaches
to work practices. Until they are fully socialized into the workplace, they do
not necessarily see the justification for certain practices, and must expect
resistance to suggestions of change, especially when offered self-righteously.
Fruitful interaction often occurs after interns or newcomers have gained suffi-
cient experience to able to discern what it is they need to know and who is most
likely to provide the information they need.
• Are we helping students and interns by asking them to innovate?
Although taking initiatives is often the corporate ideal presented to all
employees, especially in large corporations, the reality often is that taking a
critical stance is not rational behavior with high survival value for most
employees at many levels, who wish to do no more than get through the day or
satisfy immediate needs and demands. An idealized, global view of the corpo-
ration's goals and functions, while worth recalling from time to time, may prove
to have little applicability to day to day activities.
• Professionalization comes at a cost to self-identity.
To illustrate: social work supervisors often discourage interns from using
"I" in social work reporting on the grounds that it is not professional; our hunch
is that by not using "I," social workers disguise their personal identity under
professional makeup and distance their personal selves from the work they do.
Thus, social work interns and graduates who see themselves as agents of change
will be functioning as agents but not the ones they expected to be. As we have
seen, as soon as they begin using the genres of the agency, they buy into the
ideology; they learn to live with contradiction. Such professional genres con-
struct subject positions that may not accord with their goals; not to be too
dramatic, they fragment the personality. It is the price of professionalization,
so that they may do things as professionals that they are not prepared to do as
persons.
CONTEXTS FOR WRITING 235

BRIDGING THE GAP

Given the theoretical orientations we began with and the perspectives we have
employed, we are not surprised that writing at school and at work is indeed
happening in two different worlds. Because workplace writing is so deeply
embedded in workplace practices and cultures and is not normally identified as
a distinct work practice, it should seem rather anomalous that in most school
settings, writing assumes a distinct identity and seeming autonomy. Courses
dedicated to the teaching of writing were until recently exceptional outside the
North American context, and whereas there are good historical and cultural
reasons for their institution and prevalence in North America (see Berlin, 1996,
and Russell, 1991, for instance), a view of writing as integrally woven into
disciplinary knowing and integrally bound up within action and activity (as an
operation, in Activity Theory terms) appears to us to be a plausible explanation
for the dearth of writing courses outside North America. In other words, people
are assumed to learn to write by doing things with writing; that is, as writing
becomes increasingly operational, a means rather than an end.
It seems reasonable that the embeddedness of writing in workplace practices
ought to be replicated in school settings as well, if it isn't for the fact that the
process of education does often operate on a model of detaching skills and
practices from their workaday settings in order to teach them effectively. Such
encapsulation (Engestrom, 1991) of knowledge and skills is quite likely a
deterrent rather than an aid to learning to write. If as we argue, writing is a
by-product of other activities, a means for getting something else done, we
ought to consider how we might engage students in activities that commit them
to write as necessary means-but only as a means not an end. If there is one
major, obvious-seeming way in which educational courses might prepare
people better for the demands of writing at work, it is through constituting the
class as a working group with some degree of complexity, continuity, and
interdependency of joint activity. Such arrangements will go some way toward
realizing the far richer communicative relations that contextualize writing in
the workplace.
 REFERENCES
Ackerman, J. & Oates, S. (1996). Image, text, and power in architectural design and workplace
writing. In A. H. Duin & C. J. Hansen (Eds.), Nonacademic writing: Social theory and
technology (pp.81-121 ). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaurn Associates.
Anderson, P. V. (1985). What survey research tells us about writing at work. In L.Odell & D.
Goswami (Eds.), Writing in non-academic settings (pp.3-83). New York: Guilford.
Anderson, P. V., Brockmann, R. J., & Miller, C. R. (Eds.). (1983). New essays in technical and
scientific communication: Research, theory, and practice. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood.
Anson, C. N. & Forsberg, L. L. (1990). Moving beyond the academic community: Transitional
stages in professional writing. Written Communication, 7 (2), 200-231.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M M Bakhtin. (M. Holquist,
Ed., C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.,
V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bataille, R. R. (1982). Writing in the world of work: What our graduates report. College
Composition and Communication, 33, 276--282.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: A revolutionary approach to man's under-
standing of himself New York: Ballantine.
Bazerman, C. (1979). Written language communities: Writing in the context of reading. (Educa-
tional Resources Information Center Publication No. 232 159).
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental
article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of gemes. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the
new rhetoric (pp. 79-101). London: Taylor & Francis.
Bazerman, C. & Paradis, J. (199la). Introduction. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual
dynamics of the professions (pp. 3-10). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bazerman, C. & Paradis, J. (Eds.). (199lb). Textual dynamics of the professions: Historical and
contemporary studies of writing in professional communities. Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press.
Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Berkenkotter, C. & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication:
Cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates.
Berlin, J. A. (1987). Rhetoric and reality: Writing instruction in American colleges, 1900-1985.
Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Berlin, J. A. (1986). Rhetorics, poetics, and cultures: Refiguring college English studies. Urbana,
IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Bitzer, L. F. (1968). On the classification of discourse performances. Rhetorical Society Quarterly,
7, 31--40.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). London: Cambridge
University Press. (Original work published 1972).
236
REFERENCES 237

Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in question ( R. Nice, Trans.). London: Sage Publications. (Original
work published 1984)
Bourdieu, P ., & Passeron, J. C. ( 1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture. London: Sage.
Brand, N., & White,J. 0. (1976).Legalwriting: A strategy ofpersuasion. New York: St. Martin's
Press.
Brandt, D. (1990). Literacy as involvement: The acts of writers, readers, and text. Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois Univesity Press.
Brandt, D. (1992). The cognitive and the social: An ethnomethodological approach to writing
process research. Written communication, 9, 315-351.
Bristol, M. C. (1936). Handbook on social case recording. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Britton, J., Burgess, T., Martin, N., McLeod, A., & Rosen, H. (1975). The development ofwriting
abilities, 11-18. London: Macmillan Education.
Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, K., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993).
Distributed expertise in the classroom. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psycho-
logical and educational considerations. (pp. 188-228). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, J. (1988). A survey of writing practices in management. English Quarterly, 21, 7-18.
Brown, V. (1993). Decanonizing discourses: Textual analysis and the history of economic thought.
In W. Henderson, T. Dudley-Evans, & R. Backhouse (Eds.), Economics and language (pp.
64--84). London: Routledge.
Burke, K. (1957). The philosophy of literary form (Rev. Abr. ed.). New York: Vintage.
Burke, K. (1950). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Chandler, D. (1992). The phenomenology of writing by hand.1ntelligent Tutoring Media, 3 (2/3),
65-74.
Clark, G. (1990). Dialogue, dialectic, and conversation: A social perspective on the jUnction of
writing. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Clews, R., & Magnuson, H. ( 1996, June). Theory and practicum: Bridging the gap. Paper presented
at the meeting of the Social Work Field Education Conference, Hamilton, ON.
Coe, R. M. (1986, May). Process, form, and social reality. Paper presented at the 4th International
Conference on the Teaching of English, Canadian Council of Teachers of English, Ottawa,
Canada.
Coe, R. M. (1987). An apology for form; or, who took the form out of the process? College English,
49, 13-28.
Coe, R. M. (1994). "An arousing and fulfilment of desires": The rhetoric of genre in the process
era-and beyond. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp.
181-190). London: Taylor & Francis.
Cole, M. (1991). Conclusion. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & D. T. Teasley (Eds), Perspectives
on socially shared cognition (pp. 398-417). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Cole, M., & Engestrom, Y. (1993). A socio-cultural approach to distributed cognition. In G.
Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and education considerations (pp.
1-46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, M. M. (1996). Foreword. In A. Duin & C. Hansen (Eds.), Nonacademic writing: Social
theory and technology (pp. ix-xii). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associations.
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (1993). The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching
writing. London: Falmer.
238 REFERENCES

Corbin, C. I. (1992). Writing and the design student: Strategies for initiating the process.
Proceedings of the 1991 Southeast Regional A CSA Conference (pp.177-183). Charlotte, NC:
UNCC College of Architecture.
Corey, R. C. (1976). The use ofcases in management education. Boston, MA: Harvard Business
School, Publishing Division.
de Saussure, F. (1967). Cours de linguistique GemJrale. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. (Original
work published 1916).
Devitt, A. (1991). Intertextuality in tax accounting. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual
dynamics of the professions (pp. 336-357). Madison, WI: University ofWisconsin Press.
Dias, P. (1987). Making sense of poetry: Patterns in the process. Ottawa: Canadian Council of
Teachers of English.
Dias, P. X., & Pare, A. (Eds. ). (in press). Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Doheny-Farina, S. (1985). Writing in an emerging organization: An ethnographic study. Written
Communication, 3, 158-185.
Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Driskill, L.P. (1989). Understanding the writing context in organizations. In M. Kogen (Ed.),
Writing in the business professions (pp. 125-145). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers
of English.
Duguay, P., & Longworth, D. (1997). Macroeconomic models and policy making at the Bank of
Canada. Paper presented at the 1Oth Anniversary Congress of the Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam.
Duguay, P., & Poloz, S. (1994). The role of economic projections in Canadian monetary policy
formulation. Canadian Public Policy- Analyse des Politiques, 20, 189-199.
Duin, A.H., & Hansen, C. J. (1996). Nonacademic writing: Social theory and technology.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Duxbury, L., & Chinneck, J. (1993). Thepracticum approach to the teaching of systems analysis
and design: A view from the trenches. Paper presented at Administrative Services Association
of Canada, Lake Louise, Alberta.
Ede, L., & Lunsford, A. (1984). Audience addressed/audience invoked: The role of audience in
composition theory and pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 35, 155--171.
Ede, L., & Lunsford, A. (1990). Singular texts/plural authors: Perspectives on collaborative
writing. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Elbow, P. (1986). Embracing contraries: Explorations in learning and teaching. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Emig, J. (1971 ). The composing processes of twelfth graders. (Research Report No. 13 ). Urbana,
IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Engestrom, Y. (1991) Non scalae sed vitae discimus: Toward overcoming the encapsulation of
learning. Learning and Instruction, 1, 243-259.
Engestrom, Y. (1993). Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory: The case
of primary care medical practice. InS. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice:
Perspectives on activity and context (pp.64-l 03). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engestrom, Y. (1997, March). Talk, text, and instrumentality in collaborative work: An activity-
theoretical perspective. Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College
Composition and Communication, Phoenix, AZ.
REFERENCES 239

Engestriim, Y., Engestriim, R., & Karkkainen, M. (1995). Polycontextuality and boundary
crossing in expert cognition: Learning and problem solving in complex work activities.
Cognition and Instruction, 5, 319--336.
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H.A. (1985). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Faigley, L. (1986). Competing theories of process: A critique and a proposal. College English,
48, 527-542.
Faigley, L. (1992). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Faigley, L., & Miller, T. (1982). What we learn from writing on the job. College English, 44,
557-569.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London:
Longman.
Fitzgerald, P. (1985). Looking at Law. Ottawa: Bybooks.
Fleck, L. (1979). Genesis and development of a scientific fact (F. Bradley & T. Trenn, Trans.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1935).
Flower, L. (1977). Problem-solving strategies and the writing process. College English, 39,
449--461.
Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition
and Communication, 32, 365-387.
Flower, L. S., Hayes, J. R., & Swarts, H. (1980). Revising functional documents: The scenario
principle (Tech. Rep. No. 10). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie-Mellon University.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New
York: Harper.
Freadman, A. (1987). Anyone for tennis? In I. Reid (Ed.), The place ofgenre in learning: Current
debates (pp. 91-124)). Geelong, Australia: Deaken University Press.
Freedman, A. (1987). Learning to write again: Discipline-specific writing at university. Carleton
Papers in Applied Language Studies, 4, 95-115.
Freedman, A. (1990). Reconceiving genre. Texte (9), 279--292.
Freedman, A. (1993). Show and tell? The role of explicit teaching in learning new genres. Research
in the Teaching of English, 27,222-251.
Freedman, A. (1996). Argument as genre and genres of argument. In D. Berrill (Ed.), Perspectives
on written argumentation (pp. 91-120). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Freedman, A., Adam, C., & Smart, G. (1994). Wearing suits to class: Simulating genres and
simulations as genre. Written Communication, 11, 192-226.
Freedman, A., & Adam, C. (1995, March). Learning and teaching new genres: New literacies,
new responsibilities. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Conference on College
Composition and Communication, Washington, DC.
Freedman, A., & Adam, C. (in press). Write where you are: How do we situate learning to write?
In P. X. Dias & A. Pare (Eds.), Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P., (Eds.). (1994a). Genre and the new rhetoric. London and Bristol,
PA: Taylor & Francis.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P., (Eds.). (1994b). Learning and teaching genre. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton-Cook/ Heinemann.
240 REFERENCES

Freedman, A., & Pringle, I. (Eds.). (1979). Reinventing the rhetorical tradition. Ottawa, ON:
Canadian Council of Teachers of English.
Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York:
Basic Books.
Giltrow, J., & Valiquette, M. (1994). Genres and knowledge: Students writing in the disciplines.
In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Learning and teaching genre (pp. 47-62). Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.
Goodman, J., Fairey, J., & Paul, V. (1992). The word and the freshman design student: Word and
image in form and imagination Proceedings ofthe 1991 Southeast Regional A CSA Conference
(pp.184-187). Charlotte, NC: UNCC College of Architecture.
Graves, D. H. (1984). A researcher learns to write. Exeter: Heinemann
Gutierrez, K. (1994, April). Laws of possibility: Reconstituting classroom activity for Latino
children. Paper presented at AERA, New Orleans, LA.
Halliday, M. A. K. ( 1975). Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language.
London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. ( 1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Hanks, W. F. (1991). Foreword. In J. Lave & E. Wenger (Eds.), Situated learning: Legitimate
peripheral participation (pp. 13-24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hebden, J. E. (1986). Adopting an organization's culture: The socialization of graduate trainees.
Organizational Dynamics, 15, 54-72.
Herndl, C. G. (1993). Teaching discourse and reproducing culture: A critique of research and
pedagogy in professional and non-academic writing. College Composition and Communica-
tion, 44 (3), 349-363
Herndl, C. G. (1996). The transformation of critical ethnography into pedagogy, or the vicissitudes
of traveling theory. In A. Duin & C. Hansen (Eds.), Nonacademic writing: Social theory and
technology (pp. 17-33). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Herrington, A. (1985). Writing in academic settings: A study of the contexts for writing in two
college chemical engineering courses. Research in the Teaching ofEnglish, 19, 331-59.
Hillocks, G., Jr. (1986). Research on written composition: New directions for teaching. Urbana,
IL: National Conference on Research English & Educational Resources Information Center
Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills.
Hubboch, S. (1989, Fall/Winter). Confronting the power in empowering students. The Writing
Instructor, 35--44.
Huckin, T. N. (1992). Context-sensitive text analysis. In G. Kirsch & P. A. Sullivan (Eds.),
Methods and methodology in composition research (pp. 84-104). Carbondale and Ed-
wardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Hunt, K. W. (1970). Syntactic maturity in school children and adults. Monographs of the Society
for Research in Child Development, 35 (1), entire issue.
Hutchins, E. (1993). Learning to navigate. In S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding
practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 35-63). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Jakobson, R. (1987). Linguistics and poetics. InK. Pomorska & S. Rudy (Eds.), Language in
literature (pp. 62-94). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Johnson, A. G. (1995) The Blackwell dictionary ofsociology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
REFERENCES 241

Joliffe, D.A. (1994). The myth of transcendence and the problem of the "Ethics" essay in college
writing instruction. In P. A. Sullivan & D. J. Qualley (Eds.), Pedagogy in the age ofpolitics:
Writing and reading (in) the academy (pp. 183-194). Urbana, IL: National Council ofTeachers
of English.
Kinneavy, J. L. (1971). A theory of discourse. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Knoblauch, C. H. (1980). Intentionality in the writing process. College Composition and Com-
munication, 31, 153-159.
Kress, G. (1982). Learning to write. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London:
Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1986) Word, dialogue and novel. InT. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva reader (pp. 34-61).
Oxford: Blackwell.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The social construction ofscientific facts. 2nd
edition. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lave, J. (1991 ). Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, and
D. T. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 63-82). Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. ( 1991 ). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ledwell-Brown, J. (1993). Reader responses to writing in a business setting: A study ofmanagers'
responses to writing in an organizational culture. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, McGill
University.
Ledwell-Brown, J. (in press). Organizational cultures as contests for learning to write. In P. Dias
& A. Pare (Eds.), Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings. Cresskill, NJ:
Hampton.
LeFevre, K. B. (1987). Invention as a social act. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern lllinois
University Press.
Leont'ev, A. N. (1981). Theproblemofactivityinpsychology. InJ. V. Wertsch(Ed.), The concept
of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 37-71). Armonk, NY: Sharpe.
Lunsford, A., & Ede, L. (1990). Singular texts/plural authors: Perspectives on collaborative
writing. Carbondale: University of Southern lllinois Press.
MacDonald, S. P. (1992). A method for analyzing sentence-level differences in disciplinary
knowledge making. Written Communication, 9 (4), 533-569.
MacKinnon, J. (1993). Becoming a rhetor: Developing writing ability in a mature, writing-inten-
sive organization. In R. Spilka (Ed.). Writing in the workplace: New research perspectives
(pp. 41-55). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Martin, R. (1992). Writing in the design disciplines. Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinneapolis,
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing.
Matthews, H. (1992). Writing for designers: A strategy for teaching. Proceedings of the 1991
Southeast Regional ACSA Conference (pp.173-176). Charlotte, NC: UNCC College of
Architecture.
McCann, R. (1992). Through the looking glass: Writing as a method of experiential design.
Proceedings ofthe 1991 Southeast Regional ACSA Conference (pp.l97-203). Charlotte, NC:
UNCC College of Architecture.
242 REFERENCES

McCarthy, L. P. (1987). A stranger in strange lands: A college student writing across the
curriculum. Research in the Teaching of English, 21, 233-265.
McCarthy, L. P., & Gerring, J. P. (1994). Revising psychiatry's charter document: DSM-IV.
Written Communication, 11, 147-192.
Medway, P. (1996). Writing, speaking, drawing: The distribution of meaning in architects'
communication. In M. Sharples & T. van der Geest (Eds.), The New writing environment:
Writers at work in a world of technology (pp. 25-42). London: Springer Verlag.
Miller, C. (1994). Geme as social action. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the
new rhetoric (pp. 23-42). London: Taylor & Francis.
Mishler, E.G. (1986). Research interviewing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morris, C. (1971) Writings on the general theory of signs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Murray, D. (1980). Writing as process: How writing finds its own meaning. In T. R. Donovan &
B. W. McClelland (Eds.), Eight approaches to teaching composition (pp. 3-20). Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English.
Myers, G. (1985). Texts as knowledge claims: The social construction of two biologists' articles.
Social Studies of Science, 15, 593--630.
Myers, G. (1989). The pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles. Applied Linguistics, 10, 1-35.
Nardi, B. (1992). Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and
distributed cognition. Proceedings of the East-West HCI Conference (pp. 352-359). St
Petersburg, Russia.
Nickerson, R. S. (1993). On the distribution of cognition: Some reflections. In G. Salomon (Ed.),
Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 229-261). Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nystrand, M. (1989). A social-interactive model of writing. Written Communication, 6, 66--85.
Odell, L., & Goswami, D. (1982). Writing in a non-academic setting. Research in the Teaching
of English, 16, 201-223.
Odell, L., & Goswami, D. (Eds.). (1985). Writing in nonacademic settings. New York: Guilford.
Paradis, J., Dobrin, D., & Miller, R. (1985). Writing at Exxon Ltd.: Notes on the writing
environment of an R & D organization. In L. Odell & D. Goswami (Eds.), Writing in non
academic settings (pp. 281-308). New York: Guilford.
Pare, A. (1991a). Writing in social work: A case study of a discourse community. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, McGill University, Montreal.
Pare, A. (l99lb). Ushering "audience" out: From oration to conversation. Textual Studies in
Canada, 1, 45--64.
Pare, A. (1993). Discourse regulations and the production of knowledge. In R. Spilka (Ed.),
Writing in the workplace: New research perspectives (pp.lll-123). Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press.
Pare, A. (in press). Writing as a way into social work: Geme sets, geme systems, and distributed
cognition. In P.X. Dias & A. Pare (Eds.), Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace
settings. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Pare, A., & Smart, G. (1994). Observing gemes in action: Towards a research methodology. In
A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 146--154). London and
Bristol, P A: Taylor & Francis.
Park, D. (1982). The meanings of"audience." College English, 44, 247-257.
Peirce, C. ( 193111958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1--6, C. Hartshorne &
P. Weiss, Eds.; Vols. 7-8, A.W. Burks, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
REFERENCES 243

Petraglia, J. (1995). Spinning like a kite: A closer look at the pseudotransactional function of
writing. Journal ofAdvanced Composition, 15 (1), 19-33.
Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Popken, R. (1992). Genre transfer in developing adult writers. Focuses, 5, 3-17.
Rafoth, B., & Rubin, D. (Eds.). (1989). The social construction of written communication.
Norwood, NJ: ABLEX.
Reither, J., & Vipond, D. (1989). Writing as collaboration. College English, 51, 855-867.
Renshaw, P. D. (1992). Reflecting on the experimental context: Parents' interpretations of the
education motive during teaching episodes. In L. T. Winegar & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Children's
development within social context. Vol. 2: Research and Methodology (pp. 53-74). Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Resnick, L. B., Levine, J. M., & Teasley, S.D. (Eds.). (1991). Perspectives on socially shared
cognition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rogoff, B. ( 1991 ). Social interaction as apprenticeship in thinking: Guided participation in spatial
planning. In L. Resnick, J. Levine, & S. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared
cognition (pp. 349-364). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Rogoff, B. (1993, April). Guided participation of children and their families. Paper presented at
the American Educational Research Association Conference, Atlanta, GA.
Rogoff, B. (1994, April). Models of teaching and learning. Development through participation.
Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference, New Orleans,
LA.
Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem. Carbondale, IL: Illinois University Press.
Rush, J., & Evers, F. (1986). Making the match: Canada's university graduates and corporate
employers. Montreal: Corporate-Higher Education Forum.
Rush, J., & Evers, F. (1991). Report on making the match: Phase two. Montreal: Corporate-Higher
Education Forum.
Russell, D. R. (1991). Writing in the academic disciplines, 1870-1990: A curricular history.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Russell, D. R. ( 1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written
Communication, 14(4), 504-554.
Salomon, G. (1993). Introduction. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological
and education considerations (pp. xi-xxi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schryer, C. F. (1994). The lab vs. the clinic: Sites of competing genres. In A. Freedman & P.
Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 105-124). London and Bristol, PA: Taylor
& Francis.
Segal, J., Pare, A., Brent, D., & Vipond, D. (1998). The researcher as missionary: Problems with
rhetoric and reform in the disciplines. College Composition and Communication, 50, 71-90.
Selzer, J. (1983). The composing processes of an engineer. College Composition and Communi-
cation, 34, 178-187.
Shaughnessy, M. (1977). Errors and expectations: A guide for the teacher of basic writing. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Sheffield, A. E. (1920). The social case history: Its construction and content. New York: Russell
Sage Foundation.
244 REFERENCES

Smagorinsky, P., & Coppock, J. (1994). Cultural tools and the classroom context: An exploration
of an artistic response to literature. Written Communication, 11 (3), 283-310.
Smart, G. (1985). Writing to discover structure and meaning in the world of business. Carleton
Papers in Applied Language Studies, 2, 3-44.
Smart, G. (1989). A social view of genre: Some implications for teaching. Inkshed, 8, 9-12.
Smart, G. (1993). Genre as community invention: A central bank's response to its executives'
expectations as readers. In R. Spilka (Ed.), Writing in the workplace: New research perspec-
tives (pp. 124-140). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Smart, G. (1998). An ethnographic study of knowledge-making in a central bank: The interplay
between writing and economic modeling. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, McGill Univer-
sity.
Smith, D. (1974). The social construction of documentary reality. Sociological Inquiry, 44,
257-268.
Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. College
Composition and Communication, 31, 378-88.
Spilka, R., (1990). Orality and literacy in the workplace. Journal of Business and Technical
Communication, 4, 44-67.
Spilka, R. (Ed). (1993). Writing in the workplace: New research perspectives. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Suleiman, S. R., & Crossman, I. (Eds.). (1980). The reader in the text: Essays on audience and
interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. ( 1985). Human agency and language: Philosophical papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Thiessen, G. (1995, April). Interview with Peter Gzowski. CBC Morningside.
Todorov, T. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The dialogical principle (Wlod Godzich, Trans.). Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tompkins, J.P. (Ed.). (1980). Reader response criticism: From formalism to post- structuralism.
Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toulmin, S., Rieke, R., & Janik, A. (1979). An introduction to reasoning. New York: Macmillan.
Upchurch, D. A. (1993). Writing in the design curriculum: Alternative routes to the imagination:
A collection of student writing 1992-93. Muncie, Indiana: Ball State University, College of
Architecture and Planning.
Voloshinov, V. (1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (l98la). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), The
concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 144-188). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Vygotsky, L.S. (198lb). The instrumental method in psychology. In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), The
concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 134-143). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
REFERENCES 245

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Translation newly revised and edited by Alex
Kosulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
W aern, Y. ( 1979). Thinking aloud during reading: A descriptive model and its application (Report
No. 546). Stockholm: Department of Psychology, University of Stockholm.
Walvoord, B., & McCarthy, L. P. (1993). Thinking and writing in college: A naturalistic study of
students in four disciplines. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Wertsch, J. V. (Ed.). (1981). The concept of activity in Soviet psychology. Armonk, NY: M.
E. Sharpe.
Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
W ertsch, J. V., Minick, N., & Arns, F. J. ( 1984). The creation of context in joint problem-solving.
In B. Rogoff & J. Lave (Eds.), Everyday cognition: Its development in social context (pp.
151-171). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, J. V., Tulviste, P., & Hagstrom, F. (1993). A sociocultural approach to agency. In E. A.
Forman, N. Minick, & C. A. Stone (Eds. ), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in
children's development (pp. 336--357). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willard, C. A. (1982). Argument fields. In J. R. Cox & C. A. Willard (Eds.), Advances in
argumentation theory and research (pp. 27-77). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press.
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana Press.
Winsor, D. (1989). An engineer's writing and the corporate construction of knowledge. Written
Communication, 6, 270-285.
Winsor, D. (1994). Invention and writing in technical work. Written Communication, 11 (2),
227-250.
Witte, S. P. ( 1992). Context, text, intertext: Toward a constructivist semiotic of writing. Written
Communication, 9 (2), 237-308.
Wood, C. C. (1992). A study of the graphical mediating representations used by collaborative
authors. Brighton: University of Sussex School of Cognitive and Computing Science.
Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, S. G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem-solving. Journal
of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89-100.
 AUTHOR INDEX

A Bruner, J. S., 205

Burgess, T., 6
Ackerman, J., 35, 87 Burke, K., 20, 120
Adam, C., 61, 189, 191, 196, 197, 198,
206
Anderson, P. V., 5, 113
c
Anson, C. N., 196, 197
Ams, F. J., 24, 25, 67,76 Campione, J. C., 30
Ash, D., 30 Chandler, D., 38
Austin, J. L., 160 Chinneck, J., 207
Clark, G., 9
Clews, R., 214
B Coe, R. M., 56, 120, 123
Cole, M., 31, 65, 136
Bakhtin, M. M., 21, 35, 37, 40, 62, 186 Cooper, M. M., 113, 114
Bataille, R. R., 5, 113 Coppock, J., 35
Bateson, G., 36 Corbin, C. I., 87
Bazerman, C., 7, 8, 9, 20, 66, 114, 118 Corey, R. C., 192
Bereiter, C., 192
Berkenkotter, C., 8, 196
D
Berlin, J. A., 6, 9, 235
Bitzer, L. F., 18
Bourdieu, P., 58, 62, 118, 129 de Saussure, F., 35
Brand, N., 53 Devitt, A., 119,120,124
Brandt, D., 14, 62 Dias, P. X., 13
Brent, D., 234 Dobrin, D., 9, 113,115, 195,216,224
Bristol, M. C., 125 Doheny-Farina, S., 114
Britton, J., 6, 7 Douglas, M., 118, 124, 141
Brown, A. L., 30 Driskill, L. P., 113
Brown, J., 5 Duguay, P., 139, 140, 142, 143, 146
Brown, V., 139 Duin, A. H., 114

246
AUTHOR INDEX 247

Duxbury, L., 207 Hillocks, G., Jr., 50

Hubboch, S., 200
E Huckin, T. N., 8, 14, 196
Hunt, K. W., 50
Hutchins, E., 31, 32, 137, 138
Ede, L., 9, 115
Elbow, P., 200
Emig, J., 6
Engestrom, R., 71
Engestrom, Y., 65, 71, 114, 136, 143,235 Jakobson, R., 157
Ericksson, K. A., 13 Janik, A., 13, 52, 54, 178
Evers, F., 5 Johnson, A. G., 180
Joliffe, D. A., 223
F
K
Faigley, L., 6, 9, 29, 113
Fairclough, N., 9, 119, 120, 123,225,233 Karkki:iinen, M., 71
Fairey, J., 87 Kinneavy, J. L., 51
Fitzgerald, P., 51 Knoblauch, C. H., 113
Fleck, L., 141 Kress, G., 38, 54, 91
Flower, L., 6, 13 Kristeva, J., 40
Forsberg, L. L., 196, 197
Foucault, M., 62 L
Freadman, A., 61
Freedman, A., 9, 51, 61, 189, 191, 196, Latour, B., 143
197,198,203,206 Lave, J., 18, 28, 29, 30, 71, 114, 136,
185,186,191,202,212,219
G Ledwell-Brown, J., 13, 229
LeFevre, K. B., 7, 9
Geertz, C., 8 Leont'ev, A. N., 23, 26
Gerring, J. P., 9 Longworth, D., 139, 143
Giltrow, J., 99 Lunsford, A., 9, 115
Goodman, J., 87
Gordon, A., 30 M
Goswami, D., 9, 114
Graves, D. H., 7 MacDonald, S. P., 14
Gutierrez, K., 199 MacKinnon, J., 9, 189, 196, 197
Magnuson, H., 214
H Martin, N., 6, 7
Martin, R., 87
Hagstrom, F., 33, 34 Matthews, H., 87
Halliday, M.A. K., 14, 160 McCann, R., 87
Hanks, W. F., 187, 193, 198,218 McCarthy, L. P., 9, 196
Hansen, C. J., 114 McLeod, A., 6, 7
Hayes, J. R., 6, 7 Medway, P., 39, 91, 98
Heath, S. B., 186, 203 Miller, C., 19, 20, 21, 24, 44, 47, 102,
Hebden, J. E., 9 118, 119
Hemdl, C. G., 9, 29, 114, 118 Miller, R., 9, 113, 115, 195, 216, 224
Herrington, A., 9, 196 Miller, T., 113
248 AUTHOR INDEX

Minick, N., 24, 25, 67,76 Segal, J., 234

Mishler, E. G., 13 Selzer, J., 9, 114
Morris, C., 34 Shaughnessy, M., 6
Murray, D., 7 Sheffield, A. E., 125
Myers, G., 9 Simon, H. A., 13
Smagorinsky, P., 35
N Smart, G., 9, 13, 19, 61, 62, 141, 145,
189, 191, 195, 196, 198,206,
Nakagawa, K., 30 216,224,230
Nardi, B., 25 Smith, D., 120
Nickerson, R. S., 33 Sommers, N., 6
Nystrand, M., 62 Spilka, R., 9, 114
Swales, J., 9, 29
0 Swarts, H., 13
Oates, S., 35, 87
T
Odell, L., 9, 114
Taylor, C., 34
p Todorov, T., 40
Tou1min, S., 13, 44, 52, 54, 178
Paradis, J., 8, 9, 113, 114, 115, 195,216,
Tulviste, P., 33, 34
224
Pare, A., 9, 19, 29, 114, 115,234
Park, D., 115 u
Passeron, J. C., 58, 62
Paul, V., 87 Upchurch, D. A., 87
Peirce, C., 34 Valiquette, M., 99
Petraglia, J., 200 van Leeuwen, T., 38, 91
Polanyi, M., 27, 121 Vipond, D., 9, 234
Poloz, S., 140, 142, 146 Voloshinov, V., 35, 159
Popken, R., 197 Vygotsky, L. S., 33, 34, 35, 36, 88, 100,
185, 187,
R
Reike, R., 13, 52, 54, 178
w
Reither, J., 9
Renshaw, P. D., 24 Waern, Y., 13
Rogoff, B., 186,199,203,205 Walvoord, B., 196
Rosen, H., 6, 7 Wenger, E., 28, 29, 30, 71, 114, 186, 187,
Rosenblatt, L., 8 191,202,219
Ross, S. G., 205 Wertsch, J. V., 23, 24, 25, 27, 33, 34, 35,
Rush, J., 5 36,60,67, 76,186,205
Russell, D. R., 6, 26, 235 White, J. 0., 53
Rutherford, K., 30 Willard, C. A., 45, 56
Williams, R., 29
s Winsor, D., 9, 35
Witte, S. P., 35
Salomon, G., 135 Wood, C. C., 40
Scardamalia, M., 192 Wood, D., 205
Schryer, C. F., 23 Woo1gar, S., 143
 SUBJECT INDEX

A architects and architectural technolo-

gists, 152
division oflabor, 157
Academic writing, see University writing complexity of the job, 166-168
genres, 153-156
Activity systems, 65, 66-67, 114
University and Workplace writing: conceptual design, 154-155
bridge between, 230-231 construction, 156
contracts, 153-154
Activity Theory, 23-28, 67, 123, 177
renovation of old buildings, !56
genre theory, 46
working drawings and specifica-
University writing, 65, 67-68, 233
tions, 155-156
Management Strategies course, 69-76,
metafunctions of texts, 157
79
modes of communication, 160-162
architectural practice, 180
writing, 161, 180-182
writing, 223
careful judgment, 165-166
Architects, 152
complexity, 175-177
division of labor with architectural tech-
epistemic purpose, 160, 181
nologists, 157
experience of architects, 168-169
Architectural activity at school and work, increase, 169-171
see also Architectural practice, learning architectural genres,
177-179 171-175
Architectural education, 82-84, 177-178 multifunctionality, 175-177
design notebook, 98-102 persuasive function, 164-165
design studies, 102-103 rhetorical demands, 162-168
language connection, 106-107 social relations, 166
writing about architecture, 84-85 Architectural technologists, 152
writing as architecture, 107-111 division of labor with architects, 157
writing for architecture, 85-107 Architecture and writing, 84-111
Architectural practice, see also Architec- AT, see Activity Theory
tural activity in school and work, Attenuated authentic performance (Work-
151-182 place), 188, 199, 200, 201-202,
Activity Theory, 180 216-217

249
250 SUBJECT INDEX

B Everyday cognition, see Situated learning

Exigence, 20
Expression of intent (architecture),
Bank of Canada, 136, 138-148 153-154
distributed cognition, 140-142
genres, 142-148
BOC, see Bank of Canada F
Boilerplate (architecture), 163, 167, 168
Brief (architecture), 154 Facilitated performance (University),
Building study (architecture), 156 188,199,200,201,203-206
Finance papers, 57-58
c Financial analyses, 204-206

Case-study writing, 232

G
Change orders (architecture), 156, 159
Community of Practice, 21,28-30
definition, 28-29 Genres, 63, 118-120
learning, 215 architecture, 153-156, 171-175
legitimate peripheral participation, 188 Bank of Canada, 141-142
writing, 223 definition, 118-119
workplace writing, 117,118,119,189 design notebooks, 98-102
Condition report (architecture), 156 distributed cognition, 31
finance papers, 57-58
Contemplated change notices (architec-
Law 100, 48-57
ture), 156, 159
Management Strategies course, 68-69,
Contract documents (architecture), 77-81
155-156, 158 medical charts, 121-122
COPs, see Communities of Practice social work documents, 123-124,
128
D social work, 120-122, 125
Genre studies, see also Rhetoric, 18-23,
Design report (architecture), 156
44
Design intent manual (architecture), 155
Grades, 44, 61-63
Design notebooks, 98-102
Guided participation, 186-188
Distributed cognition, 31-34, 135-150,
213
Bank of Canada, 136
comparison between University and
Workplace, 148-150 Ideational metafunction of texts (archi-
definition, 135-136 tecture), 157, 158-159
genres, 31 contract documents, 158
University, 136-137, 148-150 paper trail, 159-160
Workplace, 137-150 Ideological-discursive formations,
Document cycling, 195 119-120
Drawing notes (architecture), 155 Interpersonal metafunctions of texts (ar-
chitecture), 157, 158
E Intertexual density, 224-226
Invitation to tender (architecture),
Enculturation, 58, 140 155-156
Epistemic purpose of writing, 44-45, 47, IRAC (issue, rule, application, conclu-
48-61, 181,202,231-232 sion), 53
SUBJECT INDEX 251

L N
Language across the curriculum, see Writ- Naturalization of ideology, 233
ing across the curriculum New Criticism, 8
Language as mediating tool, 35
Language connection, 106 0
Law 100, 48-57
Learning in University and Workplace, see
Other media and writing, 37-41
also Situated learning 188-200,
237-234
authenticity of tasks, 189-191, 202
p
authority, 202
autonomy, 217-221 Paper trail (architecture), 159-160, 164,
complexity of context, 191-192, 227
201-202 Professional writing, see Workplace writ-
epistemic purpose of writing, 202 ing
evaluation, 194, 202 Program document (architecture), 154
focus, 189
genres, 196-197, 198
goals, 189, 199, 200 R
guide-learner roles, 192-194, 202
improvisation, 191 Rhetoric, see also Genre studies
internships, 210-217 architectural practice, 162-168
memberships, 219 classical definition, 18
newwaystolearn, 197-199 workplace writing, 113-114
object of activity, 188-189
ownership of ideas, 198
participation, 198-199
s
sites, 194-196, 202
transition, 206-210 School, see University
University, 203-206 School writing practices, see also Univer-
sity writing, 6-10, 11, 14-15
Semiotic theory, 34-37
L Shared cognition, see Situated learning
Signs, 34-37
Legitimate peripheral participation, 30, Site instructions (architecture), 156, 159
187-188, 199, 200, 201, Situated experience, see Situated learning
217-221 Situated learning, see also Learning in
Letter of recommendation (architecture), University and Workplace,
156 185-188
attenuated authentic performance
M (Workplace), 188, 199,200,
201-202
communities of practice, 28-30
Management Strategies course, 68-69
facilitated performance (University),
Activity Theory applied, 69-77, 79
188,199,200,201,203-206
writing, 77-81
guided participation, 186-188
Medical charts, 121-122
legitimate peripheral participation, 30,
social work documents, 123-124
187-188,199,200,201,
Myth of transcendence, 223 217-221
252 SUBJECT INDEX

Situated practice, see Situated activity University writing and Workplace writ-
Situated social practice, see Situated learn- ing: bridge between, see also
ing University writing; University
Social motive, 20-21,22,4,45 writing to Workplace writing,
accountability, 124-134 10-11, 14-15, 183-184,
genre, 118-120 222-235
grades,61-63 activity systems, 230-231
University writing, 47-64 complexity, 226-230
Workplace writing, 117-124 conservation of materials, 228-230
Social work, 120-122, 125 genre, 228-230
interns, 211-212,213-217 intertextual density, 224-226
legitimate peripheral participation, liberal values, 232-233
217-218 location, 222-223
Specification notes (architecture), 155 reading practices, 224
Systemic linguistics, 22 University writing to Workplace writing,
Systems analysis, 206-210
see also University writing;
University writing and W
T
v
Textual metafunction of texts (architec-
ture), 157 Vygotskian school of Soviet psychology,
T-unit, 50-51, 55 23,33

u w
University writing, see also School writing Workplace writing: bridge between,
practices; University writing and 201-221
Workplace writing: bridge be- attenuated authentic participation,
tween, 43-111 210-217
activity systems, 65, 66-67 social work, 206-210
Activity Theory, 65, 67-68 WAC, see Writing across the curriculum
architectural education, 82-84 Workplace writing, see also Workplace
design notebooks, 98-102 writing and University writing:
design studios, 102-103 bridge between, 113-134
language connection, 106-107 activity systems, 114
writing about architecture, 84-85 audience, 115
writing as architecture, 107-111 authorship, 115
writing for architecture, 85-107 complexity, 226-230
composing processes, 58-61 definition, 115,151
epistemic purpose of writing, 44-45, 47, genres, 117,118-120
48-61 medical charts, 121-122
finance papers, 57-58 rhetorical challenge, 113-114
grades, 44, 61-63 social motive, 117-134
Law 100, 48-57 accountability, 124-134
Management Strategies course, 68-69 social work, 120-124
Activity Theory, 69-76, 79 Workplace writing and University writ-
writing, 77-81 ing: bridge between, see also
social motive, 44, 45, 47-64 University writing to Work-
SUBJECT INDEX 253

place writing; Workplace writ- discipline-specific, 9

ing, 10, 11, 14-15, 183-184, discovery, 7
222-235 epistemic purpose, 7, 44-45, 160,
activity systems, 230-231 231-232
complexity, 226-230 functions, 11
conservation of materials, 228-230 invention, 7
genres, 228-230 nature, 4
intertextual density, 224-226 other media, 37-41
liberal values, 232-233 process, 6-7, 8
reading practices, 224 readers, 8
Writers, 223 rehearsal for communication, 102-103
Writing, see also Architectural practice; research, 4-10
University writing; Workplace situated activity, 8, 17-18
writing, 4-10 socially defined, 9
acting, 3, 223 teaching, 6-7, 8
context, 17 tools, 223
case-study, 232 Writing across the curriculum, 7-8
Writing and architecture, 84-11