Aviva Freedman

Worlds apart : acting and writing in academic and workplace contexts

Contents: Editors Introduction. Preface. Part I: Introduction. Introduction: Researching Writing at School and at Work. Situating Writing. Part II: University Writing. The Social Motive of University Writing. Complications and Tensions. Writing and the Formation of the Architect. Part III: Workplace Writing. The Complexity of Social Motive in Workplace Writing. Distributed Cognition at Work. From Words to Bricks: Writing in an Architectural Practice. Part IV: Transitions. Students and Workers Learning. Virtual Realities: Transitions From University to Workplace Writing. Contexts for Writing: University and Work Compared.

Wearing Suits to Class Simulating Genres and Simulations as Genre

Using the theoretical perspective offered by recent genre studies, this study compares student and professional discourse within the same field through a set of case studies written for a third-year course in financial analysis—writing that was conceived and designed by the instructor to simulate workplace discourse. Observational and textual analyses revealed the radically distinct social action undertaken in this student writing as compared to related workplace discourse, despite the simulation. Social motives, exigent rhetorical contexts, social roles, and reading practices were all distinct in ways that profoundly affected both discourse processes and products. At the same time, certain commonalities were apparent in the student and workplace writing. These shared features point to ways in which student writing enables and enacts entry into sociocultural communities.

Learning to Write Professionally “Situated Learning” and the Transition from University to Professional Discourse

Drawing primarily on theories of situated learning, this study compares novices learning written genres in two different institutional settings within similar disciplines: university students in public administration courses and graduate student interns placed in government agencies. Observational and textual analyses of novices learning to write the genres necessary for these settings point to differences in writing goals, guide-learner roles, text evaluations, and learning sites. The results show that when students move from the university to the workplace, they not only have to learn new genres but they need to learn new ways to learn these new genres.

“Just the Boys Playing on Computers” An Activity Theory Analysis of Differences in the Cultures of Two Engineering Firms

When we began this study, we expected to explore the ways in which engineering student interns become acculturated into the ways professional engineers communicate in the workplace, and we intended to use genre theory to illuminate this process of student initiation into the profession. However, as most researchers know, what we learn in the end is not necessarily what we expect to study in the beginning. That is particularly true for researchers involved in naturalistic studies, especially those that take place over a lengthy period of time. During the course of our investigation, we found ourselves led down unexpected paths: Our subjects behaved in ways we had not anticipated; their behaviors led us to rethink and expand our theoretical constructs, and together the behavior and the theory led us to broader insights about the cultures that we had not intended to explore. To be specific, by the end of the study, we extended and modified our theoretical framework, which was initially based on genre

Genre, Genres, and the Teaching of Genre

From the placement of this article and from the headings above with the bibliographical citations of three books, readers of this piece know that this is a type of writing commonly called a review essay. From the editors invitation, I knew that what I was to write was a review essay. What does that generic knowledge for writers and readers mean? The significance of this potentially shared understanding is much of what the developing new field of genre study-and these three books-is all about. To understand how writing works, theorists argue, we must understand how genre works, for writing is embedded within genre, writing is never genre-free.

Literacy and Genre

The word “genre” was rarely used with respect to literacy, at least in the sense of composition theory and pedagogy, until the late 1980’s. “Genre,” as a term, was reserved largely for literary texts, and was understood to refer to “text-types” — categories of texts marked by linguistic and formal similarities.