A excerpt from Chris Anson and L. Lee Forsberg’s article “”Moving Beyond the Academic Community” presents the main point of this week’s readings: “Our research shows that becoming a successful writer is much more a matter of developing strategies for social and intellectual adaptions to different professional communities than acquiring a set of generic skills, such as learning the difference between the passive and active voice” (Peeples 389). Each article addresses the changing demands that accompany the transition from academic environment to the workplace.
Context
Anson and Forberg made a point I found particularly interesting in the context of English 306 when they asserted that their “interns were not simply ‘filtering’ a static context through their own development and consciousness, but in fact were writing on it and influencing its development” (Peeples 405).
All semester we have been asked to consider our writing as a creation of new material rather than as the retooling of something created by someone else. The introduction to theory that is English 306 is a struggle to replace the idea of information as a commodity that is transferred from inventor to writer to reader with a more realistic notion of the relationship between writer and reader a collaborative one of creation. This statement allows an analogy to be drawn comparing the new member of a business environment to a writer creating a document: both are introduced to a rhetorical situation already in progress (in the case of the former, a workplace comprised of “internalized values, attitudes, and ways of acting that are shared by other members of the organization” (Peeples 390) – and in the latter, the source material the writer draws upon in the creation of his or her document) which absorbs and is transformed by his or her contributions to it. The context of the writer’s work – or the workplace – is, like information, not something to be “conveyed,” but is a situation that is continuously recreated.
Audience
This week’s readings made some additional points the context of writing in the workplace that I thought were interesting. The context of a document is the rhetorical situation in which it is created, and a major component of its rhetorical situation is the audience the writer intends to address.
This semester in English 306, we have frequently been reminded to consider a hypothetical audience whose needs are central to the process of creating a document. For the final interview project, we write for an audience of our classmates and future English 306 students. An in-class activity last week asked us to work in teams to produce documents directed toward groups such as the Chinese government or United States Olympic athletes.
However, no matter what audience the assignments dictates, the student writer invariably writes, be it subconsciously or no, with another audience in mind: his or her instructor. In the in-class activity mentioned above, the student is actually trying to write a document that the student thinks will fulfill the instructor’s idea of the Chinese government’s needs, rather than what the student thinks the Chinese government needs. In this way, writing in the classroom never truly mimics the rhetorical situation of real-world writing, in which more than just a grade rides on the student’s successful or unsuccessful understanding of an audience’s needs.
Holly Pierson - Team Protagoras
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