JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

As a hybrid compositionist (is there any other kind?), I teach a variety of English courses, work as a writing consultant, and situate my research in several arenas. My students at Old Dominion University are hybrids, too, especially those in English 687, a seminar on the sites and scenes of writing. As undergraduates they majored in a range of disciplines that led them into careers as varied as teaching, advertising, medical grantsmanship, flying, and fund raising. I put Writing in the Workplace on the seminar reading list for those students who wished to study writing in non-academic contexts. This reviewofSpilka’s book is informed by both my own and my students’ readings of it.

Spilka arranges the nineteen chapters in her collection into two parts:

“Research Studies of Writing in the Workplace” and “Implications of Recent Research Findings for Theory, Pedagogy and Practice, and Future Research.” In her preface, Spilka tells us the collection “evaluat[es] research advances to date and proposed research directions for tomorrow,” with a special emphasis on qualitative research in the “discipline” of professional writing.

The naturalistic studies reported in Part One narrow the gap between rhetorical theory and empirical research. Most of the authors provide clear reasons for their particular methodological choices. My seminar students appreciated the candor. For example, in “Situational Exigence: Composing Processes on the Job by Writer’s Role and Task Value,” Couture and Rymer explain how their survey of 431 writers helped them make “process” distinc­tions between “professionals who write” and “career writers” and between “routine” and “special” writing tasks. Although a copy of the survey instrument is not included, Couture and Rymer recount the mix of rhetorical theory, intuition, and their “own experiences as writers” that led them to develop their categories. Anthony Pare, in his study of court-appointed social workers (“Discourse Regulations and the Production of Knowledge”), includes revealing quotes from protocol transcripts, discourse-based inter­views, case logs, and drafts. All the while, Pare reminds us of the extent of community influence on writing practice and research. Judy Segal, in a discourse analysis of “headache literature” (“Writing and Medicine: Text and Context”), dissects the closed, conservative rhetoric of medicine, illus­trating case study methodology in the process.

One of the liveliest chapters in Part One, “Becoming a Rhetor: Develop­ing Writing Ability in a Mature, Writing-Intensive Organization,” is based on Jamie MacKinnon’s research for his master’s thesis. MacKinnon follows ten recent college graduates through their first year as employees of the Bank of Canada. He is interested in their transition from academic to non-academic writing. He analyzes both the graduates’ self-assessments of their writing and their supervisors’ evaluative comments, thereby persuading us of the inadequacy of childhood development theories “to explain and interpret the development of educated adult writers in a work setting.”

The authors in Part One model multiple ways of reporting naturalistic research, some with more stylistic skill than others. Nevertheless, all the chapters inform one another. Kleimann’s ethnographic research at the U.S. General Accounting Office (“The Reciprocal Relationship of Workplace Culture and Review”) speaks to the document cycling that MacKinnon observed at the bank. Dautermann’s look at mediation in a hospital dis­course community (“Negotiating Meaning in a Hospital Discourse Commu­nity”) provides a perspective with which to consider Pare’s account of regulations constraining social workers. Cross’ chapter on the interrelation­ship of genre, context, and collaborative process—the last chapter in Part One—speaks to all those preceding it.

Part Two deals with the theoretical issues surrounding academic and non-academic writing, thus helping readers such as my seminar students negotiate some difficult territorial borders. The topics in Part Two—intertextuality, discourse communities, “author”ity, collaborative writ­ing, writing pedagogy, theory versus practice, ethics and methodology—are, of course, familiar to compositionists. So are many of the authors: Jack Seizer, James Reither, Stephen Doheny-Farina, and Lee Odell, to name a few. But a major strength of the essays in Part Two is the way they make the familiar strange, the way they explicate composition theory from multiple perspectives, including those of the workplace. Four examples will have to suffice because of space limitations, but it is difficult to choose from among the many fine essays in this section.

First is the chapter entitled “Corporate Authority: Sponsoring Rhetor­ical Practice” by Mary Beth Debs. Debs argues that we must consider the socially constructed “author”ity of an organization in order to lead writers within organizations toward a “conscious examination of the terms of membership as well as an aggressive sense of social responsibility.” Second, Jack Seizer in “Intertextuality and the Writing Process” clarifies (without simplifying) the “event” of intertextuality and recommends workplace texts as “laboratories on intertextuality, places where the implications of intertextuality for our understanding of ‘writer,’ ‘text,’ and ‘reading’ might be teased out.” In a third example, Sullivan and Porter (“On Theory, Practice, and Method”) argue that researchers (and I include myself and my students here) must accept the fluidity of research as praxis. A conscious tension between theory and practice keeps us honest and reminds us that we are constructing ourselves as well as our subjects. Finally, Leslie Olsen in “Research on Discourse Communities” provides further guidance for those of us traversing territorial borders. She reviews the literature and then calls for needed research on how discourse communities function in the work­place.

My readings and my students’ readings of Writing in the Workplace confirm Mirel’s claim in Chapter 2 that contextual dynamics affect how “users” adapt documents for their own purposes. Mirel is talking about software documentation, but her point applies to other texts as well. Spilka’s collection is user-friendly about eighty percent of the time. It skillfully mixes theory with empirical research, it contains an excellent bibliography, and it is arranged like a highly interactive panel discussion with research and pedagogy frequently interrogating one another. In some chapters, however, long-winded sentences, passive-voice verbs, and buzz phrases are anything but user-friendly. In addition, many readers would benefit from an introduc­tion that moves beyond synopses of the chapters to consider in some depth the overarching themes of professional writing.

Nevertheless, I applaud Spilka for encouraging teachers, students, re­searchers, and theorists to crisscross the borders between academic and non-academic writing. In that regard, Writing in the Workplace is especially appealing to hybrids like me, compositionists who need more than two feet so they can keep one in each of the several camps they straddle. Although the book seems somewhat less appealing to graduate students, it is a useful heuristic for all of us who make the attempt to read and write across the slippery fields of English studies and in non-academic contexts, too: How does document cycling that sells an argument to multiple audiences relate to peer groups in writing classrooms? How do the comments professionals use to mentor new employees relate to teachers’ comments on students’ drafts? What does it mean that most assignments in the workplace are dynamic and consciously intertextual while many classroom assignments are not? Spilka promises the collection will raise important questions, and she delivers on that promise.