Studying Writing in Non-Academic Settings

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the writing tasks people actually do as a normal part of their day-to-day work. Linda Flower and John R. Hayes have shown that it can be useful to present writers with novel tasks, tasks that make it difficult to rely on "stored plans" or routine strategies for producing a piece of writing. The chapter shows that the study of writing in non-academic settings has implications for teaching and for learning. It examines the linguistic features in samples of work-related writing and examines workers' criteria for evaluating the writing done by someone else and explores the reasons writers give for making a particular stylistic or substantive choice in their own writing. The analysis of written texts can be highly systematic and can enable one to use statistical procedures in trying to determine whether certain features of writing vary according to the rhetorical context for the writing.