"Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts" offers a unique examination of writing as it is applied and used in academic and workplace settings. Based on a 7-year multi-site comparative study of writing in different university courses and matched workplaces, this volume presents new perspectives on how writing functions within the activities of various disciplines: law and public administration courses and government institutions; management courses and financial institutions; social-work courses and social-work agencies; and architecture courses and architecture practice. Using detailed ethnography, the authors make comparisons between the two types of settings through an understanding of how writing is operative within the particularities of these settings.
Although the research was initially established to further understanding of the relationships between writing in academic and workplace settings, it has evolved to examining writing as it is embedded in both types of settings--where social relationships, available tools, and historical, cultural, temporal, and physical location are all implicated in complex ways in the decisions people make as writers. Readers of this volume will discover that the uniqueness of each setting makes salient different aspects of writers and writing, resulting in complex, and potentially unsettling implications for writing theory and the teaching of writing.

Contents:
Introduction: Locating Genre Studies: Antecedents and Prospects. Genre Theory: Genre as a Social Action; Anyone for Tennis?; Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre; Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions. Research into Public and Professional Genres: The Lab vs. the Clinic: Sites of Competing Genres; On Definition and Rhetorical Genre; A Genre Map of R & D Knowledge Production for the US Department of Defense; Observing Genres in Action: Toward a Research Methodology; Genre and the Pragmatic Concept of Background Knowledge. Applications in Education: "An Arousing and Fulfillment of Desires": The Rhetoric of Genre in the Process Era...and Beyond; "Do as I Say": The Relationship between Teaching and Learning New Genres; Traffic in Genres, In Classrooms and Out.

Contents:
Introduction: Locating Genre Studies: Antecedents and Prospects. Genre Theory: Genre as a Social Action; Anyone for Tennis?; Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre; Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions. Research into Public and Professional Genres: The Lab vs. the Clinic: Sites of Competing Genres; On Definition and Rhetorical Genre; A Genre Map of R & D Knowledge Production for the US Department of Defense; Observing Genres in Action: Toward a Research Methodology; Genre and the Pragmatic Concept of Background Knowledge. Applications in Education: "An Arousing and Fulfillment of Desires": The Rhetoric of Genre in the Process Era...and Beyond; "Do as I Say": The Relationship between Teaching and Learning New Genres; Traffic in Genres, In Classrooms and Out.

"Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts" offers a unique examination of writing as it is applied and used in academic and workplace settings. Based on a 7-year multi-site comparative study of writing in different university courses and matched workplaces, this volume presents new perspectives on how writing functions within the activities of various disciplines: law and public administration courses and government institutions; management courses and financial institutions; social-work courses and social-work agencies; and architecture courses and architecture practice. Using detailed ethnography, the authors make comparisons between the two types of settings through an understanding of how writing is operative within the particularities of these settings.
Although the research was initially established to further understanding of the relationships between writing in academic and workplace settings, it has evolved to examining writing as it is embedded in both types of settings--where social relationships, available tools, and historical, cultural, temporal, and physical location are all implicated in complex ways in the decisions people make as writers. Readers of this volume will discover that the uniqueness of each setting makes salient different aspects of writers and writing, resulting in complex, and potentially unsettling implications for writing theory and the teaching of writing.