As Composition instructors consider how to revise their courses, we want to highlight the collaborative research of Brian Fitzpatrick, Assistant Professor at George Mason University, and Jessica McCaughey, Assistant Professor at George Washington University and GMU PhD student in Writing and Rhetoric. Fitzpatrick and McCaughey continue to research workplace writers’ writing experiences and were recently published in Double Helix. Their Archive of Workplace Writing Experiences is an ever-growing online collection of interviews with workplace writers across many professions—and accompanying resources designed for writing courses like ENGH 101 and 302. The Archive’s purpose is to help student writers more easily transfer their writing skills to the workplace by offering insights on varied workplace writings from the workplace writers who write them. By listening to interviews with workplace writers in their prospective work field, student writers can better imagine and prepare for the writing they will do outside the academy.
“We have made the Archive available to students, professors, and the public to serve as a learning tool and as an ongoing repository. But perhaps most importantly, it serves as a crucial link between the university and the ‘working world,’” explain Fitzpatrick and McCaughey in their recent article. The article lays out the origins, purpose, and goals of their project, along with offering specific suggestions for instructors of writing:
Central to our project is the acknowledgement that different industries, organizations, and even teams frequently employ very different types of professional writing, and to better understand transfer, or patterns of transfer, it is crucial to examine how writing differs between industries and organizations. To that end, a goal of the Archive is to collect interviews focused on how workplace writers perceive this transfer of skills and how they come to understand the actions they take in this process in specific contexts.
Fitzpatrick and McCaughey acknowledge the importance of students’ critical thinking and metacognition, which move students beyond rote performance, in order to transfer between university-level assignments and workplace writing. Rather than teaching general workplace writing skills by focusing on audience and purpose, as often happens in general writing courses, they suggest mirroring the very specific writing skills in the workplace by helping students also consider context and genre.
Beyond the Double Helix article and regular updates to the Archive, they are currently working on two chapters based on their Archive data, both for upcoming collections from the WAC Clearinghouse's new series on Foundations and Innovations in Technical and Professional Communication.
When it comes to their teaching, Fitzpatrick and McCaughey both use the Archive in their respective classes (for McCaughey, it's a themed FYW course focused on workplace and technical writing, and for Fitzpatrick, it's English 302). They encourage other faculty to do the same, especially through the Resources page, which builds from the interviews and accompanying transcripts in the Archive. “Each of [the interviews and resources] offers teachers an opportunity to help students develop a flexibility in their thinking, as they work to inhabit various writing roles, each with its own complexities and constraints, and adapt to modes and genres across contexts,” they explain. Composition faculty might ask students to listen to interviews with workplace writers in their prospective fields, to conduct original interviews with such workplace writers, and/or to write a more developed piece (several of which are outlined on the Resource page).
“The interview format allows listeners to examine gaps between perception (at all stages—student, new employee, established workplace writer), expectation, and experience as well as between the modes and authenticity of writing in the classroom and in the workplace (skills which were useful, or transferred, and those which were not),” Fitzpatrick and McCaughey write. “It is our hope that this will allow students to think not only about their future genres, but also about how they might best prepare themselves for the inevitable writing challenges they will face once they leave the university.”
Explore the Archive now, and let Fitzpatrick and McCaughey know if you have questions about how to use its wealth of resources in ENGH 101 or 302.
August 06, 2020
