Adapting to New Writing Situations

Zusammenfassung

In a year-long ethnographic study of four writers in a non-profit agency in the US, the author observed the issues these writers had to struggle with written texts to communicate successfully in a variety of social contexts — business, government, the news media, and within the organization itself. Each writer was a college graduate. Two also had advanced graduate degrees. But their struggles with unfamiliar writing tasks point to the context-specific nature of writing skills, and that there is no such thing as “an expert writer.” Instead, writers acquire writing expertise for different social situations. The author documents the learning process for gaining greater writing expertise in an informal setting, as well as the particular skill areas the writers had to work on. From these data, the author developed a theoretical model of five aspects of writing expertise that must be learned in each specific social context for writing. In addition, applying the concepts from the transfer of learning research, the author lays out an approach to training writers — in formal school settings or in informal settings — that will aid positive transfer of learning and a more systematic approach to gaining writing expertise in new situations.