RE October 20: Three Summaries of Harrison

The Setup

Following the initial posting, some of the class participants provided the following raw content to facilitate the group activity for the evening:

Synopsis

The basic gist of the article is this ...

a rather repetitive statement that writing is context and that the context in organizations is not the same as writing in classroom context.

Most Important Quotes

1. “Writing in organizations differs from that done in classrooms in that, as initially experienced by the writer, the organizational context is unknown” (Harrison, 2004).
2. “It appears that the process of writing in organizational contexts is quite different from what occurs in classroom contexts” (256).
3. “Studying the process of writing as it occurs in organizational life ... might establish more precisely the nature of any interrelationships between organizational processes and composing” (256).

Questions/Specific Topics for Classroom Discussion in October 20

1. How would you respond to Harrison’s own critique of her work in retrospect as to its derivative nature, then concluding, “But with the benefit of advanced age and many subsequent attempts to theorize, I realize now that the primary activities of communication theorists are to derive and synthesize” (255)?
2. What particular strategies might take Harrison’s advice by better equipping, “their students with analytic capabilities that will guide them in this particular writing context” (256)?

The Classroom Interaction

So we had three groups:

1. Real Time Collaborators. Instructed to process and compose online synchronously via GoogleDocs.
2. Bottleneck/Gatekeepers. Instructed to allow one member to type while others contributed verbally.
3. Total Freedom. No constraints on process.

The Actual Outputs

And we had three initial outputs.

Group 1: Real Time Collaborators

Writing takes place in a socially constructed milieu-- often in an organization that is a “culture-like” phenomenon. Therefore, the discipline should rhetorically analyze its exchanges in organizational contexts, using the lenses of “Organization as Systems of Knowledge” and “Organizations as Patterns of Symbolic Discourse” to inform our research, practice, and pedagogy.

... OR IN FRENCH [just for fun] ...

Rédaction a lieu dans un milieu socialement construit - souvent dans une organisation qui est une «culture comme" phénomène. Par conséquent, la discipline devrait rhétorique analyser ses échanges dans des contextes organisationnels, en utilisant des lentilles de "Organisation des systèmes de connaissances et les organisations comme des modèles de discours symbolique" d'informer notre recherche, la pratique et la pédagogie.

Group 2: Gatekeeper/Bottleneck

Context as situation: rhetorical situation doesn’t incorporate what the organization is about

Context as community: encompassing dynamics and rituals and discourse of organization.

Organization as systems knowledge and symbolic patterns

1. Systems of knowledge: evolutionary and social information processing
2. Evolutionary: idea of organization as whole not focused on individual
3. Social Information processing: thinking is linked to action, Analysis of what they think is how they act.

Patterns of symbolic discourse: part of organizations have a defined way of talking about things.

Implications for research: we need to think about organizations when doing research on communication: i.e. don’t look at the document, look at people behind it.

Group 3: Total Freedom

Organizations present specialized contexts different from the classroom. They can be analyzed in terms of culture and rhetorical contexts. Analyzing organizations in this way can illuminate “constructed realities” both in organizations and other social communities. Organizations are rhetorical contexts with their own discourse and epistemologies which are mediated by the culture of the organization. Analyzing organizations also helps writers assign meaning within the context of the organization. Teachers should emphasize the audience and culture within organizational contexts and that (by extension) the analysis is a valuable rhetorical asset to understanding writing in these contexts.

Making Meaning

By comparing and contrasting the processes utilized in and content created by the different composition groups, we sought to thoughtfully analyze and become aware of our own variations in standards of discourse and the implications of these variations in our individual and collective meaning-making processes.

To fully realize the value of these interactions will require participants to process reflectively and post their own observations on their construction of knowledge here in the form of comments. I hope they'll all consider doing so.

References

Harrison, T. M. (2004). Frameworks for the Study of Writing in Organizational Contexts. In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 255-267). New York: Oxford University Press.