Whereas most research on writing in the workplace examines writing from writers' perspectives, this study focuses on readers' responses to writing. The central issue in this study is the relationship between readers' responses to writing and the goals and values of an organization. The particular focus of the study is managers' responses while reading their subordinates' reports. / Conducted over two years in a large company that develops and markets health care products, this study used a variety of qualitative methods. Observations, interviews, and the critical incident method revealed that organizational expectations for writing were closely tied to the organization's mission and its beliefs about how that mission should be accomplished. Respond-aloud protocols from two divisions of the company, Marketing and Management Information Systems, demonstrated that managers' responses while reading their subordinates' reports strongly reflected their beliefs about the particular mandates of their divisions. Furthermore, these protocols also revealed how the divisional cultures reflected the larger framework of the organization. / These findings suggest that writers must learn both the organizational and divisional goals and values in order to write reports that meet readers' expectations. Moreover, this study illustrates the importance of readers' responses to the development of theories about writing in the workplace.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2007. / Title from title page screen, viewed on April 8, 2008. Dissertation Committee: Gerald Savage (chair), Ronald Fortune, Ronald Strickland. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-189) and abstract. Also available in print.

"Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration from the Naval Postgraduate School, December 2008." / Advisor(s): Suchan, Jim ; Simon, Cary. "December 2008." "MBA professional report"--Cover. Description based on title screen as viewed on January 28, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-59). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--George Mason University, 2009. / Vita: p. 203. Thesis director: Priscilla Norton. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 11, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-202). Also issued in print.

Over the last 50 years, research has explored the writing assignment types and purposes found in undergraduate courses, including discipline-specific writing for the business major, which is one of the most popular fields of study for international students in the U.S. Many studies have explored faculty perceptions of writing challenges students exhibit when writing for business; however, few studies have compared both faculty and student perceptions of student writing challenges. The purpose of this study was to investigate business faculty perceptions of the writing challenges exhibited by students for whom English is a second or additional language (EAL) compared to EAL perceptions of their own writing challenges. This study utilized parallel surveys distributed to faculty and students in Accounting, Finance, and Management in one undergraduate business school. Students self-selected as being a native English speaker (NES), an EAL, or having more than one primary language (multilingual or ML). Results of the study indicated statistically significant differences across faculty, EAL, and ML perceptions of developing arguments as an important purpose of business writing. No statistically significant differences were found, however, across all three populations in regards to perceptions of the student challenges of business writing.

A major contribution of research in workplace literacy has been to explore the part that writing plays in the knowledge-making practices of various professional groups. While such enquiry has revealed that writing is essential to the creation and use of specialized knowledge in the professions, it also points to the need to see writing as part of a larger network of symbolic activity. Researchers have shown that practitioners in certain professions---for example, engineering and architecture---do not produce knowledge solely through the social negotiations of language; rather, acts of writing and reading merge with other symbol-based practices in larger processes of knowledge-making. / A promising area for further research in this regard is the field of economics, where knowledge is constituted through a discourse combining language, mathematics, and visual forms such as graphs. The study reported here examines a particular site of such knowledge-making: the Ottawa head office of the Bank of Canada. Employing an ethnographic methodology that included interviews, informal conversations, on-site observations, reading protocols, tape-recorded meetings, and text analysis, the study examines an ongoing, writing-intensive activity known in the Bank as the "monetary policy process," in which the institution's economists generate knowledge about Present and probable future conditions in the Canadian economy and use this knowledge in formulating and implementing policy. / The central question guiding the study is this: what is the nature of the intellectual collaboration that enables the Bank's economists to transform large amounts of statistical data into focused written knowledge about the Canadian economy and then use this knowledge in making decisions about monetary policy? The study shows that the "monetary policy process" can be viewed as a communal activity in which the economists employ a set of written genres in combination with mathematical models---most importantly, the computer-run Quarterly Projection Model---to carry out their work. The joint, intermeshed use of writing and modelling gives rise to a distinctive pattern of social interaction and a style of collective thinking that allow the economists to produce specialized knowledge about the economy and apply this knowledge to decision-making.

Based on a multimodal approach combining elements of ethnographic participant/observer methodology, rhetorical genre analysis, and corpus analysis, this study examines trouble ticket discourse as a genre of digital communication (IText), interpreting the findings through the lens of 18 months the author spent working in the environment.Trouble tickets are the basic form of documentation used in call centers. They record details of all actions and interactions in the call center environment that is the setting for this study. One section employs the Ethnography of Communication as a foundational model to provide a rich description of both text and environment. Trouble ticket text is written in a fragmentary style which internal and external audiences alike find difficult to process.The rhetorical moves analysis (Swales 1990) uses the rich description as a basis for interpreting and explaining its findings. Key findings are that trouble tickets are rhetorical, and that they seamlessly incorporate actions by the automated system into the human rhetoric. The corpus analysis builds on both the rich description and rhetorical moves analysis, finding that trouble tickets use grammatical structures differently than traditional spoken and written communication.This study concludes that trouble tickets are used simultaneously for direct and archival communication, are collaboratively concatenative in generation and that a new model is required for understanding the variation between speech, writing and IText. / Department of English

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1993. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 15-16).

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Title from screen (viewed on July 7, 2008). Department of World Languages and Cultures, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Kimmaree Murday, Nancy Newton, Marta García García. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-70).