Workplace Writing Chapter (Notes)

I’m thinking about a chapter on Workplace Literacy.

Ain’t No Blank Slate

I don’t want to lose sight of an important point I am trying to make: these folks don’t arrive in the comp classroom as blank slates. I have written this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. They arrive with

1. Specific workplace literacy experience (the major source of literacy activities in their lives)
2. The vestiges of previous experiences with academic literacy—and where does this work in? How does this fit? I’m not sure I’ve adequately addressed this, although I do sort of address it in The Things They Carry.

Might another lens to use here be that of communities of practice--to think through the status of participants in their various workplaces as "novices" or "experience professionals" (Cox 81).