One of the more popular approaches to community-based writing asks students to compose workplace documents like reports, manuals or brochures for community organizations. After doing this for the first time, students and teachers alike often register their surprise about how dramatically writing in academic courses differs from writing in nonacademic organizations. They also come to recognize how significant nontextual factors like social networks, office politics and tacit knowledge prove in the success (and failure) of projects. That academic and professional contexts are in fact “worlds apart” and that we ignore their differences at our own peril constitutes the premise of an important new book, Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts, by Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway and Anthony Paré. Using empirical case studies and multiple theoretical approaches (genre studies, activity theory and distributed cognition) the authors reveal both the socially situated nature of writing and the considerable gap between university and workplace contexts. While the book never explicitly considers service-learning, it delivers insights and cautions that can be readily applied to both the practical and theoretical dimensions of writing for the community.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric