Nadene Eisner SSR Beaufort: Learning New Genres: The Convergence of Knowledge and Action WRD 500 In chapter

five, Learning New Genres: The Convergence of Knowledge and Action, from her book, Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work (1999), Anne Beaufort analyzes how context-specific genre knowledge (p. 102) is acquired in a discourse community. As she continues to follow new writers in the JRC business organization, Beaufort documents their immersions in learning three genres, press releases, letters of requests, and federal grant proposals, and shows that although experience within and rapport with the organizations discourse community leads to expertise in manipulating and writing for a specific genre, this does not happen automatically (p.136). Staff must find writing mentors and make concentrated efforts to learn on the job and engage themselves in the discourse community in order to become skilled writers of the organizations genres. Beaufort demonstrates the expertise required for three new staff writers, Ursula, Pam, and Selma, to learn to write in their organization without a foundation in either the discourse community or the rhetorical situation of the genre. Ursulas mastery of the press release and of her letters of request is dependent upon the mentoring of other staff writers who edit her texts. Pam and Selma, likewise, learn the genre of federal grant proposals by borrowing and cutting and pasting from proposals by other staff writers (p. 126). The commonality between the three writers is their gradual comprehension of the knowledge power that comes from having personal contacts within the communities for whom they write. All three begin to realize the importance of knowing the discourse community and how the genres function within a given discourse communitydrives a set of complex interrelated linguistic features (p. 120). Genre comprehension comes differently for the new writers. Ursula writes a successful letter of request when she communicates with a contact she has within the discourse community (p. 118). Both Pam and Selma generate successful federal grant proposals after investing the time to research and inform themselves about their grants discourse communities (p.128, p. 133). All three learn to do what Beaufort reiterates throughout the chapter, to write a text that incorporates the content issues, the exigencies of the rhetorical situation (p. 105) and all of the social and cultural issues of both the sending discourse community and the receiving discourse community (p.105). Learning to write within a genre is the focus for the second half of Dorothy Winsors book, Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center (2003). She references Beaufort in her opening discussion in Chapter Five, Entering Systems of Knowledge/Power (p.125). Both authors use interviews to chronicle how new staff acquire workplace genre. Both studies demonstrate that becoming skilled in a genre occurs more in the workplace than in the classroom and new staff acquire skills through mimicking and learning from mentors in order to benefit from the distributed cognition of the workplace. The interns at JRC and the interns at Pacific Engineering (PE) are able to find mentors from whom they can copy and whom can edit their writing. PE interns are especially dependent upon the engineers and technicians because

the technical communication language is so often coded (Winsor, p. 133). Interns have to learn a new technical vocabulary that was not taught in higher education classes. They are also challenged in learning technical communication because the knowledge the engineers worked with was often fluctuating and uncertain (Winsor, p. 130). For Beaufort, discourse relates to the organizations involved with the JRC projects, but for Winsor, learning the technical communication discourse at PE means learning the tools through which the managers, engineers, and technicians communicate. Text, Winsor writes, is often spread over software and over the symbolic content one used it to generate (p. 137). Interns have to learn Word and Excel to generate reports, Power Point to prepare presentations (Winsor, p. 137), and Pro/Engineer to create engineering drawing programs (Winsor, p. 138). College engineering students have to learn quickly the genres used by their company. Until they do, they are powerless to contribute new knowledge (Winsor, p. 130). With the focus on learning genre in the working world, Beauforts and Winsors chapters help to answer all three questions: What is writing, rhetoric, and discourse? Writers of new genres in new environments are expected to learn the relationships between structure, rhetorical context, and content (Beaufort, p. 136). Beaufort writes, because discourse communities shape genres, mastering a genre requires an understanding of the genres function within the discourse community (p. 105). Acquiring knowledge of a genre goes beyond what students learn in higher education classes. Winsor notes that one of the challenges of learning engineering genre in college is that students are not given opportunity to apply knowledge within the classroom (p. 138). Likewise, the interns Beaufort interviewed did not apply the word genre to business writing (p.136). Students who learn using tools similar to those in the real world can transfer that knowledge and will be more prepared to learn the genre of their new communities.

Works Cited Beaufort, Anne. Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work. New York: Teachers College, 1999. Print. Winsor, Dorothy A. Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2003. Print.