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Professional Writing in Context: Lessons from Teaching and Consulting in Worlds of Work [Book Review

cited seem never to ask whether errant employees have even taken technical or professional writing courses. Far from seeing academic research as advancing the cause of entrenched power structures, Tebeaux sees it as insular and irrelevant. She faults academics for not adapting quickly enough to the needs of tomorrow’s workplace as envisioned by futurist management and marketing specialists in trade and popular journals like PC World, Fortune, and Industry Week. She calls for perfecting “a type of WD-40 rhetoric” that will work in any technological medium (p. 48). But if anything is clear from academic research on writing it is that simplistic models of well-oiled information transfer cannot be sustained. Tebeaux’s rule-governed model of writing is effectively challenged in this volume by Dorothy Winsor, who has studied engineering students in a co-op internship program over several years. These students seem to have to learn some aspects of writing in the workplace itself, by way of experience, feedback, and imitation of models. Yet students cling to the belief that their teachers should have been able to tell them the right way to write. In emphasizing that writing cannot be reduced to a set of explicit rules, Winsor veers in the direction of the “situated learning movement” that discounts explicit instruction altogether in favor of apprenticeship learning. But this movement underestimates the value of abstract generalizations to learners and their ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts (see J. Anderson, L. Reder, and H. Simon, “Situated Learning and Education,” Educational Researcher, pp. 5-1 1, May 1996). That reading and writing are complex rhetorical, cognitive, and social acts is a difficult lesson to learn but it is one that students can slowly acquire, as classroom research suggests. Students can learn to use some effective writing strategies and to think critically about what their managers or their teachers tell them. On the whole, this volume’does not approach the standards set by Ode11 and Goswami’s Writing in Nonacademic Settings, and by the more recent volume, Textual Dynamics of the Professions, edited by Charles Bazerman and James Paradis (1991). A few chapters (including that of Rebecca Burnett) provide substantive analyses of a set of texts or of a telling technical writing episode. But despite assembling an impressive array of contributors, the editors were generally unable to extract essays of the quality of the authors’ previously published work in the originality of the contributions, the substance of argument and evidence, or the necessary attention to relevant recent studies. In its scattershot array of challenges and polemics, the volume fails to provide a coherent perspective on nonacademic writing and leaves the reader with an image of an uneasy and disjointed field. Professional Writing in Context: Lessons from Teaching and Consulting in Worlds of Work-John F. Reynolds, Carolyn B. Matalene, Joyce N. Magnotto, Donald C. Samson, and Lynn V. Sadler (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995, 186 pp.) Reviewed by Rachel Spilka