The people I had interviewed, once they were challenged to think about it, had also been surprised by the amount of writing their work entailed. The texts, particularly those that are for internal use only, are very brief and can look scruffy, incomplete and sometimes even chaotic. However, they do the job. Perhaps the most striking observation made at the workshop was the comment that many of the completed forms we looked at would not pass an assessment but, on the other hand, a form completed to the standard required for assessment might be neither practical nor appropriate in the context of a busy workplace where speed is of the essence and shared knowledge can be assumed. Texts of this type are easy to overlook or simply categorise as repetitive or routine, but analysis shows that those writing them require a good understanding of the work of the business and need to take careful account of the needs of their audience. They must write quickly, accurately and legibly in challenging situations and exercise judgement about the information that it is necessary to record. As described by Kress (2010) in his work on the Social Semiotic Theory of Multimodality, it is possible to see this writing, not in terms of what it lacks but as the effective and sometimes creative use of the available resources for meaning making within the constraints of the workplace context.
References Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary ommunication. Abingdon: Routledge.
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