Download PDF
Contents
Anna’s Narrative
While I think fondly of the TPC courses I teach, I nervously stared at my class roster the first time I taught one. The entire class, save two, were majoring in Information Technology or Cybersecurity, many of whom had extensive experience writing for their field through co-op placements. While my job was to teach these students professional writing genres, I was unsure of their workplace communities’ genres and writing style. Would my general “business writing” course be of any use to them? The same feeling emerged one year later when I taught the course again. Some students were majoring in Cybersecurity; some were on the Rhetoric & Professional Writing track and preparing to apply for law school; some were interested in careers in copyediting; some were in interdisciplinary business tracks and pursuing careers in marketing and human resources, among others. Certainly, a student writing for an Information Technology field is going to write in different professional genres and write for different audiences than a student who is preparing to learn how to write legal documents. As a result, I found myself agreeing with what Elizabeth Wardle claims is the difficulty in teaching FYC and, as I now see, teaching TPC: “genres make sense to the people who create, use, and change them, but they are difficult, if not impossible, to teach people to write out of context” (768). In other words, the problem with the TPC contact zone is that students are expected to not only write in genres outside of their natural context but also to write in a genre that may not be directly related to their professional discipline.
Is it possible for a teacher of professional writing to teach professional genres when the teacher and students exist in different professional discourse communities? I believe the answer is yes, the teacher can, although perhaps not in a way that emphasizes discourse-specific subject matter or even teaches the broad strokes of what it may mean to write “professionally.” The dilemma of a TPC course is that it cannot attach itself to a specific discourse community. It is not realistic for an instructor to learn how to write for every professional discourse community a student belongs to, nor is it realistic to tell students there is a universal standard for professional writing. What is realistic for many writing teachers is creating a pedagogy that emphasizes students gaining context-specific genre and audience knowledge for the writing they do in their professional lives.
Writing does not exist in a decontextualized vacuum. All writing is situated, contextual, and varies depending upon the text’s author, exigence, and audience. Rather than positioning TPC as a catch-all course for learning what it means to broadly write professionally or attempting to teach discourse knowledge in a field we are not literate in, we can maximize our time by positioning TPC classes as an opportunity to encourage student-led reflection about the rhetorical concepts expected for their field. For example, when reflecting on an assignment that asked students to relay “bad news” to an audience based on a provided prompt, a student explained to me that in their field most “bad news” conversations are typically had in-person and rarely done in writing. Why, then, I wondered, was I requiring students to write this genre in a format that did not serve them?
As we moved forward in the class and continued to work on these projects, I adapted my pedagogy to emphasize that all professional writing depends on the discourse community it belongs to. For example, I now have relaxed parameters on genre. As in the above example, instead of requiring students to write a formally written “bad news” message, students may pursue alternative options: if students feel their field communicates these messages verbally, students may submit a script for a verbal conversation or a video that enacts that script. I then ask students to reflect on their intended audience and the rhetorical choices in a cover letter that precedes every individual assignment they submit. Students are expected to reflect upon their intended audience (e.g. the professional discourse they belong to) and explain how their rhetorical choices—the word choices they use, the tone they are using, the mode they have submitted the assignment in, the length of the document, among others—fit their discourse community’s expectations for writing and composing. We describe these solutions further in the following sections; although, the challenge in assessing TPC work and teaching a new student audience remained an obstacle, which Brooke describes below.