Genres in Technical/Professional Writing

          The time that I’m spending in Integrity is challenging me as a writer and opening my eyes a bit as an employee. Workplace writing is something that I’m dealing with, but, more often than not, my job boils down to a matter of uptake. As Bawarshi and Reiff say, “knowledge of uptake is knowledge of what to take up, how, and when, including how to execute uptakes strategically and when to resist expected uptakes” (86). I have been put forward, because of my experience writing as an intern, as the interim professional writer for both the IT Department and the Educational Development Department. This position is a struggle of uptake, since procedure before has always been for every department to handle their own writing, and some of them are quite proud at what they’ve written. Unfortunately, they don’t have the years of experience and training that I’ve had in writing professional documents, and all documents must have a sense of consistency.

          I’m doing my best to learn how to rewrite, redesign, and put forward these documents in a way that the original authors will uptake what I’ve written and not shut down. In the genre where I spend most of my time, which is technical manuals and instructional material, the language has to be a specific way in order to avoid failing as a genre. As Miller says, genres can fail by not having enough similarities across all the discourse, there may not be enough consideration of all the elements, and/or the genre has no real call to social action (Miller 163-4). My manuals are all calls to action, because my goal is to provide these manuals as a way of making certain processes easier and more accessible. Once these complicated procedures have become more accessible, my hope is that they will be done quicker and with fewer mistakes.

          I’m attempting to combat these problems by speaking from a place of authority. I’m learning to do these procedures by reading the authors’ original documents, and then tweaking them in a way that maintains the original meaning. I must avoid antagonism, or finding a permanent place with this company will be impossible. A lot of these authors in the IT and Educational Departments are older than myself, and so there is a barrier there when it comes to authority on language. I make my best efforts to remind them that this is my career, and I’ve spent years studying how to write for a particular genre. Teamwork must prevail, just as Miller says, “We learn to understand better the situations in which we find ourselves and the potentials for failure and success in acting together” (165).