20 Professional domains: Writing as creation of economic value

Abstract

Writing has its origins in economic activity, and many of its major developments represent attempts to create economic value within changing information technologies, work organization, and other capabilities and relationships. In this chapter, we describe the history of writing in terms of creating value by writing, discuss writing research in North America and Europe, and describe state-of-the-art and controversial issues in workplace writing. We argue that three emerging trends will shape writing in the near term: integrated writers, knowledge workers who own processes and who routinely combine knowledge, methods, and information with their work on those processes; integrated writing, in which products are customized through text to create specific value for a customer; and the integration of distributed work, which involves tying together distributed, disparate people and systems so that information can flow through, and bring value to, different contexts (e.g., by social media). We discuss the contributions that applied linguistics can make to these issues, and speculate on how research perspectives can guide future understandings of writing for economic value. The case of business reportingRecently, one of the authors studied report writing at an Internet search marketing company, Semoptco ( Spinuzzi 2010 ). Each search engine optimization (SEO) specialist wrote up to 10 to 12 complex 20-page monthly reports in the first ten business days of each month. Remarkably, these SEO specialists did not consider themselves to be writers, yet they generated structurally and rhetorically complex reports as a matter of course, while negotiating a constantly changing landscape of a contingent, rapidly changing business sector.Under these conditions, how did the SEO specialists manage to write these reports so quickly and so well? In part, they used a standing set of transformations, including report templates, annotations on old reports, automated tools, e-mail with clients and company employees, and instant messaging (IM) with other specialists, to rapidly develop and vet report sections. Indeed, much of the writing work was prepackaged via automated tools and templates; the specialists' work was to properly assemble these pieces, then interpret and explain their implications.The clients were paying for these reports as part of their service, so it is easy to see how the reports created value for them. Yet the more hidden, quotidian acts of writing also created value by allowing the specialists to gather, organize, juxtapose,

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“…Next, Author 1 identified significant research studies on reuse and also consulted overviews such as those by Faigley [25] and Jakobs & Spinuzzi [35] To better understand what is already known about the pitch and value propositions, Author 1 performed Google Scholar search for keywords such as "pitch presentations" and "value proposition" and selected the most relevant results. Author 1 then read the articles, identified relevant citations from those articles, and read the cited articles.…”

“…As mentioned, the GIP provided a slide deck template to guide the pitches and required entrepreneur teams to use it, something that the GIP began in Year 3. Not surprisingly, as Table III shows, all entrepreneur teams used the pitch deck template, which tended to structure and guide their arguments (for a discussion of templates in the context of presentations, see [Yates & Orlikowski 2007]; for a discussion of templates in other contexts, see [Spinuzzi 2012], [35]). For instance, most final decks closely followed the suggested sections ("Technology Description"; "Development Status"; "IP Status"; "Business Model"; "Markets"; "Market Interest"; "Competition"; "Team Status"; "Questions?…”

Realism, social cohesion, and media policymaking: The case of Swiss public broadcasting

“…In a media organization, language is a twofold resource: On an object level of mass media activity, language serves as a semiotic resource in a chain of value creation (Jakobs and Perrin 2014b), in which source texts are sequentially processed into target texts (Jakobs and Perrin 2014a: 3). On a meta level, language enables organizational communication and development (e.g.…”

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“…In the 1980s, it was dominated by cognitivist theoretical frameworks, but from the mid-1990s to the present, it has been informed by interpretivist frameworks. Next, Author 1 identified significant research studies representing each framework and consulted overviews such as those by Faigley [19] as welll as Jakobs and Spinuzzi [33] To better understand what is already known about the pitch and value propositions, Author 1 performed a Google Scholar search for keywords such as "pitch presentations" and "value proposition" and selected the most relevant results. Author 1 then read the articles, identified relevant citations from those articles, and read the cited articles.…”