UNIDAD DE COMUNICACION EXTERNA 1. Plan estratégico de comunicación externa

In her quest to complicate and thereby elevate professional writing beyond a fixation on form, Surma unduly disavows the very real constraints that guide much workplace writing. Ignoring templates altogether in the professional writing classroom promotes an unrealistic view of the writing students will likely encounter outside the academy. I argue that we can reconcile a focus on form with a more robust intellectual agenda by exploiting the interconnectedness of reusing forms and language on the one hand and tinkering with them on the other hand. A pedagogy that acknowledges standardized forms but encourages intervening among them need not be dismissed as formalist and thus misguided.68 Workplace writing regularly requires working creatively with prefabricated givens, whether these are bits of material that must be reused (e.g., specific language or a template) or more abstract conventions and norms (e.g., guidelines about the expected length and tone of a document).

In general, professional writers may follow given forms and adhere to certain language in order to protect or advance special interests, whether personal or institutional. Perhaps prescribed language has already been authorized legally and socially for one’s audience; likewise, a given form may be widely approved, understood, and expected within one’s environment. Changing that form and deviating from custom may unnecessarily confuse, annoy, and delay readers. Reuse promotes consistency, convenience, and efficiency and may save writers time and effort by preventing them from “reinventing the wheel.” But writing with constraints like approved language can also demand that writers perform careful rhetorical acrobatics—writing cautiously

68 _{Amy Lynch-Biniek denounces formalism in a critique of They Say/I Say, where she defines formalism as}

“instruction grounded in fixed forms, set schema and particular ‘academic’ turns of phrase” (n. pag.). She uses the term to invoke strongly negative feelings yet repeatedly concedes that it is only problematic when “allowed to dominate composition teaching.” This chapter demonstrates how instructors can inventively revise coursework

yet creatively to satisfy requirements. Reuse in professional realms does not necessitate mechanical composition.

Valuing convenience and efficiency seems out of place in English departments, where courses in composition, literature, and creative writing all encourage students to spend time with reading and writing. Reading slowly and closely and revising multiple times are key strategies for teaching reading and writing. Writing is imagined as difficult and time-consuming. Any shortcuts that make it easier or faster—such as relying upon a template or reusing previous writing in a new context—are suspect.

However, values like speed and ease legitimately put pressure on writers composing in extramural settings where “time is money” and employees must work efficiently. For example, in his interviews with a military officer, Chris M. Anson illustrates that time management and efficiency drive much reuse in the military. Anson’s informant, Sheldon, explains, “In general, we are expected to do so much in the Army that anything we can ‘plagiarize’ to make life easier is not only useful, but often encouraged. A general motto is ‘work smarter, not harder.’ . . . All that leaders care about is whether or not the product is effective and can reduce time-consuming work. Time is a precious and inexhaustible resource” (“Fraudulent” 37).69 Anson shows the benefits of reuse in commercial environments too—for instance, reusing a product description to market a camera or vacation package in a new context (32). The original description is effective, reusing it bears no negative consequences, and rewriting it instead would occupy time, effort, and money better directed elsewhere. Furthermore, in some cases, reuse facilitates consistency and accuracy by retaining details that may get lost or grow inaccurate through rewriting. In

69 _{Note how Sheldon draws attention to the word plagiarism with quotation marks that register its contingency.}

particular, technical workplaces, such as scientific, engineering, or financial institutions, may rely upon cut-and-paste to ensure precision and accuracy when working with large, sensitive datasets.

In some work environments, composing involves advanced consideration of how current writing will facilitate quicker future writing. Writers may, for instance, produce distinct modules, blocks that can stand on their own or be easily integrated into several different contexts. Composition here entails writing new material and then resourcefully building multiple documents out of it through careful combination and rearrangement of parts. Some genres are especially amenable to modular development because they can be easily segmented into discrete parts—elements in a glossary or user manual and general policies and procedures, for example (Kostur). When writers know they must eventually translate the same subject matter into multiple formats, perhaps for different audiences and occasions, they can plan ahead by drafting modular, easily reusable writing. As James A. Mann and John B. Ketchum have shown, modifying these parts may require adjusting tone and angle to satisfy different audiences, rearranging the presentation of information to highlight different emphases, adding or removing explanations to match readers’ knowledge, or excerpting selected information according to importance. Preparing accessible, reconfigurable parts that can be easily adapted according to these procedures proves more efficient than assigning each eventual document as an entirely independent project to be written seemingly from scratch.

Reused language circulates in the workplace as buzzwords, clichés, and other kinds of formulaic language too. Reusing such language helps writers accurately and consistently address a given community, context, or field of expertise. Here reuse may entail repeating principles and values that one’s workplace wishes to support, that help characterize the company or

organization uniformly, and that contribute to its overall self-image or brand. Individuals employ the same strategy when sending job applications that strategically integrate keywords from the job ad to which they are responding or from the target company’s website. Reuse here is goal- oriented and originates either materially from a specific document or more abstractly from a general sense of the discourse community one wishes to enter.70

Company and industry standards and policies may also guide language and form, so that stakeholders other than oneself exert some control over a project’s presentation. In professional environments subject to the work-made-for-hire doctrine, the company rather than the individual ultimately owns its products anyway; so even mundane correspondence falls within a domain of muddled agency and multiple origins. Likewise, much workplace writing is collaborative and requires selecting, cutting, pasting, and synthesizing contributions from a number of sources, which may include coworkers, previous documents, and research. (See Jason Johnson; Cross; Rivers; Paré; Debs; Surma.) Working together and combining different ideas and ways of thinking may yield richer, more comprehensive results but requires careful tinkering, in addition to joining, in order to approximate a unified, consistent point of view.

Individuals may produce this point of view to simulate a coherent group consensus, one voice devised from many. Often it represents a corporate author, a reliable brand cobbled together from many participants’ contributions to a writing project. I suggest that the work of cobbling together requires dwelling within existing texts (notes, previous drafts, correspondence) and playing with their components; it is an act of tinkering. Mary Beth Debs has found that a

70 _{Application materials depend so much on keywords that guides like Alan Bond and Nancy Schuman’s 300+} Successful Letters for All Occasions offer lists of keywords for use on résumés and cover letters, arranged according

to different fields. And as Nicole Amare and Alan Manning have shown, employers’ widespread practice of screening candidates’ résumés for keywords may encourage applicants to pad their application materials with

collective “we” undergirds much business writing and can be discerned in writers’ discussions of their work and in company documents themselves. She notes that “The role of the organization may be taken on so well by individual writers that we find the corporation to be the only author visible in many documents today that address a consumer audience,” such as annual reports, collection letters, and advertisements (Debs 163). How do disparate individuals achieve unity and sustain a collective ethos in these documents? Debs approaches this question from more of a social perspective than a textual one: she argues that institutionalized interactions and rhetorical practices facilitate individuals’ inculcation into company values and norms. Rhetorical practices involving “[d]ocument cycling, review privileges, central data bases, and boilerplate material” ensure that individuals interact with other employees who screen their developing writing as appropriate to the organization’s ethos (Debs 167). What Debs does not consider is how these interacting participants shape the documents they modify and review into cohesive wholes—an endeavor in which tinkering must be central. On such occasions I would expect to see specific strategies for textual manipulation: for example, substituting language to produce an appropriate and unified tone and register and to rely upon consistent terminology; adding language to clarify, explain, or fill gaps; deleting superfluous language; and reformatting fonts, spacing, margins, indentation, and alignment to ensure a cohesive appearance that represents the collective ethos that one’s workplace supports.

As the examples in this section have shown, professional writing can feature heavy reuse, which necessitates the common textual procedures that I have previously enumerated. There is continuity between this more standardized domain and the looser, more unpredictable ones that have preceded it; similar practices drive reuse and variation. These include rearranging and manipulating words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs to adjust tone or modify emphasis or

sequence; building new texts from previous parts via combination; and translating a document for a new occasion. Translating may involve condensing or expanding, changing form or genre, or adjusting tone or vocabulary. At the very least, reusing templates and basic forms always requires some adding and substituting of general information—the date, a company or employee’s name, a reason for writing. Such basic procedures mark a minimal, required level of intervention, while further intervention, and even deviation from a standard, signifies greater invention and exposes the playful, creative potential in composing even routine correspondence. Creativity intermingles with the many constraints and occasions for textual reuse that characterize professional writing. Writing that emerges from a form or template can be inventive, just as writing that does not model a form or template can be formulaic (for instance, expressing obvious or repetitive ideas and sentiments).