Thanks, Jamie, that helps. I'm having to revise my previous stance, but
I'd like to hold it for a moment longer in order to respond to this:
> But now that I write this, I find myself puzzled at your puzzlement
> ("hard time imagining"). If business needs knowledge (axiomatic, I
> think), and knowledge needs language (cf Aristotle, John Gage), why
> wouldn't a good deal of writing in businesses be epistemic? Surely you
> don't think that knowledge creation occurs exclusively in schools?
Nope, it's not that I think knowledge creation occurs exclusively in
schools. It's that I (almost) think that epistemic writing in school serves
the function of connecting the writer with the knowledge, of helping the
writer assimilate knowledge (writing-to-know). This process (and its
artifacts) seems much more tentative than what I imagine you'd find in
"recommendation reports, proposals, contracts, pharmaceutical trial
documentation," all of which seem to me to be examples of writing whose
possible outcomes are much more severely constrained or curtailed. In
school writing,it's much easier to be off-the-wall, as it were, because
nothing is likely to happen as a result of the writing. In a workplace,
the audiences and purposes for producing the documents are more pragmatic
and many more conclusions are therefore rendered unreachable, many more
opinions unsayable . . .
I don't mean to sound paranoid or to denigrate the knowledge-making that
you have shown does go on, only to say that it isn't as free-form as the
knowledge-making in school and so it seems to me to be something else. The
knowledge created in schools strikes me as far more personal than the
knowledge created in workplaces.
Marcy
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Marcy Bauman
Media Consultant
College of Pharmacy
University of Michigan
734-647-2227
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