I am a bit late to join the discussion, but still...
I've been quite confused by the repeated claim that writing at school is
"not real," while writing at work is. My question is: "not real" to
whom? I bet it's real to the students: they have to work hard to produce
it, and I bet it's real to the professors, who have to work hard to
respond to it. So, who is this imaginary person who sees school writing
as not "authentic"? And why we, for whom school writing is the reality
of everyday work, insist that it is not quite so "real"?
On the other hand (as I said many times in different contexts), there
are many cases when workplace writing in not perceived as real either by
the writers or by the readers (let's say, more than once did I hear that
some workplace writing is just a "game"; and sometimes, it is).
I do not think that by arguing that some courses are designed to
encourage "real" writing versus "not so real" writing we can convince
anybody that school writing is as real as any other type of writing. In
fact, this argument only supports the claim that the "usual" school
writing is "not real," and that we need to design special courses that
would require students to write for outside readers/clients and thus, to
become engaged in "authentic" writing tasks. While I support this
approach to course design and use it myself, I think that to understand
the origin of the claim that school writing is less "real" than
workplace writing we need to go back to my initial question: who decides
how real a piece of writing is? Perhaps, classroom writing is not "real"
to a company manager who expects reports from her employees, but it is
more than real when situated in a classroom. By the same token, an
employee report written to a manager of a particular company in the
context of a particular project is not "real" to a student in a
classroom: it has no meaning outside of its immediate context.
Perhaps, we could agree that any type of writing is real to the person
who writes it and to the person who receives it as a reader.
--
Natasha Artemeva
Assistant Professor
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
K1S 5B6
Tel.+1 (613) 520-2600 ext.7452
Fax +1 (613) 520-6641
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.carleton.ca/~nartemev/index.html
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