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Kathyrn: Your post reminded me of how, when I first started to study workplace writing in social work, I would ask workers about their "writing" and get painful disclaimers: "I'm a terrible writer," "I can't spell, and my grammar is awful," and a real discomfort with the idea that I wanted to look at their "writing." Then I noticed that the workers themselves referred to this activity as "recording," and so I asked about recording and got rich, thoughtful, confident replies. Clearly, this was something quite different from what we might call "professional writing." In fact, I suspect that most social workers (and others in service fields, as you point out) would deny that they did anything called "professional writing." Someone (I can't remember for certain who, but I think it might have been my colleague Jane Ledwell-Brown) reports that even people who spend a considerable amount of their working week "writing" do not list that activity as "writing" on their job descriptions. Anthony Pare