One of the course requirements is a formal report. For many students, this laboratory report is their first opportunity in an academic setting to present information and findings on an actual system. A fairly large number of students also participate in the Co-op Program, a sequence of courses built around an actual industrial assignment. For most students, this quarterly report is their first experience writing for a corporate audience. Our research examined how students wrote in these two different settings.
Writing is a communicative event.
Since each communicative event is embedded in the communicative habits of a given community, there must also be a set of implicit rules establishing the context of different types of writing. Thus, besides facing the general difficulties of writing, students are faced with writing in very different, specific contexts, an academic context for the lab reports and an industrial context for the quarterly co-op reports. Our research project explores the parameters and rules governing writing for the academic setting in comparison to the industrial setting and the impact of these different speech situations on the cognitive processes of writing. We have developed a conceptual framework that focuses on identifying senders, receivers, channels, and forms of messages to help identify the components and characteristics of these different speech situations. We have noticed that there are differences in the quality of writing in the two settings and suspect that this is due to differences in conceptualizing the writing situation.