They may struggle with skills with which they were comfortable in previous writing situations as they grapple with an increasingly complex array of choices and demands and constraints on their writing in a different situation. They will have stopped the learning process for several years, and they will be attempting to use skills and abilities that have atrophied from disuse. The assignment sequences that teachers in the Business Writing program will develop and use will share the assumption that learning about writing is a recursive process in all the senses described above. And writers will have repeated opportunities to use those processes for different purposes and in different contexts in all of the writing courses they complete. When we say writing is social practice, we mean several things, too.
Writing is purposeful and context-specific.
We write for reasons, to accomplish things, to DO something. Writers are thought of as joining a conversation, using language to participate in an ongoing conversation. To follow the conversation metaphor further, writers are always joining conversations or forming and participating in communities of discourse. We define discourse communities as groups of individuals communicating within and through approved channels of discourse, well-established or diverse, regulated or openly competitive, marked or amorphous. Equally important, discourse communities are defined by a body or lore of knowledge familiar to all members, knowledge that is used to limit, prioritize, or valorize the membership.