The authors report on a survey of students and alumni, examining their “rhetorical training”—their writing knowledge and experiences across multiple courses, campus employment, and workplace contexts. The survey asked participants to identify their most often written genres and their most valued type of writing, the rhetorical situations in which they compose their most valued genre, and the writing processes they have developed. The authors examined the multiple sources of rhetorical training that participants believe prepared them to write their most valued genre. Multiple rhetorical training experiences prepare writers for the writing they value, and both students and alumni describe robust writing processes and appreciate feedback from others. Yet alumni continue to express challenges adapting writing for new audiences and genres.

Abstract from the authors/article:

This article explores ways that the field of rhetoric and writing studies can benefit from intentional engagement with work-integrated learning (WIL) research and pedagogy in the context of transfer research. Specifically, the article discusses: (1) redesigning writing internship pedagogies to align with WIL learning and curriculum theories and practices; (2) revisiting threshold concepts of writing by accounting for knowledge, theories, and practices that are central to epistemological participation in a variety of professional writing careers; (3) reconsidering notions of vocation to emphasize the ways writers’ personal epistemologies and social trajectories interact with the purposes, aims, and values of academic and workplace contexts; and (4) reconceptualizing writing major curricula in relation to the conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and dispositions of expert writers in a range of professional contexts. In short, we argue that intentional engagement with WIL can enrich work on writing transfer and the field of rhetoric and writing studies as a whole. In addition to our theoretical discussion of the value of engaging with WIL frameworks in writing studies, we introduce our multi-institutional, transnational study of how WIL affects diverse populations of undergraduate students’ recursive transfer of writing knowledge and practices as an example of the kind of generative research on writing transfer and WIL that we are encouraging writing transfer researchers to take up.

From the published abstract: “This article explores ways that work-integrated learning (WIL) scholarship and the field of writing studies can benefit from intentional engagement in the context of transfer research. This conceptual paper foregrounds writing in WIL contexts, introduces writing transfer and its relationship to writing in WIL contexts, discusses conceptual
overlaps of writing transfer research and WIL, and suggests what writing transfer can mean for WIL practitioners. Overall, we argue that intentional engagement with writing transfer can enrich both WIL research and pedagogy.”