Theory of Learning Workplace Genres
Every step to learning your genre requires humility. If you need to follow a style guide, you need the humility to follow it. If you have previous examples of a text you need to produce, you need the humility to copy their template and conform to the genre norms. And further, rhetorical knowledge can only be gained through humility. For rhetorical knowledge, you really must understand what your place is and what the purpose of your writing is, and you can’t let personal pride add a flare that will interfere with that.
I developed this theory through my personal conversations with my contact, Jeff. We talked about the workplace I picked for my project, but we also talked about other places we worked, too. He emphatically preached that, to survive in software engineering, you needed the humility to learn. The more I thought about that, the more it seems to apply to the concepts we learned in class. No matter how well prepared you are in terms of subject matter knowledge, if you don’t have the humility to curb your own personal style to what your company needs and expects from your documents, you haven’t really done the job asked of you.
I think rhetorical knowledge is the most important concept I learned from this class, and I think it’s generally more important than subject matter knowledge. In general, if you were hired onto a company or organization of some kind, the odds are that you understand the subject matter. Rhetorical knowledge is what really makes that subject matter useful to the company. And you need the humility to apply that rhetorical knowledge properly.
I will apply this theory to my workplace by understanding what my role is. I will really examine what my role is at the company and what the role of the documents I produce are. I will need to remind myself that my way of doing things is not necessarily the proper way of doing things, because seeking to change a document’s purpose or other important aspects of it is a waste of everyone’s time.
PHILLIP DRENNAN is a senior pursuing a Baccalaureate in Computer Science. Selected by Professor Jenkins.