This article elaborates and evaluates a sociolinguistic framework for the study of writing. The first part of the article discusses different sociolinguistic concepts and theories and introduces the two concepts of communicative community and communicative group, which encompass speech and writing, as well as communication of both local and distant and public and private types. For the purposes of these concepts, written and spoken discourse are assumed to be intermingled in the communicative process and steered by similar sociocognitive conditions. The second part of the article discusses the application of the theoretical framework to a specific case, the writing that takes place at a local government office. The study comprises analyses of the organizational structure and its effects on writing at work, the communicative process and the role of spoken discourse and collaboration in the construction of documents, and the social dimension of writing at work. This workplace is found to constitute a communicative group of the local-public type, which means that communication at the office is part of a socially based and hierarchically structured set of communicative activities, with a close intertwinement of spoken and written discourse.

Texts reflect the conditions under which they are produced. This means that the writing process can favor or counteract a comprehensible text. In this article, problems of law text comprehensibility are related to the legislative writing process. The drafting of three pieces of Swedish consumer legislation was observed at different stages, and the results of this study are summarized and analyzed in relation to rhetorical and sociolinguistic theories of writing. Law writing can roughly be described by a rhetorical model as regards the role of the main phases in the process. It is, however, found to be less reader-oriented and more oriented toward the speech community than the rhetorical model prescribes.