Within work sites that engage in knowledge work, newcomers have particular difficulty acquiring knowledge because knowledge keeps changing. Newcomers have to assimilate currently accepted knowledge while remaining open to learning and even generating new knowledge. Such acquisition and generation of communal knowledge are examples of distributed cognition. In workplaces engaging in knowledge work (where knowledge is the primary product), distributed cognition aims at a less stable goal than the one that Hutchins describes for ship navigation. A study of six summer interns in an engineering development center shows that, for them and their more experienced colleagues, learning did not precede activity but rather was the means by which they remained attuned to activity and able to function. Cognition was distributed not only among people but also among people and their tools. Communication tools were particularly important because communication was the means by which the system functioned as a unified whole.

Within complex organizations, people are members of various and sometimes conflicting subgroupings. Texts function between and across these various subgroupings to simultaneously bridge the gap between them (and thus allow joint work to be done) and yet maintain existing structures of power and territory. This study reports observations of blue-collar laboratory technicians using work orders written by engineers. It identifies work orders as a genre that both triggered and concealed the work of the technicians, allowing it to disappear into the work of the engineers. This study has implications for our understanding of the role texts play in coordinating joint work and for our understanding of what it means for texts to be perceived as generic. In particular, it emphasizes the political aspects of genre as form of social action, an aspect previous research and theory have tended to neglect.

Rhetoric continues to struggle to theorize the simultaneous existence of pattern and contingency. Responses to this issue have been couched in elaborations of genre theory and, more recently, of Vygotskian activity theory. Activity theory offers two advantages in theorizing how change and continuity can coexist: It expands our ability to see how text and context influence one another and it encourages us to see that lack of unity is normal in any activity system. This study exemplifies these advantages by looking at four entry-level engineers who produced a genre they called documentation in their first 4 years at work. They defined documentation as writing that describes events to establish a common understanding of completed or promised actions. Documentation was one of the tools the participants used to create and maintain the activity system of their workplace and to reshape it as well.

Engineers' use of rhetoric differs from that of scientists because of the material objects engineers work with and the material conditions under which they act. For engineers, “publication” takes the form of releasing a marketable object, not a refereed article. Thus, they have less need than scientists do to create written theoretical work and can instead build knowledge by group discussion of instrument traces that they tie directly to the object. The fact that they usually work in hierarchical, for-profit organizations also affects their rhetorical practices, as they must shape the actions of those both below and above them in the corporate hierarchy.

Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy. Cheryl Geisler. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994. 354 pp. Computer Ethics: Cautionary Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in Computing. 2nd ed. Tom Forester and Perry Morrison. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. 347 pp. A Practical Guide to Usability Testing. Joseph S. Dumas and Janice C. Redish. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993. 412 pp. Managing Your Documentation Projects. JoAnn T. Hackos. New York: Wiley, 1994. 629 pp. Hypertext in Hypertext. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 242 pp. Available in either MS Windows or Apple Macintosh versions on two 3.5 inch diskettes.

Traditionally, invention has been regarded as relatively unimportant in technical writing because of the widely held notion that technologists generate their ideas prior to writing. It has recently been argued, however, that studies of situated writing encounter difficulties due to restricted ideas of writing and text. For instance, if writing means only transcribing extended pieces of prose, then it is difficult to account for the way invention is performed in technical writing. The wider idea of writing allows us to look differently at this instance of situated writing. Using this wider idea, a study of 3 engineering students engaged in a real-world project shows that the technical work of the project and invention for the students' final report were actually simultaneous rather than sequential activities. Moreover, writing in the form of notes and lists contributed to technical work and served to make knowledge communal among group members. In the technical writing examined here, invention for writing, invention through writing, and technical invention itself heavily overlapped.

Engineers and public relations writers must cooperate to write public relations releases in a manufacturing firm. These releases represent the firm rather than any individual writer. An ethnographic study shows, however, that both engineers and public relations writers see at least some aspects of the releases as representing themselves personally. They therefore try to control content, wording, and authorship of the documents. Despite the difficulties they have in achieving such control, writers invest in corporate texts just as they do in personal ones.

Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers. Stephen Doheny‐Farina. Cambridge: MIT, 1992. 279 pp. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 312 pp. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 212 pp. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Richard Rorty. Cambridge UP, 1991. 226 pp. Color for the Electronic Age: What Every Desktop Publisher Needs To Know About Using Color Effectively in Charts, Graphs, Typography and Pictures. Jan V. White. New York: Watson‐Guptill Publications, 1990. 208 pp. Eye on the News. Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark. St. Petersburg: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1991. 86 pp. Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing. Roger C. Parker. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: Ventana, 1990. 371 pp. The Makeover Book. Roger C. Parker. Chapel Hill: Ventana, 1989. 278 pp. Graphic Design for the Electronic Age: The Manual for Traditional and Desktop Publishing. Jan V. White. New York: Watson Guptill, 1988. 212 pp. Technical Editing. Joseph C. Mancuso. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1992. 191pp.

Previous research on the communication failures contributing to the Challenger's explosion tends to ask why it happened that various people in the organizations involved knew about the faulty O-rings but failed to pass on the information to decision makers. This is a faulty question, revealing assump tions many of us unconsciously share even when we consciously reject these as sumptions. This question implies a simplistic notion of knowledge and a conduit model of communication. Insights from the sociology of technology and the new rhetoricians can help us to form better questions about rhetoric in organizations.

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Previous research on the writing process in the workplace has given inadequate attention to the collaborative nature of work in an organization. Examination of the processes an engineer goes through as he writes a routine and a non-routine document shows that those processes are strongly affected by the degree to which his company has previously accepted the claims he makes as given or as knowledge. Claims are established as knowledge in an organization by being “inscribed,” that is, by having a series of increasingly general symbolic representations assigned to them by a series of writers at work. The inscribing process both resembles the writing process and affects it.