The full Q&A is here: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/12/07/252108/index.htm

Here's the relevant passage:

DEAR ANNIE: I'm not your average FORTUNE reader--I teach English at a state university--but I wonder whether you can help me out. I'm teaching a course in business English this semester, and I find that students are quick to disparage the importance of writing as a business skill. Can you give me a realistic view of how useful it is to be able to communicate well in a business environment? SISYPHUS

DEAR SISYPHUS: Gary Blake, who runs the Communication Workshop in Port Washington, N.Y. (www.writingworkshop.com), has this to say: "When I go around the country talking with big corporate clients, I am astounded at the number of managers who bewail the fact that nobody who works for them can write a simple paragraph. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but they're no good to your company, or your career, if you can't express them clearly and persuasively."

Paula Goodman, a vice president and senior recruiter at Citigroup in New York City, finds that strong writing skills are "a tiebreaker. If I have two job candidates in front of me, equally qualified except that one can write well and the other can't, I'll hire the one who can--every time."

Want statistics? A survey last year by Robert Half International of the 1,000 largest employers in the U.S. reported that 96% say employees must have good communication skills to get ahead. And several detailed studies have shown a clear correlation between literacy and income. Stephen Reder, a linguist at Portland State University in Oregon, has worked closely with the U.S. Department of Education in measuring how American adults' verbal proficiency (or lack thereof) affects their economic success. Reder found that among people with a two- or four-year college degree, those in the highest quintile in writing ability earn, on average, more than three times what those with the worst writing skills make. Tell your students that, and I'll bet they sit up and pay attention. And their future colleagues, who will be spared jumbled reports and murky memos, will bless you.

I was particularly interested in Cathy Schryer's opening keynote that reported on research she has been doing with an interdisciplinary team in health care and social work. They have been studying a particular genre - "case presentations" - and the associated document types and practices associated with presenting cases in three different health fields: opthalmology/optometry, general medicine, and social work.

I liked the characterization of genres as "trajectory entities" - a focus which highlighted the improvisational character of patient case presentations and the way specific documents anchored these, but did not determine them. The structrual elements provide the tactical resources for maneuvering - brokering, etc. This is an enriched view of Leigh Starr's concept of "boundary objects," a deeper view that is informed by rhetoric, discourse analysis, and genre theory.

Two important texts that were mentioned and that I will be including in a future grad. seminar on methodology are Ken Hyland's Exploring Interaction in Writing and Dorothy Smith's The Conceptual Practices of Power

Also notable today were presentations by Peter Kastberg whose process tracing work includes the most impressive observational accounts I've seen apart from Spinuzzi. Denis Alamargot gave a very interesting paper reporting on a cognitive study of pausing during a composing tast. Using synched eye-tracking and pen tracking on a tablet PC, the study went into the pauses to determine what was happening when writers with high-capacity working memory paused vs. when those with low-capacity working memory paused. Turns out that both types of writers get to the same desitination - texts of comparable quality - but they take different paths to get there. What we saw in this presentation was that the cognitive psychologist had a much more flexible and constructivist view of process than many of our arch-humanist colleauges do!

Graham Smart talked about a new project he is working on to map the environmental discourse around the issue of climate change. It promises to be a very interesting study as he gets into interviews and ethnographic observation with the various players: think tanks, dissident scientists, govt. agencies, indiginous groups, among others.

The last talk of the day was by Carol Berkenkotter, Laura Gurak, and Zoe Nyssa from U. Minn. They talked about a project with Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo that had many of the dynamics of WIDE's information modeling client projects, so it was a pleasure to hear. And Zoe did a fantastic job; she's getting ready to start her Ph.D. at UMinn and she clearly has a bright future ahead of her in the field!

So far, I really like the CATTW conference and community - I am going to try to do some ambassadorial work with ATTW because there is no reason why we oughtn't coordinate more than we currently do with our impressive colleagues to the North.

The DVD package is a collection of video shorts and other materials. The underlying purpose of the collection is to present a case for shooting movies on film - actual film, vs. digital, etc.

But as Carmen points out, the clips of famous directors, cinematographers, and producers are also useful teaching and learning tools apart from an explicit message about which media might be better to use. The myriad uses of such a package, in fact, puts the notion of "genre" - and particularly definitions of genre that might rely upon the tendential forces of writers/authors in determining purpose and therefore the type of genre - under serious scrutiny. Can we say that such a collection of multimodal texts *is* a genre? or is many? Or should we just concede, perhaps, that it has *genre potential* and leave it up to specific instances of use to determine what genres emerge at a given time/place?

Jeff and I had a bit of a back and forth about this during the talk, passing notes like high-schoolers...except we were writing things like this:

Bill:
"the upshot here is that a genre is not made by a writer, it only becomes a genre in a situation where users recognize and act on it...before or after that it is 'simply' a text..."

Jeff:
"Hmm...so genres don't precede use? This is both interesting and conceptually incoherent if read simply."

Bill:
"Yes, two things are problematized, espcially. 1) genres as forms of any type - no 1 to 1 relationship can exist between a text and a genre; a genre cannot "stick" to a text, rather a text becomes a genre only in situated circumstances...and it could later become a different or modified one. 2) authors can't work to "create" a genre, they can only create texts that, given the right circumstances, could occupy a genre in the future (or, through self-mediation, could act as a genre for the writer herself as she writes and/or uses the text - e.g. a grocery list). Both of these are relatively radical implications for rhetoric that are, nonetheless, based on what we take to be common sense in the field: that discursive action is fundamentally social.

Jeff:
"Maybe what is needed here is a robust sense of what we would call rhetorical moves that can be deployed in various genres. The "instructive text" then can work/exist on its own or as part of any number of genres and in coordination with (or conflict with) other 'texts'."

Good stuff!

One of the issues that is important in terms of working toward a "global articulation" around the study of professional writing is the complexity of the disciplinary, intellectual, cultural, and institutional geography.

But first, I suppose I should say what I mean by "global articulation." I made this up as I was writing, of course, but what I suppose I mean by this concept is the need and ability to have shared understandings about what we mean by the study (and practice and teaching) of writing as a type of globalized knowledge work. I do not mean one understanding; nor do I think that this understanding should be stable. But if we understand writing as a practice, currency, and (social and economic) form of capital that refuses boundaries in both its practice (production) and reception, then moving toward coherent conversations across boundaries seems important.

In any event, for the past few years one of the issues that has occupied my attention at international meetings and in conversation with colleagues outside a US context is the relationship between linguistics and writing studies. This was a feature of the Aarhus meeting as well (and I suspect will be visible in Toronto). In some European contexts, at least, what we in the US study through the lenses of composition or rhetoric is studied through the lenses of linguistics.

There have always been and continue to be methodological relationships between linguistics and writing studies in the US, but in a European context, the relationships are also deeply disciplinary. What was fun in Aarhus was the many conversations we had about the affordances of different ways of looking at more or less the same activity.

But here is the interesting disciplinary issue for me. Within many European institutions, it seems to me, linguistics is tied to languages. That is, there is a research area-pedagogical area link that is important. And so at Aarhus, the study and teaching of writing is connected to the study and teaching of languages.

We simply do not (often) have that connection within a US disciplinary and institutional context. In fact, the study and teaching of languages, at least at my institution, is much more closely tied to the study and teaching of literature than it is to writing.

Pictures soon, I promise.

I'm actually posting a blog entry! Actually, this is only a quick note of thanks to the folks at the Aarhus School of Business and all the new colleagues we met. Our colleagues in Aarhus are warm, generous, and provided an intellectually rich meeting.

I will post some pictures and a bit more in the coming days.

Tak ASB!

Jack (Danish national team jersey) and Meg cradle Danish licorice

I hoped to launch a few conversations with the talk, and by the responses I saw so far, I think it has. I wanted to talk about the ubiquity of instructional texts as cultural artifacts, and not only as products but as the markers left behind of ways people learn to live with one another, particulary in a "knowledge society." I got some great questions from the audience - one that I am getting used to hearing lately about just how meaningless the notion of an individual author is given the research stance I propose (pretty damn meaningless).

Another great question was one of scale and the problem of representing "culture" depending on how the details of practice are rendered. There is a way in which ethnographic "thick description" still tells macro-level stories about practices that involve writing...when you "zoom in" to see note-taking, drafting, and formal text-making practices the accounts that result can seem to be acultural. I agree with this comment in part, though I guess this is where I'd suggest that at increasingly micro-levels we haven't (in our field) understood how culture inheres in practice. To take an example from another type of inquiry: can we see "culture" by looking at skin cells instead of skin colors on the faces of people in a crowd? sure we can...how? that's what we need to work out.

I attended some interesting sessions in the afternoon that picked up several threads we've been following at WIDE. One was about task-oriented structures for online help systems and the benefits and drawbacks this creates for searching and maintaining help content.

The conference reception was held at the Aarhus City Hall, a famous example (maybe *the* example) of Danish Modern Functionalist Architecture. I took about a million pictures of this Arne Jacobsen masterwork with the ASB's nice camera. Watch for a revision of this post for some of these when I get them uploaded.

Friday is conference day two. I am looking forward to a stimulating day of talks and conversation. Jeff speaks today, as does Peter. More soon!

I want to thank the students for attending during a busy time of the semester for them - they are either taking or preparing for exams, so I am grateful for their time. I also want to thank the students for the excellent questions they asked which raised and/or deepened many issues related to the ways that the modeling technique(s) might eventually become useful for writers.

Many of the questions got me thinking about how the folksonomy/tagging dynamics we are exploring in some of our other WIDE projects might pertain to a logging and visualizing tool such as the design for Lester (the proposed system that allows users to collect data and build the Communicate event models and which Clay, Mark, and I are interested in further developing to include Genre Ecology Models and other visualization formats). The students were asking about issues that intersect with Josh Porter's excellent summary of The Del.icio.us Lesson: how can this help me, personally? and how can what I do get shared in ways that build social value without eroding personal value?

I also had a nice chunk of writing time in the morning and I managed to get a bunch of my SIGDOC paper drafted and the rest planned...looks I can make the deadline on that one. Whew!

Jeff & Peter and I grabbed a quick dinner and had a nice talk about future projects, including an article that we might all work on together that tilts productively at "knowledge management." We agreed to talk some more about this in the next few days and decide on a timeline and a venue so we can get to work writing something. Our meal was wonderful too! Jeff and I sampled some Aqvavit.



And Jeff seemed to be happy to be off the plane and in Denmark.



Thursday is the first day of the 360 Conference Encompassing the Instructional Text. I'm up at 13:30, then the rest of the conference I can be a listener. I like that. Jeff talks about Grassroots on Friday.

Peter and I stopped by Jeff's hotel this afternoon and we all went for a nice dinner at a great restaurant by the South Marina called Navigator. We had some traditional Danish seafood, including a wonderful pan-fried flatfish for our entree. We also sampled some Aqvavit, the Danish national spirit that is something like Schnapps but flavored in a variety of interesting ways. The one I tried was flavored subtly with caraway.

After dinner, Peter had to get back to work on conference things. So Jeff and I took a quick stroll downtown. If you look really closely, you can see Jeff in front of the cathedral in downtown Århus.



I think the flash failed on the Jeff picture. Here's one of me in the same spot:

Carmen's interests are what I might characterize as building multimodal rhetorics, with her immediate project focusing on film trailers. She is working to inductively build a descriptive rhetorical framework that helps to show how trailers are persuasive and, in this way, quite different than the film genres they excerpt. She's worked with a production house in London to analyze trailers for comedies, incorporating painstaking coding (her data set included 1400+ frames of video) and interviewing in her analysis. She had just received the printed version of the dissertation, a milestone that I congratulated her in reaching!

Among other things, we talked about her data analysis methods and the way she turned Adobe Premiere into a qualitative data analysis tool for this project. I pointed her to the re-cut trailer for The Shining that had been circulating the blogosphere a few months back, and I sent a note introducing her to our very own Danielle Devoss, who is also interested in multimodality, film trailers, and other cool stuff.

And did I mention Carmen's advisor is Theo Van Leeuwen? And Gunther Kress will be one of her examiners for the defense? Yeah.

After a little more work time in the afternoon, Carmen and I visited ARoS, the museum of modern art here in Aarhus. Wow! What a great place. Great building.





Great collections.



I took a lot of pictures which you can see over at Flickr. Here's one of the better ones, a much larger-than-life but otherwise hyperreal sculpture called "Boy" by Ron Mueck.



Wednesday looks to be another exciting day. Writing in the morning, and a seminar with ASB faculty and students in the afternoon. I will be talking about the modeling knowledge work research that I have been doing with Clay Spinuzzi and Mark Zachry in some depth. The interesting thing will be exploring the intersecting syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis dimensions with this group because the disciplinary basis of much of the work that goes on here is Linguistics. I have always seen the connection between the Communication Event Models and the Genre Ecology Models and the work of Halliday, as they are attempts at modeling the function of discursive artifacts at various levels and with different attitudes (that is, research stances) toward discursive agency. Should be a great session!

Jeff arrives this afternoon, so Peter and I will meet him for an early dinner and a beer when he gets in. We hope to lay the groundwork for an article and/or some additional research that tries to differentiate an approach to "knowledge communication" that is distinct from and in some ways corrective of problematics in "knowledge management." Some key ideas from Peter's work include the drive to understand this work in terms of complex social relationships, something that overlaps nicely with Jeff's work too. My contribution includes the idea that at a micro-level, knowledge "work" is made up of communication events that produce and are mediated by textual artifacts. This suggests, also, a shift from information to something like the definition of "content" that I have proposed which is: "information and interactions that comprise the user experience." In any case, Peter, Jeff, and I all have data from previous projects that could be cross-analyzed for this argument, I think, and so it seems like an exciting proposition.

Apart from my laptop checking out, I had a good day. Peter and I got to talk some more about the intersections of our research, past, present, and future, and I think he would like to start to use the software we are developing for logging and visualizing knowledge work. I am giving another talk on Wednesday here that goes into more depth about this work, and my talk for the 360 conference on Thursday touches on it some as well. So we are laying some promising groundwork. I am also eager to bring Jeff into the conversations when he gets here on Wednesday

After spending the morning checking off some to-do's, I had a chance to meet with another ASB faculty member - Birthe Mousten. We had lunch and talked about her current research project which examines the way a Danish company's localization strategies in the various markets it sells to influences what I (and WIDE) would call their website's information model. Very interesting project! The analysis involved some very interesting ways to show how content is clustered in terms of total volume (compared across national and language communities). I also recommended that she consider looking at use with a similar technique to see if their localized content "footprint" on the production side seems to match with the footprint of consumption/use. Seems like a promising line of work that extends the sort of cultural usability work that Huatong and Kellie are doing with the kind of focus on Delivery and Distribution that Ridolfo is doing.

In the afternoon we visited "Klubben," the campus pub, for a free half-pint in celebration of BA/MMC students who had just turned in their thesis projects. I'll try to get a few pics with the new camera/computer setup.

After work, Birthe, Peter, and I had a nice dinner at Connie's house - a South American feast!



Tuesday's schedule includes time to work on the two articles I am trying to finish, a meeting with assistant professor Carmen Daniela Maier, and in the afternoon a trip to the AROS museum of art here in Aarhus.

After spending half of each day Friday and Saturday doing a little cultural exploration in Århus, I set today aside to put in a full work day before heading back to the apartment to make a nice hearty Sunday dinner. It was pretty quiet at ASB, not unlike Olds Hall on a typical Sunday.



I managed to revisit my presentation for Thursday's talk at the 360 Conference and tighten it up a bit. I had the structure in place before I left the States, but I wanted to incorporate some cool local examples once I had arrived. Among other things, I am talking about the way the mediational function of instructional texts can introduce interesting extra-textual issues that are impossible to see unless you encounter these texts in their natural habitat, so to speak. Sometimes, seeing them this way means you can understand them even if you can't read, say, Danish:



Here's some info about the sign above: it hangs on the door to a shared office or common room for instructors here at ASB. It's exam week and time for students to turn in final assignments. The sign's crumpled (oft re-posted. Have a guess what it says? You might look at a faculty mail room or adjunct or TA group office near you. The gist: students shouldn't try to turn in papers here, there's a spot for that down the hall. The hope: that the room doesn't pile up with papers and that students don't keep knocking on the door asking where to turn their papers in. :)

Cool eh? Sure we could have surmised the same thing if we could read Danish, but it's pretty neat that the circumstances can communicate the sign's function without reading the words.

I could go on...and I will (though not about that example) in the paper I am doing for Peter on the communicative and mediational functions of textual artifacts.

Tomorrow is Monday, and I have a meeting with ASB faculty member Birthe Mousten for lunch, then a sponsored drink at the ASB student watering hole "Klubben" after work. In the morning I am writing this, and pushing ahead on two other writing projects I would like to be finished with before I leave next Sunday: the mediation paper I mentioned and my contribution to the SIGDOC panel that Clay, Mark, and I are proposing for which I am writing about the challenges of visualizing writing practices in such a way as to productively inform the writing process for actual writers (not just for researchers).

My mission was really to experience some of the hustle and bustle of downtown on a busy Saturday. And I was not disappointed. The shops on the pedestrian street and througout the Latin Quarter were full of people.



Like most, I rode a bike here. Once secured with a little back wheel lock, all but the fanciest machines are safe. Not the case in the States.

After picking up a little something for the loved ones, I headed back to the office at ASB to work to finish up the study abroad report draft so it can be in circulation during the coming week. Tomorrow I plan to work most of the day on the mediation/visualization paper, give the conference talk one last tightening, and then make a big pot of pasta e fagioli with the nice produce (and bacon!) I bought at the grocery this morning. That should last me a couple of days.

Our first destination was a Mental Hosptial that has an art gallery featuring the work of patients. We rode along the bay for about 30 minutes or so on a beautiful day to get there.

But it was closed for the holiday. So we may try again tomorrow afternoon. Not to be deterred, we rode the other way all through Arhus until we reached the South Harbor area. There was some sort of Rock-n-roll fesitval going on so it was quite busy. We decided to have lunch near the Marina.

We also took a quick tour of the grounds of one of the Danish Royal Palaces. You can see more pictures on my Flickr page. All in all, it was a nice afternoon of Danish culture, traditional and, er, it's intersection with the U.S.:

I worked on my Hermes article for Peter this morning before heading out around Noon today, so it was a productive and fun day. I plan a similar schedule tomorrow (Saturday), with some work followed by some shopping for Les & Lily!

I had a very productive day, because I managed to get most of the report drafted right after our late morning meeting. I should have a draft to circulate to both Lene and to the CAL study abroad person, Beth Judge, in their respective inboxes tomorrow.

Among other interesting parallels, ASB's undergraduate program shares some courses with nearly the same name as ours! I really believe that our students could not only fulfull electives, but also core courses as well in an exchange semester.

Peter, Lene and I talked about the graduate program possibilities over dinner. I think we managed to come up with a workable plan that could have Masters students earning a dual degree from ASB and MSU. We also talked about some interactive distance course models that could involve students from both programs working together on cross-Atlantic project teams. Among others, the interaction design course and the community literacies course seemed to be promising options for MSU offerings.

Dinner was at a cozy French-style bistro in the Latin Quarter of Arhus called Latin.

The food and service were excellent. I began with mussels in a delicious tomato broth, then had a petit filet of beef stuffed with foie gras and served with a beef tip confit and chantrelles in a perfect cabernet reduction. The third course was peaches macerated in cognac and served with creme freche and a crispy rice cookie. (that's it below; Lene had the chocolate mousse) Magnifique!



Other highlights of the day included a nice amount of drafting time in the morning, a chance to attend a reception for a Ph.D. student who had just successfully defended her dissertation, and a great conversation with Connie Kampf about multimodality, mediation, and agency.

Tomorrow: no meetings, as it is a Danish national holiday. I am writing in the morning and taking a bike ride in the afternoon to an art gallery that exhibits work by folks in a...well, I suppose the word is "asylum." It's said to be impressive. I'll have the story and pictures tomorrow I am sure.

First up, a view of Downtown Århus from the apartment where I am staying. Note the skinny chimney in the middle of the photo; it belongs to the local brewery.
My walk from the apartment to ASB includes a path through a park and a botanical garden.
On my tour of the campus today, I saw the library
And the American '50's retro-cool dining hall and hang out spot for students called Plug In:

Carmen is interested in doing process-tracing work similar to what Clay, Mark, and I have been doing with our STC-sponsored project. But Carmen wants to study the work of folks doing technical translation and/or localization work. Should make for a great project! We talked about methods including the combination of using some kind of event diary/logging process that feeds into a stimulated recall interview. She liked that idea better than talk-aloud protocols which I can only imagine would be nearly impossible for a translator to do while working!

Later, Peter mentioned that Carmen might be able to get funding to come and study at MSU/WIDE for a semester, all paid by the dk government. I will follow up with her on that - it would be great because she could meet with Huatong too.

After some computer snafus in the afternoon, I recieved good news - my luggage and I were once again in the same country!

In the afternoon, I gave a talk to the communication faculty explaining a bit about the WIDE center's research trajectory, our positioning within MSU and the field, and a snapshot of some of our projects. A rousing discussion followed about intersecting research interests including web site/content management analysis projects and a very good dialogue about what stake we/I had in the term "writing." I gave two response to this last one, the usual political/historical complications of terms like "communication" in the U.S. academy being the least interesting. The better answer focused on the affordances of writing and the ways that digital environments extend these affordances to heretofor ephemeral and/or serial forms (e.g. speech, movies, etc.).

We also talked about funding models and future collaborative possibilities. Peter is eager to talk more about the possibility of a dual/joint program certificate that could get both schools some funding through a special FIPSE program. That's on our agenda tomorrow when I talk to the international office at ASB.

I saw some of downtown this evening and it was as European as I've ever imagined. We ate at a local brew pub where I had a nice May Bock that was this month's special brew along with a plate of the Danish take on BBQ ribs. Good stuff - not much like home, but great tasting all the same. We also had a coffee and conversation in the Latin Quarter of Arhus, the old part of town that has 1000 yr. old charm oozing up from the cobbles.

I didn't get my camera until tonight, so no more pics yet..but tomorrow there will be some!

Tomorrow's schedule:

• writing time in the morning, yay!
• Tour of the ASB campus and library
• Meeting with Rene Lehder of the international office
• Work on MSU study abroad report and FIPSE Atlantis proposal
• Dinner with Rene & Peter to follow up on our conversation

I arrived around 3:30 p.m.,15:30 as it's more accurately known here, local time on Tuesday, May 9th. My schedule was mercifully sparse on Tuesday after the red-eye from ORD to Copenhagen. The flight was very pleasant though. The highlight was seeing the frozen peaks of Greenland out the window. Alas, my luggage did not make the trip...yet.

Peter Kastberg picked me up at the airport and took me to the apartment that ASB is graciously providing for my stay. It has a fantastic view of the bay from the fifth-floor balcony, I'll post some pictures when my camera arrives.

We walked from the apartment to ASB, just 800 meters or so down the street. There I was shown to the office I am using during my visit. I am looking forward to a productive 2 weeks, especially since ASB has been so nice to provide a great work environment.

I had dinner with Peter and his fiancee Marianne, also an ASB faculty member, their two boys Jonas & Marten, and a visiting faculty member from the U.S., Connie Kampf. (see picture below) Connie graduated from the fine rhetoric program at the University of Minnesota. We had a nice time and a delicious Danish dish, steak with a lovely brown gravy and caramelized onions and pickled cucumber slices on the side. We also enjoyed a selection of Danish beer.

Wednesday's schedule at a glance:
1)some work time in the morning for me
2)a meeting with a Ph.D. student here working at the intersection of process/text production studies, hypertext, and translation & localization
3) a presentation to the ASB research groups in Communication on the WIDE center research trajectories and current projects more on those soon! Juggling in Denmark for Marten & Jonas: