Communicating Across Careers

Drawing from interviews with professionals across fields who have changed careers, this book offers new knowledge about professional writing experiences and workplace writing transfer during moments of career change.

Writing transfer is the process through which individuals adapt previous writing skills and knowledge into new writing contexts. In this book, the narratives of career change professionals root us firmly in the workplace, and their writing transitions serve as a common professional moment. The book establishes that workplace-to-workplace writing transfer is markedly different from earlier transitions and offers a new concept to help readers make sense of it: Dynamic Workplace Writing Transfer (DWWT). Dynamic Workplace Writing Transfer is the complex, iterative cognitive process by which professionals successfully transform as writers as they move from one workplace role or context to another. More broadly, the book also explores the life of the professional as a communicator. It considers key contexts, cultural dynamics, both writerly and other identities, and the complexities of writing lives during moments of career changes.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of technical and professional communication, writing studies and rhetoric.