Describes a study that explored the collaborative writing processes of a group of business executives over the course of a year as they prepared a vital company document. Shows how context affected the writers' conceptions of their rhetorical situations and their writing behavior and how the rhetorical activities influenced the structure of the…

Interviews with executives, managers, and entry-level engineers and analysts in 15 large corporations from both technical and nontechnical fields yielded sociolinguistic information about some of the writing problems young professionals have. The first of the problems is the familiar case in which the writer uses overly elaborate syntax and…