Non Traditional Students

787 Words2 Pages

From the Workplace to Academia: Nontraditional Students and the Relevance of Workplace Experience in Technical Writing Pedagogy Abstract: This article compares initial drafts of job application cover letters written by nontraditional students in an introductory professional writing course to those written by traditional students to determine if prior workplace experience of nontraditional students improves the quality of rhetorical adaptability in their writing. Although one might expect nontraditional students to display more rhetorical adaptability, the study found no difference. These results suggest that minor changes in pedagogy may help nontraditional students take advantage of their workplace experience when confronted with workplace-oriented …show more content…

Research demonstrates that this can be a difficult transition—accustomed to writing within an academic culture, students find themselves writing in an alien rhetorical situation where the consequences, good or bad, of their writing go well beyond a grade (Beaufort, 1999; Breuch, 2001; Flower & Ackerman, 1994; Spinuzzi, 1996; Winsor, 1996). For traditional students, whose workplace experience is often limited to part-time, and who have rarely identified themselves with their job (“I’m a waitress” versus “I’m a student who waits tables”), the workplace culture and the rhetorical assumptions implied within that culture must clearly be …show more content…

This trajectory assumes that the student’s exposure to the workplace culture is fairly limited. We assume that TPW programs must concentrate on helping students adjust their writing skills to reflect the new, unfamiliar rhetorical situation of the workplace. With the influx of nontraditional students, TPW programs may now have significant numbers of students with quite a bit of experience in this workplace culture. Even if this experience did not involve much writing, the immersion into the culture itself may have given these students a different perspective on workplace writing compared to a traditional student with relatively limited background in the working world. What happens to typical assumptions about the transition from academia to workplace, and the central mission of TPW programs, if our students were in the workplace before entering

Open Document