Orality and literacy in the workplace: Process- and text-based strategies for multiple audience adaptation

What is the role of interaction, or, more generally, orality, in multiple-audience analysis and adaptation? How does orality relate to literacy in the evolution of corporate documents? A qualitative study of how seven engineers in two divi-sions of a large corporation wrote for multiple audiences revealed that, in the more rhetorically successful cases observed, interaction was the central means of analyzing and adapting discourse to multiple audiences, fulfilling rhetorical and social goals, and building and sustaining a corporate culture; and orality was more potent than literacy in the engineers’composing behavior and the au-diences ’ acceptance of the engineers ’ ideas and documents. In recent years, a growing number of theorists have speculated that, in order to communicate effectively in a nonacademic setting, writ-ers need to learn about the social contexts of rhetorical situations they encounter (Faigley; Odell). Correspondingly, more technical-communication researchers have been focusing their attention on how professionals in the workplace apply this social knowledge bot