Building Pathways for Writing Development in the Content Areas eBook

This is Chapter 2 of Preparing Adult English Learners to Write for College and the Workplace by Kirsten Schaetzel, Joy Kreeft Peyton, and Rebeca Fernández. This volume has been written as a response to the new types of communicative demands that the twenty-first century has brought to the workplace. Today’s adult education programs must prepare students to understand complex operations, be problem-solvers, be computer literate, and be fluent in professional English when speaking and writing. As a result, writing has become a bigger need in the field of adult education, and writing instruction must follow suit and extend beyond transactional writing (taking notes, correcting grammar, writing narratives) to rhetorically flexible writing for multiple audiences, purposes, and contexts, whether for a college course or in the workplace. Some of the specific types of writing students need now are the ability to: write argumentative, technical, and informative texts; create, argue for, and support a thesis statement; summarize; write concisely with appropriate vocabulary; produce a well-edited piece understandable to native speakers; and use and credit sources.