During this semester, Spring, 1982, my mornings were spent in the reading lab at Solano College while afternoons and evenings were filled with English Composition or remedial comp courses through contracts with CMF Vacaville or military bases or Napa Valley College. I graded essays on the weekends.
An opportunity arose at Napa to teach a section of Business Communications, a writing course offered as a substitute for English 101. I didn’t know such a course existed, but a few hours curled up with the textbook on order for the course piqued my interest.
The core syllabus assignments were writing a Business Report and delivering a Business Presentation, but the textbook itself was a behemoth with a potpourri of writing situations and genres. Writing business letters, a big section in the text, offered a “Good News” unit followed by a “Bad News” unit, still a feature of this course in the syllabi of university courses to this day.
Letter format was as cut and dried as a sonnet. But rhetorical moves like greetings and closures, commas or colons, evoked discussions of audience as well as common practice—scour your mail for business letters and report to the class on greetings you like or don’t like. Thank you, There’s a Recall, You Got the Job, You Got the Interview, We Can Fulfill your Need, and hybrid occasions for delivering good news in a formal business letter together with their Bad News counterparts introduced me to genre theory.
Somewhere in my travels I latched onto a definition of ‘genre’ coined by a genre theorist that anchors my understanding: A genre is a “patterned response to a recurrent event.” The pattern involves appropriate format, register, content, tone, voice; the recurrent event involves circumstances and intentions.
An apology is a genre. The recurrent event is having done something wrong to someone. We don’t have to invent a response because we have a pattern (acknowledge wrong-doing, ask for forgiveness, promise never to do it again, and propose a way to fix it). Recurrent business events demanding complex situated responses I believe motivated the field of business education to invent the course I stumbled into where I met Margaret.
Margaret was a widower, retired, venturing out into the community through volunteer work and through taking courses at the local community college. She showed up in class at the beginning of the third week, asking if she could still register. I signed an ad card and spent a half hour after class bringing her up to speed. She was quick witted and charming, sure to bring some spice to class discussions.
Over the course of the semester Margaret and I spent time talking after class most sessions while having coffee in the union. She loved music and literature. I discovered that she was integral in the operation of an adult literacy tutoring project operating in the public library; I visited the library several times with her and learned about the materials and the tutor training.
Through Margaret I started reading about adult functional illiteracy in the United States and across the globe. She had assembled reports from various agencies that I borrowed. She also had learned close up what life was like for adult illiterates coming out of the shadows to the sunlight of tutoring.
Margaret helped schedule one-on-one interviews for me with several of the adult learners. I met for an hour with them, tape recording the interviews and transcribing them. I spoke to Jim T., a father of a daughter in grade school who inspired him to sign up at the library. He worked as a janitor at night and wanted to learn to read the street signs, menus, notes his boss left for him. I spoke to Elizabeth B., a mother who held bitter memories of a school that failed girls generation after generation.
I spoke to others, transcribed the tapes, and over time wrote 12,000-word essays I hoped to publish someday. For reasons I’ll discuss later, I was into word length big time. I came across a stash of these reports some time ago looking through boxes in the garage. I plan to summarize a few of them in upcoming posts in this newsletter.
