ABSTRACT
For the most part, this book offers an account of selected text-makers and their texts in a small university building. Seven individuals have been singled out for detailed study in an attempt to increase our understanding of what it means to say that academic writing is "situated." On the one hand, I examine how that writing is located within and along the evolution of a particular career; on the other, I try to place these various bodies of text both within a particular set of disciplinary norms and expectations, and within the local, institutional context of their production. For this last, I have also studied certain kinds of "routine writing business" that take place on each floor of the building, and have in tum situated those everyday activities within their historical and spatial settings. This, then, is a site study of particularity and communality as seen through the lens of written discourse.
