ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is founded on two premises. The first of these is that in attempting to understand the nature of writing in workplace contexts, people need to look beyond the text: workplace writing is a complex business, requiring writers to consider a wide range of factors as they construct texts. The second relates to the pedagogical perspective: textbooks that address workplace writing can tend to overlook many of the factors that shape texts in the workplace, often adopting reductive approaches that see texts as standalone entities, free of any context. In describing and explaining aspects of these two contexts for writing, there is a risk of presenting them as binary entities with exclusive practices, and that attempting in one to prepare students for the other represents an almost impossible project.
