How companies affect the writing of young engineers : two case studies

Current theory and research treat writing as a social practice shaped by its context. Learning to write then becomes a process of socialization. In order to examine how this learning through socialization occurs, interviews were conducted with co-op engineering students and their supervisors about documents the students had written. In the case studies presented here, comparisons are made between the perceptions of supervisors, a student with three months experience, and a student with twenty-one months experience