ABSTRACT
The fundamental differences between the academy and the workplace as contexts for writing have been highlighted at various points in this book thus far and perhaps nowhere are they more evident than in the ways that power is distributed in the respective settings. In the classroom, we tend very often to see homogeneity in age, experience and knowledge, which leads to a context where power, insofar as it is an issue, is for the most part shared equally among students, with only the teacher representing a figure of authority. As for the workplace, power and disparities of power are ubiquitous. Within an organisation we can see differences in areas such as age, experience, knowledge, status, authority and so on, while communication with audiences outside the organisation also involves the handling of power differences, such as those implied in a relationship between buyer and seller, for example. Imbalances of this kind place considerable constraints and expectations on the ways in which people can write in professional settings.
