Communicative writing

With communicative writing, appearances count a great deal. Communicative writing includes essays, final papers, lab reports, handouts accompanying student presentations, senior theses, and the like. Outside the classroom, communicative writing includes reports, plans, official documents of all sorts, letters of application, and so on. What all these kinds of writing have in common is the great weight they place on appearances. A misspelling in a private journal or response paper is trivial, while a misspelling in an essay undermines trust in the author's effort—and just one typo in a cover letter is usually enough to sink a job application.

　　School assignments like essays or lab reports give students practice in writing for others according to a strict format and fixed conventions. Especially in the sciences, communicative writing assignments train students to turn personal observations into impersonal prose, avoid value judgments unwelcome in the sciences, and write with economy and precision.

　　The stringent rules governing communicative writing quite effectively identify those who have not served their apprenticeship in a field. Academic journals, for instance, can often weed out crackpot or poor submissions simply by how they look. In the classroom, teachers can see at a glance whether a student proofread a paper; if she didn't, what message does that send about how much work she put into the whole project? Formal communicative requirements can be an efficient and reasonable way of judging a book by its cover.

　　Communicative writing, as we've noted, requires you to know a great deal about a particular field's rules and conventions. Nuts and Bolts can help a great deal with general rules for formal writing, especially essays. But if you want more detailed help for particular assignments ask your teacher or another expert, consult a librarian, or surf the web （for example, if you want help with résumés or cover letters you might check out the writing resources at Monster.com）.

　　A final thought on communicative writing: such formal writing has a downside. Especially for students struggling to learn the right models and lacking confidence in their own style and voice, writing to precise standards may dampen creativity and encourage vacuous, inflated verbiage. The upcoming section on Style can help you avoid this trap.