Technologies for Writing at the Private Sector Workplace

Workplace literacy practices constitute the basis of today’s increasingly textualised work life. Due to the legislation on trade secrets, less research has been conducted on literacy practices in the private sector. This interview study of reported literacy practices focused on the soft-ware, dictionaries and other technologies used in writing tasks in 11 different businesses in Finland. The informants (n=18) were Swedish-speaking Finns working in the Helsinki area and in Vaasa. The study showed that office software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is used for writing, as is email clients, chats and messaging systems. When encountering difficulties in writing, asking a colleague for help is a frequent strategy, together with searching the internet using Google. More established dictionaries, glossaries, and synonym web sites are also used, but to a lesser extent. The findings suggest implications for teaching at different levels: students could be trained in complex and multilingual text production, to efficiently use the widely used office software and to assess content in free dictionaries and on similar websites from a linguistic point of view.