Together with Technology

Swarts looks at how written documents function inside organizations as a kind of shared cognitive scaffolding. Documents give form to knowledge and experience so they can last, and they shape how people relate to one another at work.

In many fields, professional work now depends more on writing than it once did. In response, numerous organizations have set up review processes for writing, intended to help new staff improve their prose and contribute more effectively. The author studies these review practices and asks whether the tools available to support them give writers and those who write for a living a real sense of what their texts accomplish.

To test this, he reports on a study comparing two technologies used in writing review: printed paper and textual replay. Paper shows a text as a fixed object. Textual replay instead displays a text as the outcome of the writing process, recording onscreen activity as a video that writers and reviewers can watch while discussing revisions.