University College Plymouth St Mark & St John

I have been studying how people write and talk at work for twenty-six years or more. I have worked with companies in the financial, marine, and engineering sectors in south-east Asia and the United Kingdom, working as an in-house consultant or trainer. Most of my work concerns writing (mainly bid writing/proposals; sometimes other documents like specifications and requirements), but I also work with spoken language, for example, oral presentations to the customer as part of the bid process. My PhD project was based on engineers working at what used to be British Aerospace (now BAE?Systems), and I am now a sort of in-house linguist researcher working at AIS (Atlantic Inertial Systems), which is part of the Goodrich group.

Recently, I have run writing courses (mainly proposal and executive summary writing) for engineers and executives at BAE Systems and Babcock Marine (Royal Devonport Dockyard). In the last two years, I have also been involved in actual bid writing, which is a new departure for me, opening up new avenues of research into professional writing.

Academic writing has been a long-term research interest as well, and is on-going, particularly concerning feedback to students. Small-scale projects have involved devising constructive feedback for student writers that provides them with some kind of metric with which to review and improve their writing. Inevitably, this has dovetailed with my work on professional written communication, and informed it.

• Professional communication, especially technical and business communication.
• Company documents, particularly those produced for the customer (proposals/bid documents, generic proposals, executive summaries, reports, specifications, requirements); text and genre analysis; use of small-sized specialist corpora to analyse company texts.
• English grammars; written discourse analysis.

1) In the commercial workplace:

• Proposal writing, and other kinds of professional writing (specifications, executive summaries, letters of various kinds)
• Any aspect of language use in the workplace that causes concern. Examples are team briefs, talk at meetings, giving oral feedback face-to-face, telephone language.

2) In academe:

• Academic writing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
• English grammar and syntax.
• Written discourse analysis.