A shared repertoire of resources

In section 5, I address two closely related questions. The first is the question posed at the end of section 3. Given the importance of the order forms to the work of the shop, how do the members of staff manage to record all the essential information accurately and in a way that can be easily understood by their colleagues, while writing quickly, directly onto the form at the same time as talking with the customer and in less than ideal conditions? The second question is one I revisit in the further three case studies and relates

to the use of preformatted documents. What affordances do preformatted texts offer and what constraints and in what ways do such documents shape the writing undertaken?

Figures 5.2-4 provide examples of completed order forms. Looking first at the form itself, we can see that, although it has no title, several features make it recognisable as an example of a familiar genre, the order form. However, the form also has features that differ from those, for example, on order forms I was shown in the furniture shop or the fencing company in the course of my scoping study. It includes the box titled, ‘Flowers required’, spaces to record details of the recipient as well as the person who places the order and a section for a ‘message’ to accompany the flowers. These were features Jo was referring to when she spoke of having ‘a proper pad with all the relevant details’, recognising this as a florist’s order form.

Rosemary explained:

…… each individual shop has their own way of setting out. (..) >I mean you have your basic order sheet but there’s certain ways of,< (.) people like it done.

She draws attention to the very local textual practices that can exist around order forms and one example was the way in which the team used the different sections of the form. It was a standard form, obtained from a supplier, rather than one devised in-house, and did not fully suit the way things were done in the shop. Pointing out the top line of a completed order, Jo told me:

>We hardly ever fill in today’s date because we just don’t,< ‘cos you know. This is the delivery date.

This makes sense because it was the delivery date that governed the

prioritisation and timing of the work rather than the date the order was taken.

Figure 5.2 Completed order form 1

Sections of the form are not used. Staff usually put the delivery day and date here.

Writing ignores narrow lines.

Use of abbreviations.

Underlining here may be intended to draw attention to the term

‘posie’. However, its use in two other places on the form suggests it could simply be a flourish – part of the writer’s personal style.

Use of name of person whose grave the posy is for suggests they were known to staff.

There is no message needed so the space for this is used for additional instructions for florist.

These could represent the customer’s own words.

Absence of deixis creates a

condensed text. ‘Make (the posy) special’.

‘Put (a) white sparkly butterfly in (the posy.

Use of a common metaphor for colour: a shared convention.

Stock phrase frequently used by different writers. This explains lack of information recorded for payment.

‘Posie’ used in a technical sense to indicate a particular style of

arrangement: Discourse of floristry.

Figure 5.3 Completed order form 2

Day and date for delivery. Here the writer does use the lines.

Heading provides the textual context. The writer only needs to provide the specific details.

Written at angle with underlining to make this stand out.

Abbreviation on form ‘translated’ to full version and neatly written on the message card for the customer.

‘Foliage’: an example of the discourse of floristry. It has been left to the discretion of florist to choose what kind.

Number, noun and classifier: this fits with the purpose of the writing which is to record factual

information to be used by others.

Figure 5.4 Completed order form 3

Some of the narrow sections at the top of the form were ignored and account information was consistently put at the bottom of the form in the section headed, ‘Ordered by’. This freed up the ‘Account to’ section to provide extra space for the recipient’s name and address and any additional information relevant to delivery. By avoiding duplication and the need to fit information into in small spaces, the team saved unnecessary time and effort.

Date left implicit. Could be read as ‘This Tuesday’.

Use of ‘Account to’ section to provide detail for delivery driver.

Abbreviation ‘HS’ for ‘house’

H/T used as the abbreviation for

‘Hand Tied Bouquet’, a specialist term and part of discourse of floristry. No other detail given so choice of colours and flowers left to the florist.

Stock phrase, as used on form 1, written at angle to stand out.

No address needed for payment.

.

Correction

The size of the handwriting, the way the writing cut across the lines, the corrections, the use of abbreviations and the absence of full sentences all reflected the need to write quickly and directly onto the form. I asked Linda how she expected the forms to be completed:

Grammar and er (.) what I would say correct writing is never taken into account. No, it’s just written quickly and however people write.

... so although we all have different ways of writing, I don’t think any of us here have any problems in reading each-other’s writing. >Some are better and neater than others< but we know, we use a lot of

abbreviations like hand tied bouquets we write down H stroke T and we would all know what that would be. So yes it works quite well.

Rosemary spoke about a shared shorthand:

... we do a lot of shorthand so that’s, but not the shorthand that typists use if you know what I mean (both laugh) We have our own sort of shorthand that we do.

Jo commented on the use of abbreviations:

(We) tend to use abbreviations in the card messages because we, (.)

<as a sort of team work,> we know together what that means. ... if you’ve got a message for example that’s ‘Thinking of you’ you just put the T and an ‘of’ and the Y, and we know. The same with Happy Birthday you just put an H and a B. That’s purely for quickness. When we’re on (the phone), >particularly for the customer,< you know, as efficient and quick a service as you can. [Right and er and] And obviously when you’re really busy like Mothers’ Day and Christmas and Valentines that is quite essential, because you need to obviously get through things as quickly as possible.

Like Rosemary, Marie recognised the significance of the audience when she commented: ‘Because the customer doesn’t need to understand you....’

The need for speed was acknowledged in terms of getting through the work, but also the need to offer an ‘efficient’ service to the customer. There was

recognition that while the message card was written for the recipient of the flowers, the audience for the form was purely internal and therefore different criteria applied in terms of how it was to be written. Rosemary referred to what she called ‘shorthand’. This included the use of abbreviations, as Jo and Linda explain and is evident in the examples above but this was only one aspect of the shorthand they employed.

On two of the forms we see the words, ‘To call in and pay’, written at an angle in an available space. This was used frequently when an order was made by phone and the customer preferred to pay in the shop. It can be seen as an example of what Halliday, in the 1994 version of his Systemic Functional Grammar, refers to as ‘Little texts’: texts, he explains, ‘…which the context of situation determines have to be short’ (Halliday, 1994, p. 392).

Halliday believed it was possible to identify ‘general tendencies within texts of this type, based on recognizable principles’ and one of these was the absence of deixis¹⁴, ‘those elements of structure that serve to link them with the here and now’ (ibid). In this example, the agent is left implicit and the deictic tense omitted.

(the customer/he /she) (is going) to call in and pay.

This was not a phrase the team used in speech. It is a ‘stock phrase’,

another aspect of the workplace shorthand on which they drew to save time and effort. Other examples found on order forms include:

‘all freesia’ (Rosemary), ‘all whites’ (Linda) ‘... all in pink’ (Jo)

‘Cards taken to return’ (finite element of verbal group omitted)

14 Deixis refers to words or phrases that can only be understood from the context of the text or utterance in which they occur.

‘to take Thursday’ (subject and object omitted) (Jo)

Each trade has its own discourse and floristry is no exception. On a wedding order Linda wrote:

Kimsey mini Gerbs and Beer Grass

This illustrates the mix of botanical names, common names and trade names for plants that were used in the shop. The floristry team also used specific terms for arrangements of different kinds, including; ‘hand tie’, ‘posy’,

‘double-ended spray’ and ‘tied sheath’. Colour is important in floristry and the team made frequent use of terms such as ‘wine calla’, ‘ivory voile’, ‘Mint Green’: shared metaphors which allowed them to communicate subtle but important distinctions in shade succinctly. ‘Rustic’ and ‘country flowers’ were other terms, observed on orders, to communicate specific ranges of flowers.

These specialist terms and shared metaphors helped them to convey the details of an order accurately and concisely.

5.2 Multimodal devices

Information was not only carried by the written word as the following extracts from my interview with the owner illustrates.

Res. Do you have any (.) guidelines for writing those forms? Umm Marie mentioned using a black pen and a red pen.=

L. = A black pen, yes we usually, all the girls use black pens to write the order out and then if we have to, if there’s two items for example, if umm somebody has ordered a bouquet of flowers and a box of

chocolates we would put two items and we would put that in red so that when somebody picks up the bouquet they don’t leave the chocolates are left behind.

And also the other time that we would use it is if they’d asked for a specific um delivery time. If they say ‘Could we have it before 10am?’

we would underline the ‘10 am’ in a red pen.

Here we see the use of coloured pens as another resource in the team’s repertoire. In addition to colour, figures 5.2-4 provide examples of the use of the non-linguistic aspects of writing such as capital letters and the size, boldness or angle of the writing to direct the attention of the reader. Other graphic features such as the underlining of words and use of arrows were used in the same way. Such multimodal devices, together with the layout of the form, relied on the visual rather than the linguistic mode: they were quick to use and had immediate impact on the reader. Such devices took on particular importance on wedding order forms discussed below (see figure 5.5).

The physical location of the form, at any one time, also carried meaning for the staff. Location of the order form in the blue plastic file indicated it was an order for delivery the next day or later and the precise section of the file indicated on which day. Location in Rosemary’s basket indicated it was an order for delivery that day or possibly the next. Location on the board in the back room meant that the arrangement was in the storeroom ready for delivery while the specific section on which it was pinned indicated the day for delivery. Even the position of a form in a pile of other orders was

important as Rosemary sorted the forms in terms of priority or Kathy put them in the order of her route. The use of location in this way contributed to the efficiency of the system, avoiding the need for multiple copies of forms.

5.3 The features of the order as a proforma

The resource that probably helped most to reduce the amount of writing the staff were required to do was one that the team took for granted, the order form itself. The following notes, taken from my observation log, were made while observing the florist one afternoon when she was looking after the shop alone.

Phone call. Heard parts of this. L says can’t do something at this short notice. Mentions £35. Reference to height of flowers. Customer

mentioned sunflowers. F says she can make a sheath with these with mixed foliage and some other flowers, ‘off the lorry’. Reference to making this up tomorrow.

I asked to look at the order form Rosemary had written. In the section of the order form headed ‘FLOWERS REQUIRED’ the florist had simply written:

‘Tied sheath’

‘Sunflowers’

‘Mixed foliages’

‘Other flower’

The sections and headings on the form could be seen to perform a ‘textual’

function (Halliday, 1994, p. xiii), that is, to make the message of the overall text coherent. Writing about tables as a way of presenting information, Lemke (2004) refers to ‘... an implied grammar and a recoverable textual sentence or paragraph for every table.’ Likewise the headings of the sections

‘imply’ a sentence. The heading, ‘Flowers required’, could be interpreted as a question: ‘What flowers are required?’ Alternatively it could be interpreted as the introduction to a list: ‘The customer requires the following flowers ...’ In

either case, nominal phrases comprising of a single noun (‘Sunflowers’) or a noun and classifier, (‘(a) tied sheath’) offer an appropriate response. The sections and headings served to free the writer from the need to compose sentences to make their meaning explicit, saving both time and effort.

Halliday’s discussion of what he calls the ‘information unit’ (1994, p. 295) provides a useful perspective on the nature of the short written entries.

Halliday describes information, ‘…. in this technical, grammatical sense’, as

‘… the tension between what is already known or predictable and what is new or unpredictable’ (ibid p. 296). In its idealized form, he argues, the information unit is made up of two functions, the ‘Given’ and the ‘New’¹⁵. However, the ‘Given’, by its nature, is likely to be something that is already present in the text or the non-verbal context and is therefore optional. In the case of proformas, the ‘Given’ information was supplied by the headings and sub-headings of the various sections and by the wider, non-verbal context of the work setting and the shared expectations and understandings of the writer(s) and readers. The writer, therefore, only needed to supply the ‘New’, unpredictable information, in this case, the details for the arrangement and the flowers.

Linda explained how she took new members of staff through the order form, showing them the format and indicating the information that must be

recorded. I observed that, when the order was taken over the phone, the layout of the form tended to shape the conversation. The sections and

subdivisions, together with their headings, provided a prompt for the writer, in

15 Halliday introduces this in the context of a chapter on tone groups in spoken language but acknowledges that in the absence of tone, other methods are required in written texts to distinguish between ‘Given’ and ‘New’.

terms of the information needed and how to present it (Bazerman, 2004).

However, conversations do not always follow a linear course, as the

researcher’s own experience illustrates (Text box 5.1). The layout of the form then provided a standard framework within which to record the information, in whatever order it was obtained, and thus also freed the writer from the need to worry about sequencing and presentation.

Jo pointed out that certain sections of the form were relevant to particular people in the team:

……>obviously the date, [day] yeah day, the name of the person where it’s going to the address where it’s got to be delivered, obviously this is for Kathy’s ((the delivery driver)) information.<

The order form was used by a number of different people in the course of its journey and the use of a standard layout made it easy for each reader to locate and interpret the information relevant to their role (Bazerman, 2004).

They could choose their own ‘reading path’ (Domingo, Jewitt and Kress, 2015, p. 258) in relation to their own ‘interest’ (Kress, 2010) as in the case of modular texts used online. Having one standard form supported the efficient sharing of information across the workplace, avoiding the problems that would inevitably arise if individual members of staff were free to use their own more idiosyncratic methods for recording information.

Proformas, like the order form, could be seen to constrain the writer but the form appeared to be accepted as a natural part of the work. It was however, poorly designed and did not fully suit the needs of the team. This gave them the freedom to improvise and a set of shared conventions regarding the use

of the form had developed. These were tacit and in no way binding. Using Spinuzzi’s (2010; 2012) distinction between ‘regulated’ and ‘regularised’

genres, I would place writing of the order form towards the ‘regularised’ end of the continuum.

5.4 Eflorist orders

Orders for Eflorist included much the same information as the order form used by the shop but completion was more closely ‘regulated’ (Spinuzzi, 2012) by use of drop down menus and boxes to be completed. The

arrangement requested had to be chosen from the predesigned selection on the website but there was space for ‘Product Notes’ where personal

preferences, such as the colour of the flowers could be indicated. Eflorist orders received by the shop were printed out and treated like local orders.

They were placed in the appropriate section of the blue folder and, from there, followed the same trajectory. Invoicing was managed by Eflorist.

In document The Uses of Writing in Microbusinesses (Page 149-161)