Reading Response 8

Wardle -

In Wardle’s article, I think she puts her research question right before the section titled,

“Learning to Write in a New Workplace: Alan's Story” when she ends with the questions of what

happens when a new worker makes assumptions about how things are done in the workplace.

She uses the method of taking Alan’s story and dissecting it into parts, then analyzing those parts

as to why what Alan was doing wrong or right. He caused both himself harm and the workplace

while also kind of helping at the same time. Wardle answers her research question in the end by

saying how Alan both helped and hurt himself and his workplace by making assumptions about

how things were to be done.

Mirabelli -

In “Learning to Serve” by Tony Mirabelli, I think that he finally nails down his research question

in the two to three sentences before the section of “Literacy and Contemporary Theory” and he

elaborates more about it in the section of “Literacy and Contemporary Theory.” I think his

research question is along the lines of how writing and literacy in service work does not mean

that the people in service work are uneducated. When collecting his primary data, Mirabelli uses

his access to people who are service workers. He uses direct participation, observations, field

notes, documents, interviews, tape recordings, and transcriptions from historical and

bibliographic literature. He also uses his own experiences, but he mainly collects his data from

the weekend nights. He mentions that this is the busiest time and the most challenging for

workers because of the crazy schedules. Mirabelli uses all his findings to answer his research
question by concluding all the ways a service worker must use writing to make meaning and to

accurately “read” a customer. He basically says that having to understand how people act and

how to give them the best service through “reading” a person is a different form of literacy, but it

still requires intelligence to do what a service worker does. Resulting in the end where he says

that service workers are not uneducated or lazy.