Exploring the core ‘preoccupation’ of professional social work writing: A corpus-assisted discourse study

Within the profession of social work, the production and use of written texts is a high-stakes activity, playing a central role in all decisions around providing services for people, and at the same time used to evaluate social workers’ professional competence. Writing of all kinds pervades everyday social work practice, varying from case notes to inter-departmental emails to formal assessment reports. Despite the ‘writing-intensive’ nature of...