This case study explores the discourse on working knowledge that subject matter experts use with technical communicators to represent work in organizations. Participants constructing representations of tasks involving differing content areas bring distinct points of view to bear on the documentation process, resulting in one major source of ambiguity in technical documents. Imperative statements in documents are studied here as instances of negotiated order that represent distinct points of organizational accountability. As such, the narrative authority of speakers in the discourse process is an important point of focus for this analysis. The discussion reports on a case study in which knowledge engineers and domain experts interpret imperative statements of standards from technical documents during a knowledge acquisition meeting.
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