‘If it’s not written down it didn’t happen’

Abstract

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Time, the Written Record, and Professional Practice: The Case of Contemporary Social Work

“…The production of texts is mediated by a range of writing technologies, from conventional pen and paper (in notebooks and Post-it notes) to digital technologies, such as the use of large ICT systems and texting via mobile phones. The baseline characterization evidences the sheer amount and range of writing/texts constituting social work practice, signaling that social work writing is de facto a “writing-intensive” profession (Lillis et al, 2017/2020, after Brandt, 2005). The key focus in this article is an exploration of time in relation to such writing intensiveness.…”

“…Case Study 3 illustrates a further strand of text work that social workers often carry out, in this case relating to housing. Such text work has an institutionally contested position as it is outside of the social work ICT system and not required, legally or institutionally, but is clearly considered an essential dimension to social work practice (for another example, see Lillis et al, 2017/2020, pp. 42–44).…”

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

“…Texts in the corpus vary from the very short (e.g., a one-word email and a four-word casenote) to the very long (a 10,000-word court report), giving a large standard deviation of 645.18 for a mean text length of 213.79 words. Throughout the study, we remained aware of the lack of homogeneity of WiSP texts, and viewed the corpus as comprised of individual texts rather than a bag of words (Egbert and Schnur, 2018; see Lillis, Leedham and Twiner, 2017, for more discussion of WiSP text categories). An alternative division of the corpus is by social work domain, since WiSP texts are collected from children's, adult generic and adult mental health services (see Table 2).…”

“…The extensive items in the Communication category signal the centrality of all types of communication in social work practice with some lexis indicating spoken inter-action has taken place (e.g., call back, discuss, phone call, voicemail) and other key items signalling communication in writing (e.g., chronology, email, paperwork, uploaded). Any oral communication such as phone calls to other service providers still necessitates a written casenote to record that the communication took place, giving rise to the oft-quoted mantra of social work management: 'if it's not written down it didn't happen' (see also Lillis, Leedham and Twiner, 2017). The past tense verbs in both key items and clusters in this category (see Table 4) are generally procedural and relate to communication and arrangements, most often occurring in casenotes (e.g., contacted, informed, let (someone) know, requested).…”

“…A warm/healthy/caring home environment are clearly descriptive but also (positively) evaluative within a context where the overarching goal of the social worker, as indicated in the text, is to judge whether a home is sufficiently well-maintained. (The focus in this paper is on the textual signalling of goals, but we drew on researcher insights from observations and interviews as part of interpreting and classifying these goals; see Lillis, Leedham and Twiner, 2017) In contrast, the premodifier toxic (see line 5 in Concordance 1) is clearly (negatively) evaluative. This instance is the sole occurrence of toxic in the corpus, but is a powerful and emotive description which colours the whole text and may cause the social work reader to think of the commonly-used phrase 'toxic trio': of substance misuse, mental ill health and abuse (as suggested by ethnographic observation notes).…”