Think of the typical fast food drive-thru experience as one big, complex reading experience. As a “workplace writing” instructor, I can’t help but think about the fact that someone – or some team – wrote everything about that experience. What a writing challenge! Worthy, perhaps, of reverse-engineering.

During my week, I teach undergraduate English classes centered around “workplace writing.” For reasons I am ever pondering, I also assign the occasional traditional essay. This pondering process carries over into my lunch break, and I often find myself looking at and thinking about all of the writing that exists in the real world – writing that exists in real workplaces – writing that looks nothing like essays.

What I continue to find is that real-world writing is more than just words. It includes, as an essential counterpart, systems of symbols, signs, and designs. And increasingly, I am feeding such observations back into Academia.

For example, in a manual published by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, you can find Pantone color specifications for road signs and the yellow paint used to separate driving lanes. As it happens, the same hue graces the feet of McDonald’s Masterbrand Golden Arches logo; at my local McDonald’s, where I go regularly for coffee between teaching classes, I am surrounded and guided by this color. It tells me where to go and what to expect.

When we write, for example, in an academic context, we receive similar messages in the form of notebook dimensions, software-based page guides, and assignment parameters. But in the fast food drive-thru, there is really never any confusion about where to go and what to do. No one needs a textbook to navigate these lanes.

Furthermore, I notice more and more the use of meta-writing: for example, a message painted on the pavement that says something like, “Both lanes open,” or hanging, printed signs that say, “Please have payment ready.” If, experimentally, we think of the average McDonald’s drive-thru experience as a complex document, then already we are looking at a few interconnected messages and distinct purposes designed as a kind of interactive reading experience.

I’m not anti-essay. Let’s be clear – I believe that the essay can be useful, instructive, and artistic. But I can’t help but notice that the traditional approach to the essay, arguably, provides no real choices to the reader. The Drive-Thru Document does.

One of the more common buzzwords in writing pedagogy is “technology-mediated,” as in, “technology-mediated writing” or “technology-mediated reading.” Scholars and educators have long expressed an active interest in the complicated interrelationsh