Chapitre 8. Écrire comme moment de l’activité, écrire comme travail

This chapter begins with a theoretical introduction which defines three aspects of writing: writing as it produces marks and signs, writing as it produces texts (the main concern of this study), and writing as it participates in a process of formalization and planning. Consideration of writing as an activity in the context of the different French youth judicial protection services shows that a single and unified practice of professional writing does not exist. With regard to the primary research objective which was to determine if the accelerated normative context of the period 2003- 2011 in France had an effect upon the production of written reports for judges, the author shows that while constraints and workloads do increase, normalization and standardization in writing do not occur and that writing is still left up to individual and personal modes of organization. This chapter concludes with consideration of the difficulties involved in producing written reports for judges, including the difficulty of constructing continuity despite scattered administrative follow-up, and the difficulty of dealing, in the writing process, with the three different temporal dimensions of each minor’s case: the temporal framework of the educational process, the temporal framework of judicial proceedings, and the temporal framework of the young person’s own life events.