In order to participate effectively in the workplace when considering the "social perspective" that Faigley suggests, I believe a professional writer must first and foremost be aware of the audience that will be looking over any document one puts forth. Although the initial two perspectives that Faigley discusses include a need for an understand of a writer's audience, the social perspective takes the need of this knowledge a step further.
The social perspective differs in its use for an awareness of audience in that it requires a knowledge of that audience's place in the workplace and even the world. A professional writer, viewed from the social perspective, needs to know how different audiences have been formed, continued, or even how they have made relationships with other audiences! Basically, a deep background knowledge for different audiences will be necessary. This is so because as Faigley states that you can only ask yourself how a writer learns to write about their field when you assume that "writing is a social act that takes place in a structure of authority, changes constantly as society changes, has consequences in economic and political realms, and shapes the writer as much as it is shaped by the writer."
As confusing as that may sound, when you think of a single document as "a moment in the continuous process of communication," it becomes clear that each individual document is in short, one building block of an entire society. It falls obviously under what could be known as a "communication" category, but what society do you know of that works without having vast communicative details and processes?
Basically, I feel as though communication would be the breads and pastas of the food pyramid, which would make it necessary for any professional writers "societal diet."
