Epistemic tensions in engineers’ writings

The aim of this article is to show how agricultural engineers define and produce written communication materials addressed directly or indirectly to different audiences with specific requirements. These engineers belong to the same department of an agricultural technical institute and combine development and research work in their activity. Based on their discourse, we report on how they conceive of different types of writing, in their form and mode of production. We show how the construction of these texts leads to conflicts of standards between these engineers and their managers. These scriptural media are not used according to the case to connect the same actors simultaneously; they do not concern the same “community horizon” and can articulate different forms of knowledge. While, for some, it is a matter of producing texts that are scientifically valid in the eyes of the scientific community, for others the concern is to be able to answer the development questions of their regional partners.