But we also do want our students' writing to be successfully instrumental. A clash between the values underpinning composition and professional writing recently surfaced when I served as a reader for a graduate student's critical paper, the capstone experience in our professional writing M. A. track. When she tried to apply the concept of contact zones to the business-writing class, though, she floundered, finally depicting students' need to learn about different communities in that context as a matter of audience analysis, a strategy for more persuasive writing. She sensed that the concept of community played differently in the two kinds of writing instruction, but rather than dig down to why this might be so, and to the potential dissonance between composition and professional writing, she resorted to the fact that the two realms of writing instruction both draw on rhetorical principles. No, professional-writing and composition courses, as they're currently taught and understood by those within these fields, are not the same.
Professional writing is here in English departments.
As the pages of our journals attest, we in professional writing have been trying ever since becoming an academic presence to figure out on what bases we exist, but we could use some help from those intellects who purport to analyze and theorize English studies as a whole. Figuring out the relationship of professional writing to English would provide guidance to those shaping undergraduate and graduate curricula, and it would help us help our students to integrate their learning experiences in courses that now seem implicitly at odds in many ways. Maybe honestly considering this relationship would bring to light suppressed values and inconsistencies whose airing could lead to a more comprehensive, convincing vision for English studies in general. Kathryn Rentz is associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches undergraduate courses in business and technical writing and graduate courses in professional writing theory, practice, and research.