Every professional writing instructor wrestles with the ghost of Joseph K. Pumphrey, Ph.D. A minor character in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Professor Pumphrey teaches “Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law” at Zenith’s Riteway Business College (47). For most compositionists, Pumphrey still symbolizes intellectual opportunism—the unscrupulous writ­ing consultant whose workshops for the office make no distinction between “Dover Beach” and a Sears Roebuck circular. Writing Programs fear and loathe Pumphreyism, especially at a time when the Gingrichian “revolution” has escalated the corporatization of higher education; hence the problematic role of Professional Writing in our writing curricula. Since it supposedly embodies the values of a rampant capitalist culture, work-related writing is considered inimicable to the ethical mission of any good Writing Program. No one wants to train students to become the scribes for a new generation of Babbits, and most Professional Writing instructors, laboring in the offal and sawdust of business prose, find themselves alienated from their peers. Consequently, Professional Writing remains a Purgatorial experience—boring, at best; distasteful, at worst—for both students and instructors, a sweatshop that teaches business forms by rote and conformity by example.

Fortunately, two new books, Writing About Business and Industry and Professional Writing in Context: Lessons from Teaching and Consulting in Worlds of Work, challenge the myth of Pumphreyism and redefine Professional Writing in new and exciting ways. According to these texts, Pumprheyism is the bogey Writing Programs create to deny their complicity in, and their responsibility toward, the business culture that sustains them. However, as the traditional university continues to disintegrate, and higher education becomes displaced to the marketplace, writing instructors must face the possibility that the classroom of the future will be the office—a place where power, knowledge, and language are never merely “academic.” Professional Writing, therefore, will have increasing relevance in most Writing Programs because it directly addresses the cultural, political, and economic changes associated with this paradigm shift. Far from being a simple service course that teaches students the mechanics of the memo, Professional Writing in these pages emerges as a sophisticated rhetorical discipline with a history, a practice, and a theory. Teaching business writing not only can help students understand, question, and subvert an economic system that threatens to exploit them; it also can help writing instructors develop a new pedagogy as higher education undergoes a radical transformation.

Beverly Schneller’s Writing About Business and Industry is, quite simply, the best anthology of business essays in print. Schneller, Associate Professor of English at Millersville University and coeditors of Writing About Science (Oxford, 1991), has assembled an outstanding collection of 27 readings, ranging from classic texts by Adam Smith and Max Weber to contemporary journalism. The book is ideal for undergraduates for two reasons: first, it exposes students to an instructive variety of styles and documentation and demonstrates how even routine business reports can become the stuff of literature; second, the anthology presents a concise but detailed history of Western capitalism, from Renaissance Florence to the Roaring Eighties. Schneller’s main purpose, however, is to promote debate, not merely to provide models or to teach history. Although the collection’s tone is neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, the sheer range of readings and their shrewd juxtapositions are dramatic and provocative.

Schneller divides her collection into two sections. Part I, “The Inquisitive Spirit,” deals with business, with the nature of work, the life of the worker, and the character of the workplace. It also investigates the cultural assumptions behind modern business practices. Part II, “The Acquisitive Spirit,” deals with industry, with issues concerning managerial style, organizational strategy, and corporate environments. It places these issues in the context of an ever-evolving multicultural global market. Schneller, however, scrupulously avoids The Wall Street Journal approach to her material. She is interested in attracting writing instructors as well as students with professional goals. Therefore, she balances traditional business essays by Henry Ford and Arthur Pound with more radical essays by Friedreich Engels and George Orwell. In addition, Schneller demonstrates the impact contemporary theory has had on Professional Writing. Her selections include: a New Historicist excerpt from Lewis and Clark’s field trip report to Thomas Jefferson; B.L. Hutchins and Beatrice Webb’s feminist essays on Victorian and Edwardian factory conditions; Eric Hobsbawn’s Marxist critique of representations of the proletariat body in revolutionary art; Jeffrey Pfeffer’s postmodern discussion of corporate office space; and three post-colonial analyses of Third World economies.

Miraculously, Schneller makes these sophisticated readings accessible to undergraduates. Each essay comes with a trenchant introduction and is followed by stimulating questions. The latter demonstrate the originality of Schneller’s approach. For example, Schneller’s assignments for an excerpt from Daniel Defoe’s business writing manual, The Complete English Tradesman (1726), combine the critical with the practical. She asks students what Defoe’s sample business letters reveal about early 18th century English culture, and how and why writing conventions and readers’ expectations have changed since then. She then invites students to produce their own Desktop handouts outlining the central points of Defoe’s texts and to create their own business writing manual. Assignments like these make Writing About Business and Industry indispensable for an introductory Professional Writing class. Ideally, the reader would compliment a more conventional textbook of business forms and exercises. My one reservation is Schneller’s deliberate omission of fiction. Professional Writing instructors and corporate consult­ants often use stories and novels to discuss the ethics of language in the workplace. A selection from W.D. Howells, Sinclair Lewis, or John Dos Passos might enhance this collection. But that seems a minor quibble about a text that is destined to become a classic in its field.

If Writing About Business and Work is tailored to lower-level Professional Writing classes, Professional Writing in Context: Lessons from Teaching and Consulting in the Worlds of Work targets upper-division and graduate-level courses. Donald H. Cunningham already has called this volume a major contribution to Professional Writing. More than that, the collection is a benchmark. Its five essays—insightful, original, challenging—blend theory with practice and cover a variety of crucial subjects: the most common errors in work-related writing; creating the voice and persona of an organization through its documentation; the rhetorical standards and expectations of government bureaucracies; the problems and rewards of collaborative work in high-tech firms; the possibility of instigating social change by teaching Professional Writing. The contributors have spent over 20 years being both writing teachers and corporate consultants, so their words carry the authority, humor, and heartbreak of experience.

John Frederick Reynolds, Professor of English at CUNY and a consultant to NASA, Boeing, and Norfolk Southern Corporation, starts the collection with his essay, “What Adult Work-World Writers Have Taught Me About Adult Work-World Writing.” Reynolds provides a useful overview of the ten most common errors in Professional Writing, each accompanied b) deliciously grotesque examples from his file of business correspondences Reynolds’ emphasis, however, is rhetorical rather than mechanical. He is more concerned with questions of audience—with tone, style, and organization—than with comma splices. Most work-world writers, he arues, are oblivious to the rhetorical situations in which they are enmeshed, They enter an organization underestimating the amount of writing required of them, and overestimating their ability to handle it. To produce more effective, reader-oriented documents, Reynolds advises students to analyze the rhetorical context, draft an outline, showcase key ideas, and streamline their diction. That advice may seem like common sense to writing instructors, until Reynolds points out that college composition classes completely ignore work-related writing issues, and that even Professional Writing classes rarely discuss the fundamentals of rhetoric. Here Reynolds takes to task a profession whose fear of Pumphreyism harms its students:

Carolyn Matalene agrees with Reynolds in the next essay, “Of the People,by the7People, for the People: Texts inPublic Contexts.” A Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Matalene also has served on important state agencies, including the South Carolina Commission on Women. Since USC is located literally next door to the State House that funds it, Matalene’s double life seems inevitable, and her dual role as writing teacher and agency writer makes this essay engrossing and thought-provoking. Matalene’s theme is legislature as textuality. She uses Michel Foucault to analyze the writer’s self-eclipsing role in a government agency and how power generates documentation. As Matalene demonstrates, however, Foucaltian theory means one thing in the safety of a classroom, quite another thing in the Kafkaesque world of memos, minutes, proposals, reports, and position papers. Winston Smith has nothing on Dr. Matalene, and she defends those conscientious civil servants, mostly women, who daily throw their bodies before the wheels of a juggernaut against the smirking deprecations of intellectual “prima donnas” (52):

In fact, Matalene and her colleagues avoid “bureaucratese” to produce anonymous texts that safeguards people’s rights and lives (45): a management audit that reads like a piece of investigative journalism; a report on minority health aid that contains three “fictional vignettes” of wasted human potential (41). Matalene considers this kind of writing the lifeblood of the democratic process, far more important than academic prose. The most fascinating part of her essay is when she and other writers pool their talents to create an official voice for the Commission on Women—tough, compassionate, and Junoesque. This collective fiction allows the agency to function and to remain loyal to its mission. “What difference does it make who is speaking?” asks Michel Foucault at the end of “What is an Author?” (120). None, according to Dr. Matalene, so long as people’s lives are improved. Perhaps, she adds, more composition theorists should work as agency writers. “If rhetoric teaches us anything,” she says, “it is surely the overriding importance of local conditions. Learning about and engaging with our own local conditions can improve our citizenship and correct our theories” (57).

Joyce Magnotto continues this discussion on the federal level in the next essay, “Consulting in a Bureaucracy: Helping Government Evaluators Write Effective Reports.” Magnotto, an Assistant Professor of English at Old Dominion University, has served as a writing consultant for such federal agencies as the Department of Labor, the General Accounting Office, and the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. She provides young bureaucrats with practical tips about audience analysis, report conventions, collaboration, and editing. She also maps the paperwork flow within bureaucracies and evaluates the writing training programs of different federal agencies. A seasoned Washingtonian who has kept her standards and her sanity equally intact, Magnotto is familiar with the dangers, paradoxes, and rewards of writing for the federal government. Government evaluators strive not to sound like bureaucrats in their prose, but as Magnotto warns, “tradition is hegemonic, and patriarchies reproduce themselves” (93). However, even though the cultural milieu of Foggy Bottom cannot be ignored, young writers can survive, even thrive, if they remember and exploit a central paradox: “Bureaucracies resist change, but they also sponsor change through written reports” (95).

Donald H. Samson, Jr. Associate Professor of English at Radford University and senior writer and editor for Martin Marietta, is the only contributor who talks about technical writing. The same meticulous, in-depth approach that Samson exhibits in Editing Technical Writing (Oxford, 1993) distinguishes his essay, “Writing in High-Tech Firms.” Samson, who began his technical writing career in 1965 at the Crouse-Hinds Company in Syracuse, NY, distills 30 years of experience in as many pages. This small manual teaches young technical writers how to write for different audiences, how to gather information, how to write quickly and accurately, how to avoid egocentricity and work effectively in groups, how to cope with faulty computers and survive corporate politics. To his credit, Samson also conveys something of the Pynchonesque absurdity and paranoia that flourish in high­tech firms—the book bosses who cut costs by refusing to pay for overtime; the software firms that hold documentation in contempt; the Masonic secrecy associated with defense contracts; the fist fights that break out at planning conferences as deadlines loom. His observations about the job market are scathingly honest. “We’re not going to hire anymore English majors,” says one personnel director. “They don’t know anything.... if writers don’tknow the technology, they can’t be more than Kelly Girls” (119).

Despite some hard truths, however, Professional Writing in Context ends on a positive, even visionary, note. Lynn Veach Sadler’s essay, “Preparing for the White Rabbit and Taking It on the Neck: Tales of the Workplace and the Writing place,” celebrates the power of the written word to transform the workplace. It also calls on academics—for their and their students’ sake—to overcome their prejudices about business if they wish to create a better world. Sadler, former President of Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont and founder and editor-in-chief of Human Technology Interface Ink Press, is perhaps best known for applying W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about Total Quality Management to both college administration and composition theo­ry. An accomplished Miltonist, Sadler relishes polemics, and if her tone is playful, her message is urgent. “Never,” she declares, “in the history of writing has the moment been more apt for rapport among education place, workplace, and human/humane place” (134). Unfortunately, educators are failing to seize this historical moment. As new technologies and shifting markets make business and academia more and more interdependent, administrators and instructors pursue a self-defeating agenda:

As a former writing teacher, Sadler particularly chides those fugitive and cloistered compositionists who remain aloof from the rhetorical demands of the agaro. This gentle woman asks some tough questions: Who is genuinely more committed to the education of our workforce, business or the academy? CRS Sirrine, better known as “Levi Strauss U.,” designs and creates afford­able colleges and universities (173). Bell Laboratories’ Murray Hill head­quarters resembles a campus and regularly hosts free college seminars. Again, who is genuinely more committed to social reform, business or the academy? Name a university that is as willing to reclaim its surrounding neighborhood from urban blight as Erie Insurance, as effective in combatting sexual harassment as H.B. Fuller, as enlightened and progressive in its hiring policies as Apple, Celestial Seasonings, or Corning. Academics, notes Sadler, think corporations are mental factories that breed conformity, but too many colleges resemble the University of Winnemac in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith—a Ford plant whose products “rattle a little” but are “beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts” (10). Lewis himself preferred the office, the research lab, and the foundation to the university because these institutions, whatever their faults, have a greater potential for positive impact on people’s lives. Sadler concurs. If we teach our students how to produce academic essays, which they will never write again after leaving school, but not memos and reports, which they will write the rest of their professional lives, how can we in good conscience call ourselves educators?

Dr. Sadler is neither an agent provocateur nor an apologist for capitalism, but her position is bound to stir controversy. Those compositionists who will accuse her of betraying our profession are mistaken, however. Her ideas about the importance of work-related writing echo those of the great American educator, Frank Aydelotte. President of Swathmore College, Director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, American Secretary of the Rhodes Trustees, Aydelottewas also one of the pioneers of Professional Writing. While at M.I.T. in the Teens, Aydelotte taught a specially designed English and Composition class at Bell Telephone in New York. Aydelotte combined liberal arts readings from such writers as Ruskin and Arnold on the nature of work, creativity, and industry with practical exercises on writing interoffice documents and customer relations letters. Aydelotte also lectured on the history of Bell itself, on the impact of the telephone on American society. He helped students—mostly undereducated young women and teenaged boys who had been hired to replace a conscripted male workforce—to better understand their company’s culture and its ethical responsibilities to the public. As writers, he insisted, they had the duty, the power to make Bell a moral place. Years later, on the eve of World War II, Aydelotte would remark that factories, bureaucracies, and corporations inevitably become “blueprint[s]” for “self-contained despotism” and “world­wide regimentation” so long as academics refuse to bring their knowledge to the workplace (57).

These two books share Aydelotte’s vision, creativity, and ethics. For Professional Writing instructors, they are impossible to recommend too highly. Both vindicate a discipline that for years has been marginalized and despised. Pumphreyism is dead. Professional Writing finally has come of age.