The Politics of Teaching Professional Writing

Kate Ronald

One of my colleagues remarked the other night at a party that he thought the subject matter of composition was essentially “personal and social change.” I readily agreed and noted that our discipline came into its own again during the 1960’s, an era devoted to those kinds of change, when students, not texts, became our subjects. Yet it could be argued that composition and rhetoric specialists have flourished not because of our culture’s or our colleges’ desire to spread “revolution,” but largely because the corporate worlds of education and business (“ETh and Lockheed,” my friend said) have given high schools and colleges a mandate to turn out “skilled” writers who understand the conventions and constraints of writing outside the academy. Those who employ our students are less interested in their personal growth than in their ability to fit in and obtain predetermined results. Despite this reality, composition theorists continue to describe writing as a way of “knowing,” a way to help students learn about themselves, examine their own experience, and yes, change the world into a better place. In this essay, I want to explore these apparently contradictory purposes for writing instruction.

I have confronted this dilemma every Tuesday night for the past three semesters. Teaching an upper-level course in professional writing, I find myself questioning my colleague’s statement more closely. This relatively new course works specifically with students as potential members of certain disciplines—the law, medicine, social sciences, and particular areas of business such as personnel or public relations. Despite the course’s increasing popularity, the faculty does not seem exactly sure what a course in professional writing means. The students do, though. “Professional” means getting paid for what you do. And, put together with writing, it means mastering the kind of writing that will get you a job and then a promotion. The students want “in” to a certain group, and they be­lieve that I can teach them the code that will unlock the door. This belief worries me; in fact, the whole idea of a course in professional writing worries me.

Professional writing classes are the most specialized incarnation of the current writing-across-the-curriculum movement. Here, the students do not survey the range of academic disciplines; rather, they concentrate on writing in the fields they have chosen to enter. Many of them are already working writers. They and I work together on projects that are often initiated by their employers or by their imaginary visions of these employers. Consequently, we must maneuver through a complex rhetorical maze of several levels of audience at once: their classmates, their professional colleagues and clients, their superiors, their entire discipline, and me, their teacher. These students come into the course expecting to learn on-the job writing, and they demand access to the codes, formats, and etiquette of specific fields. Already competent writers, they want “in quickly. My dilemma results: am I helping students get jobs and promotions, or am I helping them become critical thinkers who can change and improve those professions? Do these need to be conflicting goals? And how can I achieve a synthesis that satisfies the university, the community, the students, and me? Should I even worry about such things? I am not certain that I have the answers to these questions, but I do want to offer some words of caution about professional writing courses and how they might connect or diverge from the other writing courses we teach in the English department.

This situation is a political one, first of all. English departments—under constant criticism from the community and from their colleagues across the university because students still “can’t write” after completing the required composition sequence—have re­sponded with writing-across-the-curriculum programs. Almost everyone agrees that encouraging our colleagues to incorporate writing into all disciplines is the ideal answer, and some programs have begun to work with teachers in other departments. But increasingly, English departments are taking on the complete burden of teaching students to write in their major field. Of course, this solution is attractive to university administrators, other departments, and community members who have often complained that English studies are not relevant, that they don’t prepare students for their work life. And since almost everyone agrees that teaching writing is a most difficult chore, why not make the English department do it? And even within the English department, it is difficult to find instructors for courses like professional writing. It is a popular course; at Nebraska we could fill several sections of it each semester. But mine is the only one. None of my colleagues want to teach it, perhaps because they, too, are confused about exactly what the course should teach students, or whether we should be teaching it at all. As Lester Faigley and Kristine Hansen recently point out, such courses “challenge the old formalist assumption that ‘good writing’ is monolithic” (140). Our approaches to invention, arrange­ment, and style, and our beliefs about process, may not apply to these new courses. Perhaps, too, English teachers don’t want to dirty their hands by exploring writing outside the academy. And even when they do, it seems to me that there is a serious question of whether we are going to study what executive officers of corporations say is good writing and try to imitate it, or whether we are going to look to research in our own field for approaches to teaching writing either inside or outside the classroom.

Faigley and Hansen, writing in CCC, warn that English teachers must first decide on the goals of these upper-level, discipline-specific courses. They focus on the writing-across-the-curriculum movement—helping students write for courses outside the English department—but their advice applies as well to professional writing classes. They describe two current approaches to these courses—the “professional” aim which trains students to imitate professional writing in the field, and the “liberal arts” aim which encourages students to explore issues in the subject matter of certain disciplines (141). Faigley and Hansen find problems in both strategies, and caution that both “pose major difficulties for a writing teacher outside the students’ discipline” (141). They observed students who wrote flawless papers in terms of mechanics and format but who had not mastered the way a certain discipline transmits knowledge. Other students wrote papers that demonstrated a working knowledge of their fields, but were full of procedural or mechanical mistakes. I find the same discrepancy in my classes. One of my students this semester is working on the legality of policies regarding sexual harassment on the job. She is a legal secretary and is herself a victim of such harassment. Her papers are full of the appropriate “whereas’s” and “thereto’s,” but she has yet to explore the implications of stated policies for women like herself. She sounds more like a lawyer than she did two months ago, but sounding like a lawyer is not the same as knowing the law or even knowing what she thinks of the way the law works. In other words as Faigley and Hansen so clearly point out, style is not enough.

And a focus on style or format will certainly not lead to the kinds of personal response and change that I would like to see in that student. I want her to investigate what she thinks of the law as a profession while she has the freedom to do so. Faigley and Hansen say that if I really want to help this student understand the way the law defines such things as proof, knowledge, and relevancy, she and I will “have to internalize much more than the stipulations of the relevant style manual” (148). Yet so many of the more recent pro­fessional or writing-across-the-curriculum textbooks consider their nod to the APA Publication Manual a breakthrough in making composition studies truly cross-curricular. Nor do the readers that label themselves cross-curricular help me much by wrenching subjects out of context to represent specific disciplines; in my mind, an essay by Richard Seizer on the art of surgery does not present a science student with a model of how scientific knowledge is communicated. Subject matter, then, is not enough either. Perhaps the solution lies somewhere between these two poles, but we have not found it yet.

Nor is this dilemma a modern one, however tempting it may be to think it so. Plato, in a sense, was one of the first professional writing teachers, and he worried, as we should, about whether rhetoricians were instructing students in a method of intellectual inquiry or in tricks for persuading the crowds. In the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, Plato tries to move his students from a sophistic focus on style and sound, designed to dazzle the audience, toward a more personal dialogue that explores how knowledge comes to be knowledge. Aristotle’s Rhetoric continued this work, attempting to show students that through careful analysis a speaker could “invent” an audience based on exploring how people come to believe. Both Plato and Aristotle wanted to teach their students a system of rhetoric that would be at the center of their intellectual learning. Perhaps we have forgotten this classical sense of a “professional” as one who is continually learning and exploring the boundaries of a discipline. Modern textbooks tend to over-simplify the process of knowing a subject or inventing an audience. My students are some of the worst culprits when they first come to my professional writing class. They have superficial notions of what a business executive wants in a piece of writing, for example, notions gleaned from their business textbooks, newspapers, and advertising. They start out writing, then, for an audience that they do not know.

Am I grappling, then, with an audience problem? The question "Who are my students writing for?” may illustrate the tension between what composition theory suggests teachers do and what the culture expects them to do, between teaching students to be perceptive or teaching them to be effective. In 1984, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford summarized these two positions in their award-winning article “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked.” They define two basic attitudes toward teaching students a sense of readership, and they review theories that lead to two different teach­ing strategies. Audience “addressed,” Ede and Lunsford maintain, has its roots in the influence of cognitive psychology, speech communications, and expectations from the world outside the academy. Teachers who subscribe to this model encourage students to write for actual readers, to engage in audience analysis, and to accommodate their writing to those readers in order to get results. Audience “invoked,” on the other hand, finds its basis in textual analysis, usually from texts inside the academy, and argues that writers cannot know their readers in the same way speakers know their hearers. Teachers who use this model ask students to discover and define audiences through cues that other writers leave behind in texts. Following theorists such as Walter J. Ong, these teachers hope that by examining the way other writers have defined their audiences, students will come to internalize their own sense of "a reader." Ede and Lunsford conclude their review by advocating a synthesis of both approaches—since they consider each position an incomplete conception of the “rich” idea of audience (156).

Yet teachers tend to forget this “richness” when confronted with a class of students there to practice professional writing. It is tempting to revert completely to audience analysis, following the guidelines left for us by memos, sales presentations, and quarterly reports. No wonder the professional writing course isn’t popular with the English faculty—there doesn’t seem anything there worth knowing. But there can be if teachers strive for a balance between appealing to a preconceived notion of audience and carefully studying the texts from various disciplines. Such a blend seems particularly necessary in a professional writing class where develop­ing a sense of audience is crucial but where students and teachers can come dangerously close to being satisfied with simple imitation or regurgitation, or where developing a sense of audience is crucial but where we can easily operate from wrong-headed or simplistic assumptions about audience.

Arthur Walzer argues recently in CCC that our methods for finding and analyzing audiences do not work for the new pro­fessional writing course. He suggests, as Faigley and Hansen do, that such courses need to return to a rhetorical approach through textual analysis of invention. Walzer borrows Douglas Park’s theories of audience when he says that writers do not “adjust” their conclusions to “accommodate” a particular audience that they have analyzed demographically. Rather, they “discover” the significance of their conclusions by reflecting on their premises from the viewpoints of various “interpretive communities.” For Walzer, what is important is not “what the audience already knows, but what kind of knowl­edge they expect to gain” (155). He suggests that we teach profes­sional writing, then, by helping students analyze the places where writers from particular disciplines reveal their strategies for invention: “the manifest character of a particular audience is to be found in those statements in which writers cast . . . the importance of what they have done and of what they have to say” (156). In other words, we should be looking at how legal writers, for example, portray themselves in certain roles and how they justify taking up a certain topic at all. I am interested in Walzer’s focus on the topoi of the professions—their implied justifications for their subjects and the roles they see themselves playing. This is where I’d like to see us place our emphasis in interdisciplinary classes—on rhetorical invention. Then, my legal secretary student might be able to “read” the research and memos from her attorney boss as the smokescreens they are. She would see the roles that this particular lawyer casts for himself and his profession—guardians of the status quo who find sexual harassment claims annoying at best but who can manipulate language to cover themselves.

I am worried, in a larger sense, about just this sort of adaptability to context and audience. I question one popular theme of profes­sional writing-across-the-curriculum courses—that they will enable students to survey various fields and then maneuver through whatever situation presents itself. In one sense, of course, I want my students to have that kind of power. But I also want them to understand how such power works. Walzer says that if students analyze the rhetoric of various disciplines, they will then be able to find a “rhetorical home”—a community they feel comfortable addressing (159). I’d like to add that students should understand, first, what kind of home they are entering.

This means getting below the surface of texts in the professions to the more difficult discovery of the relationships among writer, subject, and reader. My students have a very hard time with this sort of analysis; they constantly want to stay with the subject of a text and are quite stubborn about seeing the “audience” as actual, breathing readers rather than as an abstraction created by the interplay of voices and invitations within a piece of professional writing. For example, one of my students this semester is working on an assignment for the Nebraska Department of Revenue. He is redesigning their “Forms Management Program”—the controlling document that determines how all other forms will look and sound. He recognizes that the document desperately needs revision. It is full of jargon and in-house language, and it puts as much distance between itself and a reader as you would expect from a state tax agency. We have worked together on simplifying the language and changing the tone. But I also have encouraged him to investigate the rhetoric of such forms on a deeper level—the level of invention—to explore the kind of community the Nebraska Department of Revenue represents to itself and justifies to its outside readers. Through respond­ing personally to the text, writing about its impact on him as a reader, my student is learning about the internal premises behind the rhetoric of distance and authority that operate in the discourse of his workplace. Then, perhaps, he will understand his place in that community more clearly, and decide whether he wants to use or change that kind of rhetoric. He will, on one level, be better able to revise the document to be more “readable”; on another, more important level, he will be able to “re-invent” its orientation, and his own.

In other words, I am arguing that we should be teaching expressive writing within the professional writing class itself, not only in courses that prepare students for more specialized tasks and audiences. Perhaps more than in any other kind of course, we should invite students to adopt what James Britton calls the “spec­tator’s stance.” Britton sees the spectator’s role as that of evaluator, one who is free from the need to act and decide in response to social demands and is therefore able to evaluate more broadly, and at the same time, more personally. Britton calls this sort of discourse the “language of being and becoming,” exactly the kind of language, it seems to me, that we need to use in writing classrooms (125). Particularly in professional writing classrooms, where it is tempting to select and order material according to demands from outside, the spectator’s role would encourage looking at that material according I to individual values. The spectator’s role, manifested in expressive writing, demands relating the object of attention to the writer’s system of values, an act which means exploring that system of values as well as analyzing one’s own knowledge. I want to suggest that our students not try to write in the professions but about them. They should be encouraged to examine texts from particular disci­plines and to write about what they find there. More importantly, we should explore with them the kinds of rhetoric that professionals from other disciplines use to characterize themselves and their purposes. If we do, we’ll learn more about the subject we are teach­ing, and we will be engaging in the “search in common” that Plato argues is the foundation of learning (Gorgias 81).

But focusing on this kind of “invention” will not be politically popular, I suspect. Will corporate business, law, and government take kindly to our investigating what constitutes evidence in their fields, what underlying assumptions about clients and the public inform their communication, what their implied justifications and roles might be? Moreover, will the students and the professions like the idea of turning our focus away from style and format? It is easier to imitate the surface, as a recent piece from CCCs “Staffroom Interchange” illustrates. Kathleen Kelly notes in “Professional Writing in the Humanities Course” that our courses in business and pro­fessional writing must also fulfill humanities requirements. She suggests, then, that we assign “writing about humanities subjects in professional writing forms” (235), so that students produce memos about works of art, for example. To me, this seems the worst sort of imitation and “flattery,” as Plato called it. It suggests to students that form can somehow be separated from content, and it does fields outside of English the disservice of implying that they have no content worth exploring. I do not think we can teach the content of other disciplines, but I do think that we can teach students how to analyze the rhetoric of other fields.

Perhaps my worries and my proposals are too idealistic: like modern composition studies, I, too, am a child of the 60’s. But I do believe that we have more to bring to professions outside the academy than training students in the textual etiquette of certain disciplines. Louise Wetherbee Phelps, writing in Rhetoric Review, explores the expanding “domain” of composition studies. She notes that we have discovered, “at the very moment of accepting a wider responsibility for facilitating the development of skill and power in written language, that we are not the only people, and school not the only context, to do so” (189). Certainly, we must learn about profes­sional writing from people who aim their discourse beyond College English or PMLA. Recent articles like Tebeaux’s “Redesigning Professional Writing Courses to Meet the Communication Needs of Writers in Business and Industry” will help English teachers re­evaluate how writing works and gets read outside our classrooms. However, as Phelps goes on to suggest, school is an ideal place for just the kind of learning I have been talking about; it provides students with their “only chance to experience the intensity of activity and discussion that seems to help people become expert in other kinds of skilled action” (189), the chance to write, in other words, as spectators. We should take the time, while we have it, to help professional writing students analyze their potential professions by focusing on the way writing invents those professions. I don’t want us to forget all that we have learned about teaching writing in composition and literature courses once we walk into a course in scientific or legal writing. We do not work for corpora­tions or governments, although at times it seems that way. And even when we do work with them and their employees, we must remember that our subject is our students, their learning, their opportunities for personal reflection, and maybe even social change.

University of Nebraska
Lincoln, Nebraska

WORKS CITED
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Phys Roberts and Ingram Bywater. New York: Modern Library-Random House, 1954.
Britton, James. Language and Learning. Coral Cables, FL: U of Miami P, 1970.
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. ‘Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 36(1984): 155-72.
Faigley, Lester, and Kristine Hansen. “Learning to Write in the Social Sciences.’ CCC 36(1985): 140-50.
Kelly, Kathleen. “Professional Writing in the Humanities Course.” CCC 36 (1985): 234-37.
Park, Douglas. ‘The Meanings of ‘Audience.”’ College English 44(1982): 247-58.
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. “The Domain of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 4 (1986): 182-98.
Plato. Gorgias. Trans W. C. Helmbold. Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal-Arts­Bobbs-Merrill, 1977.
—Phaedrus. Trans. W. C Helmbold. Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal-Arts­: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981.
Tebeaux, Elizabeth. “Redesigning Professional Writing Courses to Meet the Communication Needs of Writers in Business and Industry.” CCC 36(1985): 41 9-29.
Walzer, Arthur. “Articles from ‘The California Divorce Project’: A Case Study of Audience.” CCC 36(1985): 150-59.