Treating Professional Writing as Social "Praxis.".

Abstract

To explore how professional communications are shaped by the worlds of work, scholars have drawn on several different ways of thinking about the relationship between texts and contexts?literary theories, sociolinguistics, organizational theory, ethnography, and theories of composition.11 would like to draw on classical rhetoric to develop a philosophical justification for stressing the social and ethical dimensions of business and technical writing. I am not specifically interested here in how we can apply the techniques of classical rhetoric to professional writing, but in how we can revitalize classical rhetoric's general emphasis on ethical and political values. While classical rhetoric assumed ethical and political values that need to be ques tioned, it does provide a context in which to ask questions about values, questions that are too often ignored in professional writing classes. Classical rhetoric is particularly useful in talking about technical and business writing because Aristotle's three-part conceptualization of theoria, praxis, and techne undercuts the dichotomy of theory and practice that often limits instruction in writing to the mere techniques of the craft. Classical rhetoric can also help us develop a broader social perspective on practical writing, a perspective that includes not just the social context of the company or profession but the larger public context as well. Classical rhetoric is the source of many of our basic concepts, particu larly our concern for purpose as a controlling element in discourse, but we often fail to look beyond the techniques of classical rhetoric to examine the philosophical perspective that gave classical rhetoric itself a purpose. For the tradition that began with Isocrates, this perspective is civic humanism. For civic humanists like Isocrates and Aristotle, rhetoric and the closely related studies of ethics and politics are the means of producing citizens with practical wisdom, or phronesis. Such citizens can say the right thing at the right time to solve a public problem because they know how to put the shared beliefs and values of the community into practice. According to Aristotle, practical wisdom is not merely a technical skill at problem solving, nor does it depend on a mastery of some theoretical abstractions about the nature of truth and beauty. For Aristotle (and for civic humanists generally), practical wisdom is based on a broad-based understanding of the shared experiences

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