Business & Professional Communication seems like a straightforward class: it’s about communicating in business and professional settings, right? So that means focusing on the way we communicate in the workplace, which is about emails and memos and reports and executive summaries. Right?

Well, yes, to the limited extent workplace communication is described, that’s an accurate approach to the class. Except that it’s missing quite a bit, like an entire field of study, academic discipline, and professional career.

Wait, this an English class?

This course has an ENGL (for English) prefix for a reason — our study of business and professional communication is rooted in the study of rhetoric. We don’t mean rhetoric like the term is often used in the media to mean something like “superficial language used to trick or confuse” or “bombast” but in the Aristotelian sense of using the “available means of persuasion.” Rhetorical studies has a long and rich history spanning from the ancient Greeks (at least in western studies — there are plenty of other cultural histories of rhetoric). Rhetoric remains the core of composition coursework, political speech, and advertising campaigns. And it’s at the heart of all communication, whether academic, business, or professional.

So what do we mean by “business and professional” communication? It’s the study of communication practices that both occur in business and professional settings and that enable business and professions to happen. Communication doesn’t just represent an aspect of business and professional experience — it’s at the heart of the enterprise.

Technical communication as the field term

Which is why we’ll use the term “technical communication” to serve as a term that elides combinations of “business,” “professional,” or “technical” with “communication” or “writing.” We’ll find terms like “rhetoric of technology” and “science and medical rhetoric” in the course of our study, because these represent particular communication communities under the large umbrella of “technical communication.” Business communication is communication done in a business setting, but it’s also the technical approaches to communication that enable business to occur. Professional communication is communication for which one is paid, but it’s also the technical approaches to communication that ensure the quality of products for which one has paid. Technical communication is how we’ll reference the field of study, the academic discipline, and the professional careers that encompass all of these other ways of describing aspects of the field and profession.

You can get hired as a technical communicator or technical writer. Try this Google search to prove it: technical writer jobs richmond va. But you can also implement the strategies and tactics of technical communication in your workplace and profession to improve the quality of your communication artifacts and outcomes. That’s the end goal of this course — to improve your technical communication skills to make a substantial, measurable difference in your workplace or professional context.