Laurie Grobman

Why We Chose Rhetoric Necessity, Ethics, and the (Re)Making of a Professional Writing Program

This article examines the authors’ arduous struggle to develop a professional communication program that would not only meet their students’ professional and intellectual needs but also achieve an identity consistent with their goals as scholars and teachers of composition. Ultimately, the authors argue that a professional communication program that combines in its teaching the ethos of a liberal arts tradition along with the practical skills needed by writers in the workplace is both desirable and possible but that it must be flexible enough to allow for ongoing curricular and philosophical negotiations to meet changing contextual demands.

Multiculturalism and Professional Communication Studies: A Response to Patrick Moore and Emily Thrush

Patrick Moore’s and Emily Thrush’s vastly different responses to my commentary, “Beyond Internationalization: Multicultural Education in the Professional Writing Contact Zone,” reinforce how invigorating our intellectual debates can be. Rather than respond to each of these writers separately, I am choosing to write one response that addresses both comments and reiterates the main argument in my original commentary: that adding multiculturalism to the international perspective in professional communication studies can transform the politics of professional communication classrooms. In so doing, professional communication and composition studies can inform one another in important critical and pedagogical ways. The international perspective in professional communication studies rightfully accounts for the multiple, cultural layers of the professional communication audience. I suggest, however, that professional communication studies follow the lead of composition studies and go beyond international issues to confront—in our professional communication classrooms—multicultural issues within the United States and abroad. Unlike internationalization, multiculturalism embodies a politicized, critical edge, one compositionists have embraced. Because all language intersects with ideology and has both political and ethical implications, compositionists have increasingly incorporated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class into their instruction, seeking to “promote ideological transformation” as students gain critical understanding of dominant and subordinate ideologies and structures (Swilky 21). In the past decade,