The Origins of the Art and Practice of Professional Writing

Download or read book The Origins of the Art and Practice of Professional Writing written by Kathryn Rosser Raign and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origins of the Art and Practice of Professional Writing addresses the classic divide in teaching written skills between rhetoric/composition and technical/professional communication (TPC). It explores a body of texts that were created earlier than any yet identified by either field: ancient Mesopotamian documents, produced in the eighth century BCE. The book debunks two myths: it shows that rhetoric was practiced consciously and taught systematically long before the Greek civilization existed; and because a large swathe of the public, while not fully literate, had access to the services of scribes, not just men, but women, merchants, and even slaves utilized writing as a tool for social justice. From their earliest writings, humans consciously applied principles of persuasion to the documents that they produced. Rather than being two distinct fields, rhetoric and professional communication are intertwined in their histories.