Will Professional Communication be the Death of Business Communication‪?‬

IN THE LAST 15 YEARS, business and technical communication, once separate courses and areas of study in US universities, have increasingly, though incompletely, merged into a field called "professional communication." The reasons for this merger are largely political but are facilitated by a common base in theory and research. I believe that business communication is in danger of being buried by professional communication and needs to preserve its own identity as a field. In this paper, I will first review the growth of business and technical communication courses as college courses in US universities, then document the move to "professional" communication in English departments and explain why technical communication dominates "professional" communication. Finally, I argue that faculty who teach business communication in business schools should care about terminological practices in English departments and show why "business" communication needs to retain an identity separate from "professional" communication.