Professional Communication Studies, The MLA, and Civic Discourse‪.‬

PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION STUDIES, taken very broadly to mean everything from business writing through technical writing through the "New Rhetoric," could do a better job--and until recently did a better job--of teaching effective and responsible language usage to students in a way more coherent to an overall university education and to a healthy civic discourse than the interests commonly represented by the MLA have done. Whether we seek to displace MLA as the chief professional organization of language studies or not, the study of professional rhetoric ought to return to its historic center in each student's educational experience. This is not a new argument. The reclamation of rhetoric as a central enterprise in the university has been the theme of many an article over the last decades, although probably unread by the typical MLA member. We can't claim this centrality, however, until we return to our intellectual underpinnings and sell to the university a coherent picture of why we belong there--also not a new argument. This paper illustrates this claim with one of the intellectual underpinnings, genre, and then cites positive and negative historic examples from medieval England and Italy of the way professional communication studies can operate as a linchpin of a university curriculum. So perhaps a better title might be "Two Lessons from History and Ways They Played Out" or "Four Lessons and a Finale." Lessons from the Past