ABSTRACT
Rhetoric has always aimed at teaching professional discourse—particularly the discourse of the assembly, the court, and later the pulpit—and so it is possible to see technical communication as a direct descendant of rhetoric, even more in tune with its aims than is composition. If we are serious about defining technical communication as a practice, then we must expand its scope to include political discourse. In short, expanding the scope of technical communication to include political discourse is to fight against the alienation produced by our economic and technological systems. Defining technical communication as a practice has major significance for technical communication teachers. Taking this distinction into account, we can define social action as action free from the economic constraints of the workplace: it is the political-ethical act of someone functioning in the citizen’s role rather than in the worker’s role.
