Miller's Treating Professional Writing as Social Praxis, A Brief Note

While other scholars have used many theories to talk about professional writing and to think about text and context, in this article, Thomas Miller draws on classical rhetoric because it justifies a social and ethics of technical and professional writing. Technical writing, after all, has a strong emphasis on purpose, practicality, and the fulfillment of goals. For civic humanists like Aristotle and Isocrates, the emphasis was on making a morally good person who demonstrated phronesis, or practical wisdom, the capacity to say the right thing at the right time, solving problems when perfect knowledge wasn’t possible. Miller writes, “For Aristotle (and for civic humanists generally), practical wisdom is based on a broad-based understanding of the shared experiences and traditions of the community that enables us to discover what is best in a particular situation” (57-58).

So, there should be no division between theory and practice. Professionals run in to problems when they know more than they can put into practice. They have to learn common sense and how to apply principles in order to be successful. Knowledge is not an object, but is socially constructed.

Civic humanism manages the so-called divide between theory and practice. We can’t pretend that rhetoric is just theory whereas composition is the techne, the practice of that theory. Technical writing is social action. Writing is not amoral, and neither science nor writing is free from values (63). Miller sounds a lot like James Berlin's 1988 argument in several parts of this article. Humans can’t be reduced to information. We’re much more than that.

An uncritical but fragmented knowledge can be dangerous to humanism (69). Separating context and text can be, too. We should teach technical and professional writing as social praxis so that it becomes more than just a skills class--so that it becomes practical in the most important sense of that word.

Miller, Thomas P. 1991. "Treating Professional Writing as Social Praxis" JAC. Vol. 11, 1: pp. 57-72.