Article
Language, Discourse, and Professional Communication: An English Studies Approach to Contemporary Contexts
Professional communication has traditionally been studied through the applied, skills-oriented lens of business communication pedagogy, yet the linguistic and rhetorical structures underlying workplace writing, speech, and digital interaction are equally amenable to the theoretical tools English studies has developed for literary and everyday discourse analysis: genre theory, register theory, and rhetorical-situation analysis. This paper reviews how an English studies approach, drawing on genre theory, systemic functional linguistics, and workplace discourse analysis, illuminates the language practices of contemporary professional environments, from traditional memos and reports through email, instant messaging, and LinkedIn profiles. The review synthesizes foundational genre theory, the rhetorical genre studies tradition, corpus-based business discourse research, and the growing literature on digitally mediated workplace communication, with particular attention to how genre conventions stabilize, hybridize, and fracture as communication migrates from paper-based to platform-based channels. The paper also considers the plain language movement as a case study in applied English studies intervention into professional genres historically resistant to reader-centered revision. A glossary table defines the field's core theoretical terms, a second table contrasts the formal features of traditional and digitally mediated professional genres, and a third maps English-studies theory onto concrete pedagogical applications for professional and technical communication instruction. The paper concludes that genre, rather than medium or channel, remains the most stable analytical unit for understanding professional communication as it continues to migrate across new technological platforms, and identifies hybrid-genre and multimodal professional literacy as the central future research prospect.