1.2 Technical and Professional Communication

Communication occurring in the workplace, through verbal and non-verbal messaging or writing, via in-person or through mediated channels, are all considered to be professional communication. Technical and business communication are often thought to be part of professional communication (IEEE Professional Communication Society, 2025). IEEE, considered to be the world’s largest technical professional organization (IEEE.org, 2025), established its Professional Communication Society (PRO COMM) in recognition of the importance of communicating effectively in the workplace.  IEEE Professional Communication Society’s mission  is  “understanding and promoting effective communication in engineering, scientific, and other technical environments.”

Technical and professional discourses involve communicating complex information to a specific audience who will use that information to accomplish some goal or task in a manner that is accurate, useful, and clear. Both technical and professional communication can be described as:

• Purposeful (has a specific intent)
• Goal oriented (in terms of both hard goals like project deadlines and soft goals like rapport-building and maintaining)
• Aimed at audiences of stakeholders with agency and/or relevant credentials
• Shaped by the discursive conventions of a professional community.

When you write an email to your professor or supervisor, develop a presentation or report, design a sales flyer, or create a webpage, you are engaging in technical and professional communication. Along those lines, “technical” and “professional” are used interchangeably throughout this textbook when referring to writers and/or writing produced by them. In this textbook, the word “document” refers to any of the many forms of technical writing, whether it is a web page, an instruction manual, a lab report, or a proposal.

This section is adapted from the following sources:

“What is Technical and Professional Communication?” in Howdy or Hello? Technical and Professional Communication Copyright © 2022 by Matt McKinney, Kalani Pattison, Sarah LeMire, Kathy Anders, and Nicole Hagstrom-Schmidt, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.