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Rick, Thanks for responding to my request. (And thanks as well to the other people that have too.) I want to answer your question about the seminar I'll be teaching. > Or is the question, how is professional writing different from academic > writing, literary writing, political writing, etc.? Or, to put it another > way, what is the purpose of your question? what do you expect to accomplish > in the seminar by posing this question? What I *don't* want to do is elicit or work towards one "right" definition of PW. Indeed, perhaps I shouldn't be using the word "define" at all. What I have in mind is more of a collaborative project (in the spirit of St. Thomas's Acquinas approach) to map out some of the various meanings that people in the field appear to ascribe to the term. Why would I want to do this? In the first instance, it's so that when we use the term PW ourselves in the seminar or come across it in readings, we'll have some sense of the range of possible meanings being invoked by the speaker or writer (and, perhaps, from the context be able to get a little more closely aligned with the speaker/writer's intention). In the longer term, I want the students to be able to handle themselves in job interviews for positions involving PW and, even now at this point in their careers, to know how to place and position their work at conferences or in publications. By the way, I think it would be interesting to do some similar mapping of frequently used terms such as "rhetoric" (e.g., is it the art of persuasion or, more broadly, the activity of accomplishing something through language and/or other symbol-based representations?), "discourse," and "empirical." Take care, Graham