Surma, A. (2005). Public and professional writing: Ethics, imagination and rhetoric.  Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Reviewed by: Steve Mackey

The strength of this book is its original perspective on how all the different sorts of ‘ordinary’ writing that we produce and encounter in everyday life have consequences for the ethics of our world. How we write and how we are encouraged to read by the way others write limits, opens, distorts, or encourages the flowering, or the shutting down, of our imaginations in particular ways.

For Senior Lecturer in English and Professional Writing, Anne Surma, writing, any writing, is an engine that may build, pervert, provoke and otherwise fashion thinking – behind the scenes of the conscious mind as it were – in all sorts of positive or worrying ways. This quality of writing to shape, or at least tend to shape, thinking is what is meant by the title’s term ‘rhetoric’. But, as Surma convincingly argues, it is not just the high or low art of the novel or pulp fiction that seeds our thoughts rhetorically. Rather, all writing does this.

For instance the mundane job specification of a building engineer is laced with the complex subject positions of competitive capitalism when she tells a client where safety exits should be located. The report of a geothermal engineer has to negotiate a careful path through what might be ethical and legal to allow a client to imagine a prospective lucrative project that may have considerable down-sides. A government report on the stolen generation may be written in a way that tries to steer the imagination to think: “stolen generation is a false ideological term invented by black armband activists who want a current generation to pay for something they had nothing to do with”.

A prime ministerial or presidential web site may be constructed pictorially and semantically to convey the rhetoric of calm command and order – the nation in safe hands. E-democracy online facilities may have the same authoritative-authoritarian flavour, or they may develop a practical imagination about how society and politics could be more open and egalitarian.

At the end of the spectrum furthest away from planned and formal composition there is the sometimes direly regretted flick of an office email. The email may go to one or it may go to a thousand uninterested, or eager, or even litigious readers, spawning furore, laughter, ennui, or maybe productive, sublime or coarse thoughts as the mis-recognitions, the primnesses, or the good natured naïveté play among others' imaginations.

Surma is to be congratulated for drawing from both ancient and extremely topical theoretical schema of rhetoric to shed fresh light on the potent effects of writing on our lives. She is concerned with the massive output of commercial and organisational writing by governments, corporations and by simply you and me, which pervades our world and our minds. An important connection is made between semiotics and rhetoric (p. 10) which is implied throughout the rest of the book in the following manner: If understandings are formed in Peircean terms by the ways notions, or the signs that represent them, are juxtaposed, then how the world appears and the ethics that are consequently deemed appropriate are steered by how this juxtaposing is controlled.

This book is a good attempt at suggesting how these deliberate discourse management or ‘rhetorical’ practices of public and professional writing steer this semiotics and thus how we end up with the imaginations and the consequent ethics we experience. The book ranges across business letters, government reports and web sites, e-democracy initiatives, and personal email. It also has a chapter on public relations, focussing on the industry’s involvement with corporate social responsibility. All this is reviewed from the perspective of rhetorical practice informed by semiotic theory. The book is not for beginners but is essential reading for many advanced scholars in a wide range of communication fields.

About the reviewer: Steve Mackey has taught public relations at Deakin University, Australia since 1990. Before that he was a journalist and regional government press officer in London. His research interest is public relations theory. His PhD thesis was entitled ‘Public relations and contemporary theory’.

Purchase information: This book is available from all good booksellers, or can be purchased direct from Palgrave Macmillan at:  https://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalogue.aspx?is=1403915822

Back to: PRism Volume 5 Contents Page

Back to: PRism home page

To read other writing by Steve Mackey, visit PRism 1(1) and PRism 4(1).
To read other writing by Anne Surma, visit PRism 4(1).