Professional Writing discusses the nature of professional communication and provides the theoretical foundations and practical knowledge of professional communication research. Do business communication teachers need a business background? Is business communication data a necessity for business communication classes? This book tries to address these two questions. It attempts to analyze what the potential communication issues or problems are in a variety of professional communication encounters that the individual needs to deal with for communication success. Professional communication data is analyzed with the four main sources of communicative competencies: grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence in order to explicate how they are realized in professional communication practices. Overall, this discursive approach illustrates discourse analysis as an important perspective of professional communication research.