Learning the rhetoric of professional practice

Rhetoric is the study of persuasive speaking and writing. As such, it is an integral aspect of all professional practice. Professional practice frequently requires practitioners to present verbal and written reports to both clients and colleagues. Such reports need to be not only truthful but persuasive. The rhetoric of practice is rarely explicitly taught to students and tends to be part of the 'hidden curriculum' even though it is of such importance.This paper looks at the ways in which medical students and health practitioners both learn and use rhetoric in daily practice. It is further argued that professional reasoning and decision making, even when working alone, is largely a matter of persuading oneself to pursue one course of action rather than another. The significance of this research is that if the rhetoric of practice was more explicitly taught to students then the process of professional socialisation could be considerably enhanced.