Professional communication, encompasses written, oral, visual and digital communication within a workplace context. This discipline blends together pedagogical principles of rhetoric, technology, software, and learning theory to improve and deliver communication in a variety of settings ranging from technical writing to usability and digital media design to more effectively communicate in the business world. It is a new discipline that focuses on the study of information and the ways it is created, managed, distributed, and consumed. Since communications is a rapidly changing area, technological progress seems to often outpace the number of available expert practitioners. This creates a demand for skilled communicators. Communication skills are critical to a business because all businesses, to varying degrees, involve the following: writing, reading, editing, speaking, listening, software applications, computer graphics, and Internet research. Job candidates with professional communication backgrounds are more likely to bring to the organization sophisticated perspectives on society, culture, science, and technology. The field is closely related to that of technical communication, though professional communication encompasses a wider variety of skills. Professional communication theory Professional communication draws on theories from fields as different as rhetoric and science, psychology and philosophy, sociology and linguistics. Much of professional communication theory is a practical blend of traditional communication theory, technical writing, rhetorical theory, adult learning theory, and ethics. Carolyn Miller in What's Practical about Technical Writing? refers to professional communication as not simply workplace activity and to writing that concerns "human conduct in those activities that maintain the life of a community." As Nancy Roundy Blyler discusses in her article Research as Ideology in Professional Communication researchers seek to expand professional communication theory to include concerns with praxis and social responsibility. Regarding this social aspect, in "Postmodern Practice: Perspectives and Prospects," Richard C. Freed defines professional communication as A. discourse directed to a group, or to an individual operating as a member of the group, with the intent of affecting the group's function, and/or B. discourse directed from a group, or from an individual operating as a member of the group, with the intent of affecting the group's function, where group means an entity intentionally organized and/or run by its members to perform a certain function....Primarily excluded from this definition of group would be families (who would qualify only if, for example, their group affiliation were a family business), school classes (which would qualify only if, for example, they had organized themselves to