The Business Communication Profession

9 Selling My SoulMoving from the Humanities to Business Communication

Daphne A. Jameson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003274421-9

I became involved in the business and technical communication field quite by chance. As a PhD student specializing in nineteenth-century British fiction at the University of Illinois in the mid-1970s, I planned a career in literary studies—until I met Professor Francis W. Weeks, head of the English Department’s Division of Business and Technical Writing and concurrently executive director of the American Business Communication Association (later renamed the Association for Business Communication). The association had been founded in 1936 by Illinois faculty and was headquartered there. In the 1970s the English Department had ...