What discourse analysis reveals about professional communication and professional power.
There is a widely held assumption about professional communication, that it is, at its best, transparent: a medium through which facts, assessments, and recommendations pass from professional to audience without distortion. Discourse analysis, the systematic study of language in use, challenges this assumption at its foundations. Language is not a neutral carrier. It is an active participant in the construction of professional reality.
The work that labels do
Consider the language commonly used to describe people in professional case records. A ‘challenging client.’ A ‘non-compliant patient.’ A ‘difficult family.’ A ‘persistent offender.’ Each of these terms does work that goes well beyond description. It categorises the person within a framework that implies a history, a trajectory, and an appropriate professional response. As Norman Fairclough argued in his foundational work on critical discourse analysis, language does not simply reflect social relations, it constructs them.
Eileen Munro’s analysis of child protection cases, referenced in her 2011 review, found that the language of early assessments shaped not only how subsequent information was interpreted but what subsequent information was sought. The label was doing cognitive work that practitioners were largely unaware of.
Genre, power, and what can be said
Professional communication does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place within specific genres, the case note, the referral letter, the expert witness report, the risk assessment, the discharge summary, each of which has characteristic structures, conventions, and constraints that shape what can be said and how. Genre is not merely a formal property of text. It is a social institution. Who is permitted to write in a particular genre, whose voice is authoritative within it, what counts as evidence and what counts as mere assertion, these are questions of power as much as questions of form.
Whose voice is heard, and whose is not
One of the most politically significant insights of discourse analysis is its attention to the voices that are included in professional texts and those that are absent. Case notes are written about people, by professionals, for other professionals. The perspective of the person at the centre of the case is typically present only as reported speech, ‘the client stated that’, filtered through the professional’s interpretive framework and subject to the conventions of the genre.
Research on co-production and service user participation in assessment has consistently found that involving people more directly in the production of the documents that describe them improves both accuracy and outcomes.
The ethics of clear professional writing
Clear professional writing is not merely a stylistic preference. It is an ethical obligation. A care plan that is unintelligible to the person it is about is not simply a poor document, it is a document that excludes the person from meaningful participation in decisions about their life. Research by the NHS has consistently found that a significant proportion of the adult population has limited health literacy, difficulty reading and understanding health information. Written communications that assume a reading level beyond the majority of their intended recipients are not being clear and then failing to be understood. They are failing their communicative purpose from the point of production.
The Halvarden approach to professional communication, grounded in discourse analysis and argumentation theory, treats clarity not as the simplification of complex content but as the disciplined alignment of language with communicative purpose. Writing that is clear is writing that has been designed for its reader, not its writer. That design is a professional skill, and like all professional skills, it can be taught, practised, and improved.
Making the invisible visible
The most valuable contribution of discourse analysis to professional practice is not a set of techniques. It is a habit of attention, the practice of noticing the work that language is doing in professional texts and conversations, and asking whether that work serves professional purposes or undermines them.
This means noticing when a label has arrived before the evidence has been gathered. Noticing when the passive voice has been used to obscure who made a decision and why. Noticing when ‘the family presented as chaotic’ has replaced ‘the family were in a difficult situation that included X, Y, and Z.’ Noticing when the voice of the person at the centre of a process has been reduced to a subordinate clause in a paragraph about what professionals have decided.
Further reading
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Munro, E. (2011). The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report. Department for Education.
Plain English Campaign. Resources and guidance on clear professional writing.