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The authors report on and analyze a survey they conducted of staffing in college professional and technical communication courses. In addition, they make recommendations for better treatment of contingent faculty who teach such courses.

We all have a vision of what might be. For some of us, this vision involves a strong emphasis on rhetoric and writing; for others, it en compasses a sustained commitment to literary study and analysis. Still others might argue for the merits of communications technologies and the inclu sion of new-media-based forms of reading, writing, and speaking into the curricu lum. Regardless of these emphases, most would agree that English should foster an understanding of how human beings use language aesthetically and rhetorically in ways that matter for culture, civic society, and meaningful human existence. Lacking from most discussions of college English, though, is how students learn to make the connection between this humanities-based understanding of language and the world of work, which is often unfairly harnessed to utilitarian images. It's true that many departments have sought to alleviate this gap by encouraging internships for stu dents, but there's little agreement on how these internships should be supervised and what guidance should be provided for students. At the heart of internship initia tives is the attempt to make English curricula directly relevant to workplace situa tions. Much research exists in professional and technical writing on the role of

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Dorothy Augustine's Geometries and Words: Linguistics and Philosophy: A Model of the Composing Process (College English, 43 [1981], 221-31) illustrates how radically our understanding of the composing process has changed from the linear schemes of the last generation.' However, this new understanding is not always applied to discussions of technical writing. In fact, technical writing is sometimes assumed to be a rhetorically simple process because the rhetorical context of the completed product, the document, is generally limited.2 This assumption is not borne out by practical experience. My own initiatory adventures as a technical writer have led me to the conviction that technical discourse of any seriousness is a structure necessarily created by the writer out of the elements of the writing situation. In other words, the writing situation cannot by itself determine for the writer or editor the meaning of the technical document to be produced; in a fundamental sense, technical discourse is a lamp upon rather than a mirror of the world it represents. Of course, not all technical writing is complex; the IRS form 1040A is simple, not only as product but also as process. Moreover, a given technical document

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The word refers to a way we engage in an activity. Doing something is difficult if we do it with effort and with some doubt as to the eventual outcome. Depending on the nature and degree of doubt, there are three kinds of difficulty. If we are having difficulty with something but expect from the nature of the task or the fact that others can do it that we will eventually learn to do it easily, we are having a transitory difficulty. This is the difficulty of riding a bicycle, the difficulty of getting up in front of a group, the difficulty of choosing between vanilla and chocolate ripple. Other difficulties we do not expect to overcome, though we think in principle that the task admits easy success and we can see that others have overcome the difficulties. These are continuing difficulties. I have difficulty writing, for instance, and I expect to continue to have difficulty, but I know others for whom it is not at all difficult. I think of this sort of difficulty as a failure to call on the right resources. For most of us, selfdiscipline falls into this category, or being honest on our tax forms. The last kind of difficulty inheres in the task itself, given our capacities. These no one does easily: resolving paradoxes or thinking of two things at once, confronting death or remembering dreams. These are inherent difficulties. The transitory difficulties a new teacher of technical writing faces are only too apparent. They include learning a new curriculum, discovering the needs of a new kind of student, making up assignments and grading them, learning the textbooks, gaining a feel for technical style-and, as Maxwell Smart used to say, loving it. These are difficulties we have teaching any new subject; they are not in principle different from those we would encounter if suddenly asked to teach a course on Nigerian paleoliths. Nor are they particularly difficult as these things go, for there is a profession of teaching technical writing, which we find we have inadvertently joined, and the experienced in that profession have sought to ease our difficulties. An association, a little magazine, summer programs, textbooks, and innumerable how-to articles exist which will help any reasonably thorough person construct and teach a course which will indeed help students. The fundamental principles of technical writing (figure out your audience, organize to

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WHERE DO ENGLISH TEACHERS GET THE AUTHORITY to teach writing to students from other departments? We know-and our non-English colleagues know-that the English major is basically an English and American literature major and that graduate programs in English are more of the same, only intensified. How then are we equipped to teach students whose present and future writing tasks are very far from the literature we study? At times in my career as an English teacher I've felt myself beset by people from other departments who understandably want an answer to that question. Now that I teach technical writing rather than Freshman English in my department's composition program, I feel myself more frequently under siege. Maybe Freshman English, the question goes, but technical writing? How dare I presume to teach chemical engineers, or astrophysicists, or biochemists how to write? Technical writing taught by English teachers is the acid test of our authority; in spirit as well as subject it seems to be at the farthest remove from nearly everyone's idea of literature. Three members of the Department of Humanities, College of Engineering, at the University of Michigan have launched an especially pointed attack on English departments' teaching technical writing. J. C. Mathes, Dwight W. Stevenson, and Peter Klaver list three reasons for their doubts about letting someone from the English department teach technical writing. The first and second reasons appear to me indistinguishable, but come down to these two passages:

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