In summer of 1987, Donald Stewart began a survey of English departments, attempting to uncover changes in curriculum that had resulted from changes in discipline. Stewart reported results of his survey in a 1989 CCC article, is an English Major, and What Should It Be? Stewart acknowledged limitations of his study: he was considering only 194 colleges, and only 108 of these actually responded to his request for information beyond catalogue description. Furthermore, many of respondents indicated that their curriculum was constantly being revised. Still, survey provided an important window on English major, particularly with regard to options in creative writing and rhetoric/composition. Stewart found that only 74 of 194 colleges surveyed, or 38%, offered students chance to specialize in some aspect of writing in addition to literature. The majority of English departments surveyed by Stewart (55%) offered only literature emphases, with optional electives from other areas of English. Based on his findings, he made a call for the establishment, in all departments, of options in creative writing, linguistics (where departments of linguistics do not exist), and composition and (193). In our survey of writing concentrations or majors within English departments, we wanted to follow up on Stewart's survey to see if more undergraduates were able to specialize in composition and rhetoric.1 The initial impetus for this survey came from an e-mail discussion among writing program directors about concentrations in writing and rhetoric being offered in their departments. After several writing program directors informally announced new courses and writing concentrations, we thought a review of these changes

The results of our recent survey of the membership of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Associated Writing Programs, and the Council of Writing Program Administration indicate the relative health of undergraduate writing programs (major, concentration, or certificate programs, not service courses) in American four-year universities and colleges. During the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of undergraduate writing programs, including technical and professional writing. But responses to our survey also suggest that while undergraduate technical and professional writing programs comprise the second largest group of programs (behind creative writing) they are not increasing as rapidly as a new kind of undergraduate writing program—a broad-based program that students can complete by taking a wide range of creative writing, composition, journalism, and technical and professional writing courses. The future seems unclear for traditional undergraduate technical and professional writing programs, and faculties need to examine their options in designing or redesigning their programs.

Technical writing will become increasingly important to the nation's engineering interests in the 21st century. To meet a national agenda of competitiveness, writing program administrators must build courses and programs that are sensitive to unique institutional perceptions about writing. By means of a quantitative and qualitative methodology, the present study describes the perceptions of technical writing held by department heads at a technological university. Using a combined survey method and structured interview process, we investigate how department chairs felt about the contents, instruction, and assessment of a technical writing course. We also investigate perceptions about writing products and processes. Based on our experiences with the survey, we call for writing program administrators to study the institutional context for courses and programs in technical writing.

I recently attended a conference previously unknown to me and to most college English faculty: The Assessment Forum of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). (I was there to give a paper on measurement of writing ability and on evaluation of writing programs.) The experience of that conference ought to have been routine; after all, I have directed a variety of large-scale writing programs and I have been speaking and publishing on writing assessment for over fifteen years; I have also spent many years as chair of an English department and as a writing program administrator. But experience of hearing papers and discussions at that conference was not at all routine; it was both troubling and enlightening, as well as quite new in unexpected ways. My first reaction to sessions on writing measurement at AAHE was that I had entered a new world. The papers not only made different assumptions about writing than I, as a writing teacher, writer, and researcher, normally make, but came out of a wholly different scholarly community of discourse, one that calls itself the assessment movement. The references were entirely unfamiliar, procedures were different, and approach to subject struck me as insensitive to what writing is all about. But all of these differences seemed to center on way people spoke (and hence thought) about measurement: I was in a foreign country, language was different, and that difference changed everything. I had entered a new discourse community in a field in which I was a well-published specialist, and none of my knowledge or experience seemed to matter. And yet discourse was about measuring writing ability and evaluating writing programs, that is, about what has (however accidentally) become my specialty. I felt disoriented. When I returned home from AAHE I found a flier from Jossey-Bass, publisher of my 1985 book, Teaching and Assessing Writing. I don't expect book to appear on every flier marketing division puts out, but this little

Karen Burke LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. 173 pages. Carol P. Hartzog, Composition and the Academy: A Study of Writing Program Administration. New York: MLA, 1986. xviii + 166 pages. Walter H. Beale, A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1987. 171 pages. James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth‐Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.92 pages.

Teachers new to technical writing must understand that “Technical Writing” is not one course. Rather it is a whole variety of courses distinguished from one another primarily by differences in objectives and only secondarily by differences in subject matter. To identify needed technical writing courses and to define coherent sets of courses, teachers of technical writing and program administrators need “a mapping procedure” to help them consider alternatives systematically in terms of objectives. This paper proposes such a mapping procedure.