Abstract
As more colleges develop technical communication programs, often to boost sagging enrollments, more attention must be paid to the proper balance in such programs. Employers will want high quality in the programs from which they hire their technical writers. Engineers and other professionals may be interested in the training of those people who help them produce the manuals, proposals, and reports by which industry functions. This paper presumes that coursework must be balanced among several disciplines of learning, that theory must be balanced against practice, that course demands must be balanced against teaching innovation, and that the scholarly concerns of the academy must be balanced against the pragmatic concerns of industry.