This article considers connections between the work of composition and rhetoric and the growing field of faculty development. It defines faculty development, explores reasons composition and rhetoric scholars might be drawn to and successful in faculty development positions, and examines existing and potential intellectual connections between these two fields of inquiry.

Abstract This article argues that technical communicators are uniquely poised to function as public intellectuals. To demonstrate this point, the author offers the example of her work on a major AIDS prevention program report. Situating this work within the history of technical communication, the current discussion of rhetorics of risk, and the writing classroom, the author argues that technical writers don't have simply the opportunity to engage in textual activism; in many cases they have no alternative.

Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.