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.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.