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Most discussions of disciplinarity start by claiming an emerging group as constituting a discipline or a profession and authorizing that group by locating appropriate research foci, programs for graduate education and undergraduate certification, professional societies, and central professional meetings. Our discussion examines the field of professional writing, focusing not so much on defining it as a discipline as on working out its curricular geography, an activity that will affect its status in both academy and industry. To that end, we explore the status of professional writing within the department of English by (a) briefly examining the problem of defining professional writing; (b) reviewing several theoretical positions within English that have provided a status for professional writing—literature, rhetoric/composition, business and technical writing—to expose the competition for control of the term and to surface the implications of accepting these various groups on their own terms; and (c) considering the curricular status to which professional writing might aspire by sketching a geography that positions professional writing in a new space within English.

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

Since technical writing is changing from a course for the scientific elite to one with a much broader base, the need to diagnose in technical writing classes is growing too. The right diagnostic tools can allow the instructor to set class goals more effectively, structure the course more efficiently, and discover and deal better with student expectations. The diagnostic we have designed, asking students to compose a memo which discusses their projected needs as aspiring technical writers, yields useful information about the stylistic strengths and weaknesses of the students. But more important, the diagnostic provides guidelines for choosing among the flexible units of study at the instructor's disposal, and also reveals student attitudes, preconceptions, and prejudices — data which aid the instructor in laying the proper groundwork in the early phases of the course.