Since the 1970s, much major work in composition has been driven by moral purpose… Yet, curiously, our moral gaze has almost completely overlooked one crucial area of our personal and disciplinary responsibility, namely our ethical obligations to the persons whose words and actions we transform into the “data” of our research.

A growing number of colleges and universities are preparing programs to educate students for careers as technical and scientific communicators. The educators who design these new programs have three major resources to help them determine what their program should look like: descriptions of existing programs; published articles that discuss program design in a general way; and advice from practicing professionals. These resources do not provide a satisfactory basis for designing programs. A more satisfactory resource is a model of what the profession does. This model consists of (1) a definition of the common professional aim of all practicing technical and scientific communicators, (2) an abstract, and idealized, description of the general activities that practicing communicators perform as they pursue that aim, and (3) a catalog of the major features of the contexts within which these communicators pursue their common aim. The model is presented and its application to program design is illustrated.

Occasionally, it's nice to be wrong. I opened this book reluctantly, fearing that it might be one of those collections by which a profession self-consciously asserts its coming of age and academic legitimacy. What I found instead was one of the best (i.e., stimulating) collections of essays about technical and scientific communication to appear so far.

Technical communication is not one discipline but three, each addressing its own distinctive set of problems and applying its own particular criteria when deciding which of the alternative solutions it has generated addresses its problems most effectively. Of the three, only the professional discipline is conducting its research satisfactorily; the teaching and theoretical disciplines are not. All three could improve their research activities by posing themselves a wider variety of significant problems, generating a richer array of alternative solutions, and conducting more carefully the activities that enable them to select the alternatives most worthy of continued attention and use.

In response to a mail survey of the career opportunities they offer teachers of technical writing, twenty-four programs that prepare students for careers as technical writers and editors indicated that their technical writing faculty enjoy about the same teaching loads, salaries, and chances for promotion and tenure as do equally qualified and experienced teachers of literature at their schools. The programs also indicated that they have a growing number of openings on their faculties for teachers of technical writing. Finally, the programs ranked and rated seventeen qualifications that might be offered by applicants for those positions; the most significant conclusion drawn from the rankings and ratings is that the programs look more favorably upon experience — both in teaching and in working as a technical writer or editor — than they do upon formal study of technical writing or the teaching of it.