Finding a Home for Technical Communication in the Academy    

The placement of technical communication within an academic curriculum presents an interesting challenge for university administrators and faculty. Technical communication is a young discipline that borrows content from several older, more established disciplines. As a younger discipline, technical communication must combine its borrowed ingredients from other areas into a new and complete offering that can attract research funding for professionals in the academy and deliver job opportunities for its students preparing to enter industry. The credibility of technical communication as a new discipline is dependent on its ability to develop a cohesive body of basic and applied research, its ability to manage technological change, and its ability to promote its identity among an army of competing disciplines.

Carver, Michael. ACM SIGDOC (1998). Academic>Education>Assessment

Shaping the Future of Technical Communication: Improving the Marriage Between Academia and Industry  

The future of technical communication lies in our ability to collaboratively define who we are, what we do, what we should research, and how that research should be used to develop the field. Since technical communication remains a relatively new subject area, we must carefully compete with older, well-established fields for precious resources. The continued development of our field requires a progressively dynamic research agenda developed from a productive and ongoing dialogue between academia and industry. Without such introspective collaboration, our struggle for legitimacy summons an exhibition of rhetorical blundering, which for an emerging field like technical communication, could be fatal.

Carver, Michael. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Research>TC