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This is a special issue on transdisciplinary connections between composition studies (CS) and technical and professional communication (TPC). I am not sure that either CS or TPC are disciplines, let alone distinct disciplines. They clearly have a great deal in common, perhaps because they are fields in relation to a discipline that we have yet to form and name. Given the connections, my essay focuses on the idea of the undergraduate major as a potential boundary object that often creates distinctions. Ultimately, what we do matters deeply-however we finally draw boundaries around it and whatever we end up calling it. Our enterprise is engaged in the making of worlds. We carry one of humanity's most powerful and necessary arts into the future, and we should do so with intentionality and care. We should probably do that together.
There Are No Disciplines Here
I am not sure that either CS or TPC are disciplines, let alone distinct disciplines. It also isn't clear that they work in isolation from each other. In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case. The relationships between these fields are longstanding, deep, and come in the form of people, pedagogy, research practices, and any number of commitments (see David Russell in this issue). Yet, the fact that this special issue exists suggests that we may be having a "disciplinary moment" (see Malenczyk et al.), and so I'll start there.
Let me tell a story about my own work because I think it is illustrative of the things common to TPC and CS. When working toward my PhD, I spent most of my time thinking about composition and literacy (and technology). I became interested in the question, "How does literacy work in the world?" As I began to explore that question, it became clear that literacy "in the world" looks an awful lot like practices that we might call "technical and professional writing" (significantly, "technical and professional" writing does some of the work that at another time we might have called public or civic rhetoric). Late in my PhD program, I began to work in the field of technical and professional writing because that seemed to provide a way to understand how people used writing to make things happen in the...