REPORT ASSIGNMENTS AND collaborative assignments can both be fraught with risk. Report projects, if not well planned, can be too simple (which causes lack of motivation) or too complex (which causes frustration) and/or can leave students wondering what they are supposed to have learned-all while creating a major grading burden for the instructor. Poorly planned group projects can cause similar difficulties, with the added danger of creating interpersonal stress in the student groups.Yet for many reasons, the report assignment is the perfect choice for the collaborative project. Because of its extra length and complexity, the report enables several students to contribute meaningful research, writing, and document design decisions to one product or a related set of products. If the project goes well, each student will learn important lessons both about report writing and about teamwork.To maximize the likelihood that the project will go well, the instructor must think through a wide range of variables and decide, based upon his or her learning objectives, what the features of the project will be. To assist with this process, we have generated a

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In this article, we trace the journey our professional writing program took from marginal area to well-supported specialty in an English department-a journey we made without sacrificing our commitment to prepare students for professional-level employment. In so doing, we explore the grounds of intellectual compatibility between our field and English studies and describe the conditions most conducive to professional writing's finding a respected place in English departments.

Little has been written about the organizational role of technical communica tors. Using a systems approach to organizational theory, we argue that techni cal communicators engage in tasks that permit them to function as "boundary spanners. "As boundary spanners, technical communicators both disseminate and make sense of information required for coordination between organiza tional groups and for effective responses to the environment. We discuss the implications of this position for managing and educating technical communi cators.

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