ABSTRACT
The challenge facing teachers of technical and scientific writing in the eighties is to develop an interdisciplinary problemsolving rhetorical theory to improve the teaching of technical, scientific, and professional writing while also guiding research in communication theory. The product approach is characterized, in freshman composition, by concern for Standard Edited English, and, in technical writing, by an additional adherence to prescribed organizational patterns. The process approach to teaching writing is characterized by expanding the scope of composition theory to include rhetorical invention, which introduces procedures for discovering the substance of discourse. Teachers of scientific and technical writing recognize that reliance on structural models stems from their usefulness as pedagogical tools for identifying the parts of a discourse and indicating how to sequence information. Writing teachers who are unaware of the analogical nature of product and process models might be tempted to teach them prescriptively, but both structural and inventional models should serve as heuristics, rather than algorithms.
