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Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Pare's enduring spatial metaphor likely describes how many of us think about the relationship between writing in academia and writing in workplaces. Famously describing these two systems of writing as "worlds apart," the authors unsettled a perspective on university writing as an initial step on a linear developmental trajectory toward workplace writing. The authors used fieldwork to show how writing is relentlessly context-dependent in its production and eventual circulation and reception (or "situated" to use vocabulary from this volume's introduction). They teased out how attitudes, meanings, and functions of writing take shape among intersecting social and material elements, such as a writer's immediate surroundings and a text's media landscape and the range of social actors that influence a text's production and use. Interns and new employees often feel stuck in the middle of these worlds left to find ways to transition between what might as well be different planets.
Following the theme of this special issue, traditional approaches to disciplinarity similarly might position composition studies and technical communication as operating in separate spheres with respect to writing practice: Each brings rich histories and traditions that "effectively function in their respective systems without necessarily bridging their two worlds" (Dias et al. 223). However, recent university graduates who begin new writing positions have much to teach us about how composition, writing in the disciplines, and technical and professional communication studies can productively meet to teach skills and practices that lead to more successful learning on the job. By naming and separating these three areas of inquiry and pedagogy for purposes of our conversation, we do not intend to erase their connections or to enforce artificial boundaries or distinctions among them, effectively "non-ing" to use David Russell's term. Our goal, instead, is to gesture to an understudied (and often undersupported) location or population that can act as a bridge not unlike other sites of connection Russell describes when "zooming in on the boundaries" among subfields (478). Early career employees, we observe, are in a transitional period between academic and professional worlds that invites the opportunity for new thinking at the intersections of the multiple knowledges across composition studies and technical and professional writing that inform how we understand and practice...