It is academically advantageous to mix students from different departments and different areas of concentration in upper level college writing courses. For such programs to be successful, faculty members in all the disciplines must commit their time and efforts to them. Isolating students in disciplines is undesirable, since it will not prepare them to explain their work to the public at large, an important goal of technical writing. Instead, they will be writing for people in their own field who already know the information they are writing about. Writing for people in other disciplines has the benefit of forcing students to examine their own understandings of concepts and terminology in their fields as they try to communicate about them to uninformed readers. Other advantages of mixing disciplines are that students learn to see the world from different perspectives and that teachers can learn from mixing with those in other disciplines. (GW)