This article traces the history of Mary Schuster's career in technical writing and communication from 1968 when she took a position in the Publications Department at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to her work at "Technical Communication Quarterly" ("TCQ") in 2003 and forward. She discusses the trends she witnessed in the profession during this time including creative tension and a broadening of scholarly perspectives grounded in rhetorical theory and how she too joined this trend to use rhetorical lenses to study other professions. She goes on to describe a research project she took on with author Amy Koerber and another trend that emerged that came with interest in collaboration--collaboration in industry and collaboration among scholars. The myth of the individual writing, working in isolation and generating ideas strictly from sole creative thinking, was replaced by the recognition of the social construction of knowledge. Through their project, Schuster and Koerber published a book on "Victim Advocacy in the Classroom" in 2011 that examined through rhetorical perspectives how victim advocates in domestic violence cases and how guardians ad litem in child protection cases find a voice in the courtroom. Through this project, Schuster and Koerber became advocates--even activists--through scholarship. In their current project, they are looking at the systemic changes initiated by public discourse in relationship with the safety and well being of victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Just as they did with their first project, they again have captured the concerns and values of the stakeholders through interviews, observations, and textual analysis. Schuster believes that this new project reflects to some extent the current profile of the technical writing and communication field, a field that now welcomes a range of scholarly perspectives and has grown from an almost exclusive focus on pedagogy to those "rhetoric of" studies.