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Are we There Yet?

THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY comes up with predictable frequency at professional conferences and in other discussion forums— for example, listservs—in business and technical writing. Although the question is framed in different ways, it often boils down to anxiety about whether we’re “there” yet, with “there” being status as a freestanding discipline. Being a linguist by training, the first thing I checked before taking on this topic was the etymology of the word discipline. I knew that it came from the same root as disciple. What I didn’t know, until doing some detective work on Bartleby.com, was that both words descend from Latin discipulus, “pupil,” which in turn is from discere, “to learn.” Delving deeper, I learned that the Indo-European root for these words, *dek-, is also at the root of words like decent, document, doctor, doctrine, orthodox, dogma, and decorate. It’s even related to the name of a large herbivorous dinosaur from the Jurassic period, diplodocus! Given the meaning of the words involved, none of these connections (aside from the dinosaur) surprised me very much, except for the first and last ones: decent and decorate. Their connection made sense, though, when I reflected further that one meaning of decent is “deemed as fitting, acceptable, or seemly.” Likewise, decorate has to do with “making seemly, graceful, or elegant.” In other words, what we define as our discipline has to do at least partly with what we deem acceptable (in the academic sense of acceptable—worthy of publication in a journal) or elegant (in the academic sense of providing an economical, enlightening answer to a complex question). With respect to the question of disciplinarity in professional writing, I’ve been convinced for a long time that the best way for us to view ourselves is as an “interdiscipline.” For that reason, I was gratified to hear Marty Graham, the new editor of the Journal of Business Communication, use exactly this term during the plenary session at the October 2005