Lee Odell is professor of composition in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition to teaching rhetoric and writing, writing for classroom and career, research in composition, and related courses, he has also directed the department's off-campus MS program in Technical Communication and a summer workshop, the Technical Writers' Institute. He is editor, with Charles Cooper, of Evaluating Writing, and with D. Goswami, of Writing in Non-Academic Settings. The author of over fifty published articles and book chapters, Odell has served as a consultant to numerous colleges, universities, and other organizations over the past thirty years. In 1986, he was the chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and in 1980 he received the NCTE's Braddock award for the article "Teachers of Composition and Needed Research in Discourse Theory."