The issues and problems confronted by a professor of literature when asked to teach a technical writing course for engineers are related in this paper. The first section of the paper explains how the professor was "recycled" from a teacher of literature to a professor of technical writing at his college. The second section describes some of the considerations involved in establishing and teaching the course, among them what text to use, what material to cover, how the students and engineering faculty would respond to the course, how to staff multiple sections of the course, and how to get students to see what they could write about after they had covered the basic techniques. The third section describes the "retraining" undertaken by the professor, which involved reading books on the subject, attending conferences, joining professional societies and reading professional journals, working as an editor for engineering professors, and auditing engineering courses. (FL)