The story of digital publishing in Writing Studies is one of innovation, collaboration, and do-it-yourself spirit. The field's digital publication venues emerged alongside the birth of the World Wide Web, and scholars used those venues to experiment with the possibilities of publishing in digital spaces. Visionary editors built journals with just a university server and a call for papers, and that creative spirit expanded the form and possibilities of scholarly communication. This article extends that work through the concept of “reader-choice publishing,” an approach that privileges reader needs and preferences by distributing scholarly texts in multiple open formats: HTML, PDF, and EPUB. Through a reader-choice approach, writers and publishers ask, “How will the reader use this text?” “What affordances do they need?” “What tradeoffs will they accept, and how might a single text be offered in multiple ways to offset those tradeoffs as the reader's needs and contexts change?” This article situates the reader-choice approach alongside a history of digital publishing in the field, acknowledging the past while pointing to a more usable future.

• Year 7 students can learn to code engaging animated narratives with basic Scratch. • English teachers can learn to sufficient coding to support students coding stories. • Student animated narratives of 2 – 3 min can meet English curricula requirements. • Student multimodality use can be evaluated using a criterion-based framework. • Student coding proficiency can be extended through coding animated narratives. Coding animated stories in the English classroom has been advocated from over a decade ago as an integrated curriculum context for early teaching of computer programming while simultaneously developing students’ multimodal narrative authoring. However, related research has not adequately addressed English curriculum requirements for narrative creation. This article describes the development of a framework for analysing coded animated stories from the perspective of English curriculum expectations. Analysis of 23 stories showed substantial variation in the emphasis given to different multimodal resources among those stories with the most extensive use of such resources. Stories with limited use of these resources excluded those expressing characters’ emotions and positioning the audience to experience the story from a variety of points of view. Stories with extensive multimodal expression were at the upper, but not necessarily highest, coding proficiency levels, while some with high coding proficiency showed limited use of multimodal resources. Implications are drawn for coding as an engaging creative tool in English classrooms.

• Students reported better understanding of writing with screencast assignments. • Students reported technology gains from screencast and screen recording assignments. • Students reported screencast and screen recording assignments were not complicated. • Blending spontaneous speech with the writing process helped students. • Students may feel self conscious when recording their screens and voices. Inexperienced writers often resist meaningful revision, which underscores the need for pedagogical approaches that foster deeper engagement. This study explores the use of student-led screen recordings and screencasts as pedagogical tools to promote students’ ownership and confidence in their writing processes. Our study surveyed 76 student writers in First-Year Writing classrooms to investigate this approach. The findings suggest that these assignments are easy to use, focus writers’ attention on the writing process, and leverage learning opportunities afforded by the transmodal blends of writing, video, and speech. Specifically, students reported more benefits from screencast assignments that allowed them to blend spontaneous speech into the writing process. Additionally, students reported that their technology skills improved after completing either the screencast or screen recording assignment. One downside was that students tended to feel self-conscious when recording their screens and voices. Overall, these student-led assignments are worth exploring in composition classrooms as they can lead to a deeper, more hands-on understanding of the writing process.

• Generative AI can help multilingual communicators in professional writing. • Generative AI supports email/report writing and meeting summary. • Practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. • Students’ AI use at workplace informs academic writing teaching and learning. Because multilingual students’ languaging practices are not limited to academic settings, it is important to explore their lived experiences communicating in real-world situations to shed light on how to prepare them in college classrooms in the era of generative AI. Drawing upon writing samples, artifacts and interview data, this case study brings attention to the potential and challenges a multilingual international student face in implementing generative AI-assisted written communication during her 5-month internship in the workplace. The findings indicate that generative AI tools, especially ChatGPT, have the potential to help multilingual communicators meet their written linguistic demands in professional contexts, especially in email writing, report drafting and meeting summary. Generative AI-assisted writing tools could assist multilingual students with idea expression and boost their confidence and agency in communication. Yet, despite its many advantages, practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. This study contributes to the scarce yet budding literature exploring multilingual international students’ AI engagement in professional settings and offers concrete pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

In place of (or as a complement to) “user experience research,” we propose “reader experience research” as a technique for tracing how contemporary readers make meaning through a host of social-semiotic modes. Significantly, such modes are always already conditioned by cognitive, social, economic, and technological factors. To illustrate how reader experience research can account for such factors, we describe the emergence of our institution’s Reader Experience Lab. We illustrate through three experiences how the lab (and reader experience research, in general) offers opportunities for gaining insight into how contemporary readers make meaning in and/or despite what Dan Keller terms a “culture of acceleration.”

People working at the intersection of composition and user experience often serve as the connective material that binds content to use. In merging fundamental skills of both in multimodal UX, practitioners position themselves as essential mediators connecting technical information, storytelling, and technologies that carry impactful messages across disciplines, audiences, and contexts. Building on previous work that advocates for the power of narrative in AR/VR storytelling, we demonstrate how combining the composing strategy of narrative layering with user testing can guide the creation of inclusive, community-centered VR experiences. To illustrate the power of this capacity, we ground our analysis in the design of a Virtual Reality experience about advanced water purification, outlining a method for how narrative layering and UX testing can be woven together to address a variety of perspectives through interdisciplinary, layered storytelling. In doing so, we argue that multimodal UX is most powerful when it blends the needs of a range of audiences to build stories that communicate complex information in an inclusive and engaging way.

• Postgraduates engaged behaviorally, affectively, and cognitively with GenAI feedback. • Postgraduates dealt with ChatGPT primarily as a tool for refining their proposals, not for generating content. • Postgraduates demonstrated agency by actively questioning, annotating, and negotiating feedback. • Postgraduates engaged in diverse affective responses, ranging from appreciation to frustration. As Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT are becoming increasingly integrated into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing context, learners’ engagement with AI-generated feedback remains insufficiently examined. This case study investigated how four Chinese EFL postgraduates joining a course in a Malaysian university engaged with ChatGPT feedback while revising their academic research proposals. The study triangulated screen recordings, pre- and post-revision drafts, and stimulated recall interviews. Participants displayed a range of behavioural strategies, including accepting, questioning, rejecting suggestions, annotating visually, and seeking external validation. Affective responses ranged from appreciation and curiosity to doubt and frustration, particularly when feedback appeared conflicting or imprecise. Cognitively, learners applied various strategies such as evaluating, comparing, negotiating feedback, and regulating its use. Yet, they showed differing levels of engagement, shaped by individual perceptions and writing intentions. Importantly, participants regarded ChatGPT as a tool for linguistic refinement rather than content generation. Overall, the findings revealed that learners did not passively receive feedback but interacted with it in agentive and critical ways. The study highlights the interplay among these three dimensions of engagement and the importance of individual differences when evaluating the pedagogical potential of GenAI-generated feedback in academic writing.

User experience (UX) as both a vocation and a skillset is currently in the center of a wicked knot: emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) are (for the moment) widely accessible in unprecedented ways and are already heavily integrated into modern workplace practices and educational spaces. Further, workplace demands have led to a change in perception of the function and value of UX, and the field is facing new obstacles to hiring and research funding. Our article argues that a resituation of UX is needed: we-as instructors and administrators-need to focus on UX as an act of slow, embodied, and multimodal UX composition. To do this work, we offer the strategy of détournement as central to UX curriculum and preparing students for design work in a variety of rhetorical situations, expressed through our example assignments for instructors to implement within the college classroom.

Content personalization or tailoring content as per the needs of users has been a focus of technical communicators’ work since a very long time. Recently, algorithms have helped trace users’ characteristics such as devices they use, platforms they work on, local language spoken, etc. to personalize content through strategies like responsive content, automatic translation and so on. AI tools have extended algorithmic capabilities for personalization, but at the same time increased the randomness of personalized content. That is, algorithms produce different results for the same user at different times or different results for different users at the same time with the same prompt thus shifting the agency of both rhetors (or content creators) and the audience (or content users). While conventional technical communication pedagogy has focused on writing for users, and more recently on writing for algorithms which serve the users, today it is crucial to understand how technologies like AI impact knowledge consumption processes from a user experience perspective? And how can we teach content personalization and adaptive techniques in the increasingly digital spaces of audience interactions? These questions motivated our research. To follow the roles of algorithms and technical communicators closely, we analyzed three different case studies where algorithms are responsible for a high level of personalization beyond the decisions made by technical communicators. Our findings suggest that we must teach students to investigate concepts such as user personas in UX for understanding audiences, several methods of decision-making for content assets, and rhetorical ecology for a holistic view of content production to dissemination.

Effective source use is a critical skill for first-year writing students because it prepares them for academic, professional, and civic engagement; however, existing research demonstrates that selecting appropriate sources and engaging them insightfully remains a significant challenge. While students struggle with the combined pressures to read, evaluate, and synthesize scholarly sources, we argue that online media including news articles, opinion pieces, and social media posts are a potent but underutilized resource for building students’ competence and confidence with source use. In this article, we present the methods that we have collaboratively developed as an instruction librarian and a first-year writing instructor to propose a new approach to teaching undergraduate research using online media. We detail strategies for teaching advanced search skills using Google and social media platforms like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), as well as a “reception study” writing assignment that requires students to develop source evaluation and synthesis skills for engaging these online sources. The success of our module highlights that enabling students to build their research skills in the context of these more familiar source formats can lead them to an enriched understanding of the research process—including formulating an authentic research inquiry and engaging meaningfully with real audiences—while also building their skills in accessing, evaluating, and synthesizing diverse sources. Furthermore, by developing research skills in the context of social media platforms and online popular media sources, students gain a practical sense of the relevance of academic research skills to their daily research habits.

With respect to AI writing technologies (AIWT), we pose three foundational questions about academic dishonesty. First, do writing instructors and students perceive differences between AI agents and human agents in classroom scenarios? Second, to what extent are writing instructor and student perceptions are aligned? Third, what types of writing scenarios are perceived as academic dishonesty? Answering these questions provides a baseline of comparison not only for future studies of AIWT collaboration but also contextualizes perceptions of human-to-human collaboration. We report on a large-scale experimental survey study that answers these questions using item response theory (IRT). Our findings demonstrate that while there are differences between AI and human agents of collaborations, writing instructors and students are generally aligned in their perceptions. Using a Rasch model, we find that academic dishonesty operates along a spectrum of textual production. Regardless of whether the collaborating agent is human or AI, the more an agent produces text, the more this collaboration is perceived as academic dishonesty. Conversely, the less text that is produced, the less this scenario is perceived as academically dishonest. In our discussion, we provide a data-driven heuristic to guide instructors and administrators.

How can posthumanism help us reframe AI-mediated literacy practices? And what implications does such reframing have for cultivating AI literacy in language and literacy education? This article explores these two imperative questions through a case study analyzing two multilingual undergraduate students’ meaning-making and meaning-negotiation intra-actions with AI technologies in a writing classroom. The case study reveals a productive tension between these students’ experiments with posthumanist literacy and their entrenched humanistic assumptions. Ultimately, through the case study, the authors hope to demonstrate that reframing and re-engaging with AI literacy through a posthumanist lens may offer students and educators a relational approach to developing and cultivating AI literacy.

• AI can offer useful writing feedback when used combined with peer review. • AI and peer responses were often similar and mutually reinforcing. • When AI and peer responses differed, the perspectives were often complementary. • Evaluating AI feedback fostered student agency and AI literacy. Cycles of drafting and revising are crucial for student writers' growth, and formative assessment plays an important role. However, many teachers lack the time or resources to provide feedback on drafts. While research suggests that AI feedback is high enough quality to be used for draft feedback, especially when assignment-specific criteria are used (Steiss et al., 2024), it must be used in a human-centered process. AI has the potential to reduce educational equity gaps in writing support (Warschauer et al., 2023), but when narrowly implemented, technologies can deepen divides (Stornaiuolo, et al., 2023). Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR) combines peer review best practices with AI review in an approach that emphasizes student agency and reflection. Using a mixed methods approach, this study examined student perceptions of AI utility in the context of peer review. Results indicate that AI tools offer useful feedback when combined with peer review. Students found the similarity between AI and peer feedback reassuring, while also valuing their complementary perspectives. Moreover, by evaluating AI outputs, students developed AI literacy, gaining familiarity with AI feedback's affordances and limitations while learning ethical ways to use AI in their writing processes.

This case study investigates how two ESL graduate students, Ian and Sam, use ChatGPT in their research writing after receiving a comprehensive tutorial based on Warschauer et al.’s (2023) AI literacy framework. We analyzed their engagement with ChatGPT across prompt categories including genre, content, language use, documentation, coherence, and clarity. Data were collected from research paper drafts, ChatGPT chat histories, and interviews. Data analyses included coding ChatGPT prompts, textual analysis of drafts, and thematic analysis of interview transcripts . Results show that while both participants utilized ChatGPT for understanding genre conventions and content development, they developed distinct approaches reflecting their individual backgrounds. Ian selectively used ChatGPT for specific assistance needs, while Sam engaged more systematically, particularly for APA style and coherence checks. Both approaches maintained academic integrity and scholarly voice, demonstrating that Generative AI tools can be effectively tailored to individual needs without compromising ethical standards. This study highlights how advanced ESL writers can adapt GenAI tools to their unique writing processes, offering insights into the diverse ways AI can enhance academic writing while preserving individual agency. The findings suggest that AI integration in academic writing can be customized to support diverse writing goals and backgrounds.

In this paper, I explore first-year students' self-reported preferences for choosing source material in a digital, research-based writing setting. I argue that widespread skepticism towards online information has led to an "objectivity bias," where students prefer sources perceived as neutral and objective. Through qualitative interviews, I report that this bias may result in an overreliance on data-driven and empiricist sources, often at the expense of valuable personal narratives and experiential knowledge. I highlight the role of digital platforms and search algorithms in shaping these preferences and discuss the implications for teaching information literacy.

• Composing process focus including screen recording and think aloud protocols. • 11 explicit composing process activities are defined and described. • Establishes explicit metalanguage for digital multimodal composing teaching & research. • Includes illustrations of complexity of multimodal composing. Daily writing practices occur in digital environments and are often multimodal. Studies have attempted to interpret composing processes in these environments through text-based lenses and findings have yet to explicitly or effectively define and illustrate the complexities. This case study explores processes and activities of 5th-grade students as they compose using digital tools, multimodal resources, and navigate the opportunities those tools and resources afford. Findings suggest 11 process activities; three unique to digital multimodal environments, and all having influences of the digital and multimodal environments in which composing takes place. Results 1) demonstrate the potential to develop a specific metalanguage for digital multimodal composing, 2) begin to inform a specific digital lens for interpreting composing in these 21 st century environments and 3) help practitioners design instruction that best support student composers in classroom contexts.