This qualitative study investigates how writing instructors compose feedback in multimodal digital environments, focusing on the rhetorical and relational dimensions of their design choices. Drawing on social semiotics and multimodal composition theory, the study analyzes feedback artifacts, instructor interviews, and student surveys from six first-year writing courses. Findings reveal that instructors engage in complex feedback design work across communication modes, often without formal training or shared frameworks. Instructors tended to default to text-based habits shaped by genre memory but adapted their strategies in response to communicative breakdowns and student needs. The study identifies three core themes: reliance on print-era conventions, rhetorical problem-solving through modal layering, and ambiguity in feedback interpretation. Despite these challenges, instructors demonstrated creativity and care in their attempts to communicate clearly and relationally. The article calls for a rhetorical framework to support multimodal feedback design, emphasizing the need for pedagogical reflection, professional development, and student co-interpretation. As genAI and platform automation continue to evolve, the findings underscore the importance of feedback as a site of human judgment and presence. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors, writing programs, and institutions to better support feedback as intentional, relational work.

The rapid increase in online learning programs has led to an increase in the number of students taking composition courses online. As a result, there is a need to develop teaching practices and approaches to feedback designed specifically for online learning environments, which serve a largely nontraditional student population. Addressing a current gap in the literature regarding approaches to feedback that meet the needs of nontraditional students, this quasi-experimental study used a process model of composition and post-positivist and social constructivist epistemological orientations to measure student perceptions and preferences when provided with text-only feedback or a combination of textual and audio-visual commentary. Results indicate that the majority of students, if given the choice, prefer a combination of audio-visual and text-based commentary to textual feedback alone because they consider it helpful and feel that it enhances their overall understanding of instructor feedback by providing more detail and by using auditory and visual modes of communication. Students also liked audio-visual feedback because they considered it a form of personalized and individualized interaction, and some felt that it helped them spend more time and effort on revision.