This study contributes to the emerging research on generative AI and writing pedagogy by exploring how college writing students make use of GAI when offered instruction in a range of responsible uses and latitude to integrate it into their writing process as they see fit. We analyzed chat log data and papers from participants recruited from six sections in which students were guided in experimenting with ChatGPT Plus and permitted to use it to produce up to 50% of submitted work. Through a combination of AI and human thematic content analysis of student chat logs, we found that in 18.6% of prompts, students asked ChatGPT to write for them. The rest of the prompts involved work leading up to or in support of the writing process. Human thematic content analysis of papers showed that students used ChatGPT to generate 8.2% of the writing they submitted. The most common rhetorical purpose of the AI-generated text they included was discussion/analysis/synthesis. English as a foreign language students (EFLs) in the sample prompted ChatGPT to clarify understanding less often than non-EFLs and integrated less AI-generated text into their papers, with a particularly notable difference in their use of AI-generated summaries. This unexpected finding merits further research, but it suggests that EFLs may use GAI for somewhat different purposes than non-EFL peers.

Academics are increasingly engaged in writing genres with purposes and for readers outside of academia—a variety of science-based communication practices that fall under the term science communication. These practices often span different modes, genres, and even languages, requiring high degrees of rhetorical flexibility, strategic knowledge, and regulation of writing. In this study, we probe the self-regulation and specifically the metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) of seven senior scientists who regularly and actively engage with writing for science communication. We argue that understanding their MSK can illuminate how strategic knowledge is transferred across written genres, and importantly offer useful insights for the training of future scientists. Using data derived from in-depth, narrative interviews with a recall component, we identify a variety of strategies for task conceptualization/analysis, planning and goal setting, monitoring, and evaluating the writing of different genres. Task analysis appears particularly crucial in science communication writing, due to the great variety of purposes and readers that fall under this umbrella. Interestingly, our participants underscore storytelling strategies, and seem to transfer language and style monitoring strategies to and from science communication and publication. We map the strategies identified and discuss the implications of our study for further research and science communication pedagogy.

To verify and extend the previous research claim that L2 students from collectivistic Asian cultures are resistant to criticizing others’ work due to a desire to preserve group cohesion, this study explored whether anonymity helps ameliorate their alleged reluctance to give negative feedback. Nineteen Japanese L2 students reviewed essays in the face-to-face and anonymous modes, and their feedback comments were comparatively analyzed according to the types, levels of negativity, and mitigation strategies implemented. The results showed that Japanese L2 students adopt an extremely polite interpersonal rhetorical stance regardless of the peer review mode. Criticism almost always assumes a mitigated form, and it is not uncommon to employ multiple mitigation strategies or lexical hedges in a single comment. The pragmatic competence with respect to hedging disagreement or requests did not correlate with the language used or the reviewer’s L2 proficiency. These observations suggest that the use of mitigating devices is transferred from learners’ L1 repertoire, indicating that cultural attributes might not be a major factor influencing Asian students’ reluctance to provide negative feedback in peer interactions.

Written communication is an important skill across academia, the workplace, and civic participation. Effective writing incorporates instantiations of particular text structures - rhetorical moves - that communicate intent to the reader. These rhetorical moves are important across a range of academic styles of writing, including essays and research abstracts, as well as in forms of writing in which one reflects on learning gained through experience. However, learning how to effectively instantiate and use these rhetorical moves is a challenge. Moreover, educators often struggle to provide feedback supporting this learning, particularly at scale. Where effective support is provided, the techniques can be hard to share beyond single implementation sites. We address these challenges through the open-source AcaWriter tool, which provides feedback on rhetorical moves, with a design that allows feedback customization for specific contexts. We introduce three example implementations in which we have customized the tool and evaluated it with regard to user perceptions, and its impact on student writing. We discuss the tool's general theoretical background and provide a detailed technical account. We conclude with four recommendations that emphasize the potential of collaborative approaches in building, sharing and evaluating writing tools in research and practice.

There is no shortage of research on learner preferences and teacher perceptions of the value of feedback in L2 writing. However, studies comparing opinions from both sides are rare. Moreover, little is known whether L2 proficiency impacts learner preferences for feedback. To bridge these gaps, this study surveyed 70 students and 16 teachers from an intensive English program in the U.S. on their preferences concerning six dimensions of L2 writing feedback: source, mode, tone, focus, scope, and explicitness. The findings suggest that (1) students overall regarded teachers as the most credible source of feedback and wanted teachers to mark all errors in their writing and correct them directly; (2) higher proficiency students showed more positive attitudes towards peer feedback and inclination towards written, comprehensive, and indirect correction; (3) students at the two ends of proficiency (high and low) favored feedback in a mixed tone; (4) while teachers and students were allies on the usefulness of oral feedback, feedback on both rhetorical and language issues, and feedback in a balanced tone, teachers were nonetheless neutral about the benefits of peer feedback and preferred focused, indirect feedback. Suggestions are offered for ESL writing instructors to adapt their feedback for its maximum effects.

This preliminary study examines the rating behavior of five composition and five ESL writing teachers while evaluating a text from a university-level non-native (L2) English speaking student. Using an eye tracker, we measured raters’ dwell times and reading behaviors across four areas of interest—rhetoric, organization, vocabulary, and grammar. Results indicate that raters with differing disciplinary backgrounds read the text differently. L2 writing teachers tended to spend more time on and re-read the rhetorical, lexical, and grammatical features of the text while skipping over more of the grammar errors, while composition teachers read the text more deliberately. The findings suggest L2 writing teachers were more prone to skim and scan for information on which to base a grade while composition teachers delayed rating decisions until after reviewing the entire text, which is corroborated in previous research. These findings can expand our understanding of how disciplinary background can influence rating processes, which can inform rater training procedures, especially in disciplinary writing contexts where L2 writing is judged by individuals with and without expertise in composition or second language writing. Moreover, it demonstrates the utility of eye-tracking methods to examine the cognitive processes associated with reading and scoring student writing.

Research on persuasive writing has investigated writing quality but has not fully considered students’ perceptions of writing and of the language used in persuasive writing. Essentialist language – including words like “always,” “every,” and “prove” – insists on one explanation, ruling out other possibilities and making for poorer-quality, one-sided arguments. In Study 1, undergraduates provided characteristics they believed were important to writing and listed rhetorical indicators of those characteristics. Analysis revealed students identified essentialist-related characteristics (e.g., one-sidedness, inclusion of other viewpoints) as related to writing persuasiveness. Study 2 investigated students’ actual reactions to essentialist language. Participants read pairs of writing samples (one with essentialist language, one non-essentialist), indicated which was better and why, and rated each sample’s persuasiveness. Results revealed no difference in how often students chose essentialist samples or non-essentialist samples as better, although different reasons were associated with essentialist and non-essentialist choices. Students who preferred non-essentialist writing rated it as more persuasive, but students with essentialist or no preference rated the persuasiveness of essentialist and non-essentialist samples similarly. These results support the notion that many undergraduates fail to consistently adjust their judgments of essentialist writing to align with a reported awareness of the essentialism-persuasiveness relationship.

This study investigates Grade 12 students’ global and local strategies for writing from the Internet. Analysis of screen captures, think-aloud protocols, and interviews showed two global writing strategies: 1) Students created mediating planning documents; they alternated between researching online and creating mediating planning documents, then drafted a text, and then revised. 2) Students created no (or almost no) mediating documents; they wrote directly from the source documents, alternating frequently between researching, drafting, and revising. Each global strategy comprised several sub-ordinate strategies (e.g., search using a combination of content and rhetorical keywords; take hard copy notes; draft a text out of the sequence in which it appears in the final text; use automatic spelling and grammar checkers to guide review). Some of these strategies are similar to those used in print-based writing from sources. However, using the Internet also resulted in new researching and writing strategies. We argue that writers created task environments and used strategies that maximized the affordances of the Internet, electronic writing medium, and internal cognition, and minimized their constraints. This work extends classical cognitive work on writing as well as more recent work on writing from sources.

Discourse-based interviews (or DBIs) have long been used in writing research to investigate writers’ tacit genre knowledge, including their rhetorical motivations for sentence-level wordings. Meanwhile, researchers in English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) have used corpus techniques to uncover patterns of such wordings, ones that index community-valued ways of knowing and meaning. This article brings together these two methods in a novel way. By offering a case study of Richard, an advanced undergraduate writer majoring in philosophy at a U.S. university, the article demonstrates how systematic analysis of Richard’s writing informed and enriched DBIs with him and his professor, Maria. Specifically, corpus-based text analysis revealed that Richard regularly expressed an epistemic stance in his course essays in ways that are conventional and valued in philosophical argumentation, while the DBIs revealed that neither Richard nor Maria were consciously aware of these stance patterns, despite regular appearance in both their writing. Taken together, these findings point to the value of using corpus techniques prior to the DBI to identify meaningful choices in language that likely otherwise would be missed. The findings also raise important questions about the acquisition of disciplinary discourses and the sources of knowledge that foster that acquisition.

Research on the texts of apprentice academic writers has found that they often exhibit weaknesses related to presenting an authoritative argumentative stance. This study rendered explicit linguistic resources for stance-taking and engaged advanced L2 writers in exploring stance expressions in published research. Both linguistic and language learning theories informed this study. Seven Mandarin-speaking learners of English from fields in social sciences engaged in three writing sessions in which they consulted a concordance tool organized and created to present genre moves (Swales 1990; 2004) and engagement strategies (Martin & White, 2005) used by academic authors in research introductions. Analysis of their drafts showed improvement in rhetorical move structure and stance deployment after using the tool. They were found to be more accurate in applying and identifying stances that present assertive claims and factual statements than moderately assertive stance expressions that present expansive meanings. Despite some success in learning, close text analysis reveals that more help is needed to support students in deploying appropriately assertive claims, substantiating strong claims, and managing their stance expression across several clauses. Overall, this study found that an explicit approach to learning about authorial stance has the potential to raise L2 writers’ consciousness and improve their writing.

Writing researchers have long attempted to classify and describe patterns of citation and source use both to describe disciplinary differences, and to identify discourse-level characteristics of new knowledge production. The analysis of large corpora has provided great insights about the formal characteristics of citations, but little information about their rhetorical nature, which we know from interview studies as central to the understanding of source use practices. This study reports on an attempt to understand and describe patterns of source use across disciplines, genres and levels of participation through systematic verbal data analysis of documents produced by sixteen participants in expert/novice pairs (faculty advisor/doctoral advisee) from four disciplines (Computer Science, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences). The results of this analysis showed that, despite some disciplinary differences, all participants used similar patterns of reference use, namely elaboration, evaluation and relation to one’s own work.

In this special section on Current and Emerging Methods in the Rhetorical Analysis of Texts, we have reported on the results of a project we undertook in order to better understand the costs and benefits of adopting particular approaches to the rhetorical analysis of texts. In the synthesis that follows, we begin with a brief review of the results of our researchers’ analyses, then turn to examine their commonalities and variations. Finally, we conclude with the considerations that should be taken into account in choosing a method, as well as a discussion of the potential for integration. Overall, this synthesis will suggest that there is much to be gained by employing multiple methods for the rhetorical analysis of texts and outlines some of the design standards that can be used to support its development.

The rise of digital humanities has led many writing researchers to consider using digital tools to analyze rhetorical patterns in text. Yet taking a digital approach to the analysis of texts is a complex task. We are faced with a variety of techniques and tools, all of which require significant investment to learn and use. How can we best understand the costs and benefits of adopting a particular approach? Are they simply alternatives or can they be integrated? The three sets of authors in this special section attempt to address these questions by using alternative methodologies to analyze a common set of documents. The following opening piece serves as an introduction to the project. In it, we place their research in the context of taxonomy of approaches to text analysis, and review prior attempts at integration. Following the articles, a closing piece examines the prospects for integration. In it, we provide a brief review of the results of the analyses followed by an examination of their commonalities and variations. Finally, we conclude with the considerations that should be taken into account in choosing a method for textual analysis, as well as a discussion of the potential for an integration of methods.

This article proposes novel methods for computational rhetorical analysis to analyze the use of citations in a corpus of academic texts. Guided by rhetorical genre theory, our analysis converts texts to graph-theoretic graphs in an attempt to isolate and amplify the predicted patterns of recurring moves that are associated with stable genres of academic writing. We find that our computational method shows promise for reliably detecting and classifying citation moves similar to the results achieved by qualitative researchers coding by hand as done by Karatsolis (this issue). Further, using pairwise comparisons between advisor and advisee texts, valuable applications emerge for automated computational analysis as formative feedback in a mentoring situation.

This study examined 164 freshman undergraduates' epistemological and writing beliefs, and rhetorical writing performance, in a first-year writing course. Students completed epistemological and writing belief scales early and late in the semester. In addition, their end of semester rhetorical writing assignment was collected. Correlational analyses indicated significant relationships between students' epistemological and writing beliefs across a 16-week semester. Results of MANOVA show a significant shift in students' epistemological beliefs regarding fast learning and certain knowledge across the semester, as well as significant changes in their view of writing as a product and writing's purpose to avoid disagreement. Correlational analyses link students' writing beliefs to their rhetorical writing performance. The study includes a discussion of qualitative features of students' writing relative to their writing beliefs.

Given the widespread use of English for the international dissemination of scholars’ research results, numerous intercultural analyses have been undertaken in the field of English for Academic Purposes in diverse genres. Rhetorical and discursive conventions across languages and cultures have been studied to help non-native English scholars to be successful in the difficult endeavour of being granted publication in international English-medium publications. The increasing competition to get one’s research published in international journals in English has resulted in the authors’ need to clearly spell out what their contribution to their discipline is, a rhetorical convention which seems to be currently crucial especially in some fields. It is the aim of this paper to trace statements of contribution in the Introduction and Conclusion sections of research articles published in two international journals in finance and to compare the results with those obtained from an analysis of three manuscripts written in English by a team of Spanish scholars sent to the same journals but which received major revision or rejection reports. Reference to these statements made by reviewers in their reports will also be analysed to explore to what extent (non) compliance with this rhetorical convention may influence their final decision (not) to recommend publication.

This study of 29 teachers from four states in the US investigated teachers' orientations towards writing and the influences on their beliefs. Through interviews about writing instruction, the researchers found significant differences between teachers in high and low-income schools. While teachers in high-income schools valued rhetorical style, developing voice, and reading-writing connections, teachers in low-income schools focused on grammar, mechanics and sentence structure. Teachers in high-income schools appear to be exercising more choice in curricular materials and valuing quality of writing beyond grammar and mechanics, whereas teachers in low-income schools are using specific curriculum mandated by the districts. Influences on teachers' orientations included school context, programs and materials, and assessments. The study raises concerns that students in low-income schools are missing out on authentic, challenging, and meaningful writing opportunities since the focus is on skills-based instruction. The findings point to the need for teachers to provide all students with opportunities to develop rhetorical style, voice, and reading-writing connections in addition to grammar, mechanics, and sentence structure.

In the United States, composition researchers have consistently depicted First-Year Composition (FYC) teachers' responses to students' faith-based writing in terms of a conflict narrative. According to Goodburn (1998), Lindholm (2000), Perkins (2001), and Vander Lei and Fitzgerald (2007), FYC teachers hold strict secular expectations and reject the religious identity and expression of their fundamentalist Christian students. This study explores this conflict narrative by analyzing how 24 FYC teachers in the Midwestern United States describe their own religious identities as well as those of their institutions and respond to two faith-based student texts. The study results challenge simplistic depictions of the conflict narrative. The religious affiliations of the FYC teachers coincide with national averages and neither relate to how teachers described the religious environment of their institutions nor the grades the teachers gave the faith-based texts. Furthermore, rhetorical variables such as genre and audience awareness affect teachers' responses to faith-based writing. Composition researchers, this study concludes, need to complicate how they depict situations in which students express their religious identity within secular post-secondary institutions.

This research examines the use of concordancing to create materials for teaching about the role of reporting verbs in academic papers. The appropriate use of reporting verbs is crucial both in establishing the writer’s own claims and situating these claims within previously published research. The paper uses a sample of articles from Science, a leading journal in the scientific community, to create two small corpora. Based on the frequency ranking of 27 examples of reporting verbs, a sample of 540 sentences was chosen for more careful analysis. For each reporting verb in this sample, a randomized sample of sentences was drawn. In addition, a third corpus was created from student papers to compare the student use of reporting verbs to that of published writers. Each sentence in the randomized sample was coded into six possible categories that were based on syntactic form and rhetorical purpose. An analysis of these categories is presented in the second part of this paper. The results of this research were used to design a database of sentences that could be used to create teaching materials for an academic writing course and also be accessed through the Internet (Bloch, 2009).