Using case study methodology, this article analyzes the collaborative writing of three adolescent girls, one Latina and two Black, composing a group poem in an after-school spoken word poetry team. Drawing from literature on distributed cognition and embodiment, we found that participants utilized a system of writing techniques “on the page,” as well as a variety of embodied and social practices “off the page” in their team meetings to collaboratively compose this poem. We argue that focusing on the intersection of distributed cognition and embodiment in collaborative writing allows writing researchers to more fully attend to the collaborative sociality of all writing and allows teachers to support youth writers in recognizing and gaining collaborative writing skills for professional and creative writing contexts.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learning. This classroom research investigated multimodal composition using the virtual paint program Google Tilt Brush™ with 47 elementary school students (ages 10–11 years) using a head-mounted display and motion sensors. Multimodal analysis of video, screen capture, and think-aloud data attended to sensory-motor affordances and constraints for embodiment. Modal constraints were the immateriality of the virtual text, virtual disembodiment, and somatosensory mismatch between the virtual and physical worlds. Potentials for new forms of embodied multimodal representation in VR involved extensive bodily, haptic, and locomotive movement. The findings are significant given that research of embodied cognition points to sensorimotor action as the basis for language and communication.

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing.

Through a study of collaborative writing at a student advocacy nonprofit, this article explores how writers distribute their text planning across tools, artifacts, and gestures, with a particular focus on how embodied representations of texts are present in text planning. Findings indicate that these and other representations generated by the writers move through a spectrum of durability, from provisional to more persistent representations. The author argues that these findings offer useful insights into the relationships among distributed cognition, materiality, embodiment, and text planning and have implications for practitioners and students of writing. Additionally, the author recommends that scholars further investigate the ways in which embodied representations of texts are generated through lived experiences with the materials of writing.

Interdisciplinary research is often described as the recasting of disciplinary boundaries, suggesting that interdisciplinary writing might require a “boundary rhetoric”—one that negotiates the borders between the various disciplinary rhetorics involved. An example of such a boundary rhetoric can be found in the work of S. E. Jelliffe, a prominent physician-writer who proposed an innovative and controversial theory of psychosomatic medicine that offers to unite neurology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Jelliffe's work—in both its successes and failures—suggests some of the textual and conventional ways in which a boundary rhetoric can operate. At its most successful, Jelliffe's boundary rhetoric blurs the generic conventions and expectations of his constituent fields and “translates” the values and principles of one discipline into the language and discourse forms of the other. Given the increasing interdisciplinary character of much modern scholarship, Jelliffe's case is important in helping to illuminate potential problems and possibilities inherent in boundary rhetorics.

This essay reappraises conventional distinctions between oral-like and literate-like discourse, particularly Tannen's (1985) distinction between involvement focus and message focus. Rather than seeing message in tension with involvement, this query treats message as an embodiment of involvement. Cohesion particularly is treated as an aspect of a developing writer-reader relationship, an outgrowth of a thickening commitment to a mutual orientation. Speculations are offered for rethinking what is called “literate orientation.”