Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.

This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

This article adds to previous literature on writing “wayfinding” by examining how a writer’s religious beliefs and commitments shape their rhetorical choices and influence their writing wayfinding. The 5-year longitudinal study we report here used discourse-based interviews to understand the experiences of student writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Examining texts our study participants wrote in and outside of college classrooms, our analysis highlights moments when they used emotion and affect as rhetorical strategies to accomplish instrumental and relational goals. We found that in these moments, participants’ commitments as Latter-day Saints and their related identities significantly affected their writing decisions and their sense of wayfinding, particularly as they navigated writing contexts outside of familiar academic settings. The article suggests that understanding the challenges and opportunities writers face in the intersections between their rhetorical choices and their commitments as members of an organized church can help writing teachers better support students' writing development.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

This article explores how public writers view rhetorical decisions in their use of quantitative information to educate, inform, and move audiences toward action. Using the concept of “statistical framing” to describe how writers signal evaluations of numbers to their readers, we set out to learn how these writers connected their rhetorical goals to how they framed quantitative information. We interviewed 14 writers using the discourse-based interview method and found that, for various reasons, writers valued speeding up and slowing down evaluations of numbers.

This article draws on narratives of 45 career-change professionals and explores the use of models as onboarding tools through the lens of writing transfer and the crucial rhetorical thinking and metacognition that it requires. These interviews show that the use of models often limits the opportunity for writing transfer for these professionals by deemphasizing the “invention” phase while they learn to write new documents in their new workplaces. The article argues that invention, rooted in rhetorical thinking, in the workplace can be a prompt for writing transfer, which is often difficult for new communicators in professional settings. The author suggests ways to position students as advocates of invention-related practices in their future workplaces, so that writing transfer might happen more seamlessly.

On Friday morning, December 2, 1955, less than 18 hours after Rosa Parks’s arrest, copies of an anonymous, half-page leaflet began circulating in Black neighborhoods of Montgomery, Alabama. It called for a 1-day boycott of city buses on Monday, December 5. The leaflet was the work of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), namely, its president, Jo Ann Robinson. After drafting the text on the night of December 1, she drove to her office at Alabama State College (ASC) to copy it, then, the next day, with helpers, distributed those copies across the city. By evening, nearly everyone in Montgomery’s Black community knew of the boycott plan. This article offers the fullest examination yet of that leaflet, one of the most impactful texts of its kind in U.S. history. It analyzes its composition, which drew on years of activism by the WPC; its reproduction, using a mimeograph machine at ASC; and its distribution, by car, foot, and hand, across a divided urban landscape. Rhetoric and writing studies help us uncover the material resources, social context, and situated processes that enabled that text; history reminds us of its extraordinary mobilizing power.

Leader messages play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships between globalized corporations and their diverse stakeholders. By constructing two corpora, each containing 45 texts of leader messages from CSR (corporate social responsibility) reports of corporations operating in China and the United States that appeared on the 2021 Fortune Global 500 list, this study explored the move structure and interdiscursive strategies employed in the messages. The study identified a rhetorical structure consisting of seven moves and eleven steps shared by both corpora. Analysis reveals that interdiscursivity is a prevalent feature of leader messages in both corpora. Specifically, discourses of promotion, strategic management, and financial accounting are favored by Chinese corporations, while evaluative and interpersonal discourses are preferred by the U.S. corporations. The findings enhance our understanding of how professionals from different cultural contexts adopt appropriate move structures and interdiscursive strategies to craft leader messages for effective CSR communication.

The police written witness statement is a major evidentiary document that has a direct bearing on the prosecution and adjudication of criminal cases. The present study examines the rhetorical structure of police written witness statements in Ghana as a genre by adopting Bhatia’s genre model to examine 120 statements on alleged criminal cases that were sampled from the Wenchi Division of the Bono Regional Police Command in Ghana. The findings suggest that the police written witness statement is typically characterized by five moves ( Disclaiming, Identifying the Witness, Stating Witness’s Involvement with the Case, Reporting the Facts , and Indicating Discharge of Legal Responsibility ) that bear facts necessary in the prosecution of crime in Ghana’s criminal justice system. The choice of lexicogrammatical features varied depending on the function of each move. The study concludes that the witness statements possess peculiar functional features that meet the legal demands of Ghana’s judicial expectations and police discourse.

Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists produce, circulate, and disseminate scientific knowledge. Here we investigate women scientists’ writing activity and digitally mediated discursive practices in their professions. Using survey techniques, we identify patterns of professional and public science communication online across the disciplines. We also explore the potentially interrelated genres—“genre systems”—that routinely enact typified rhetorical actions in their professional contexts. The findings show that their socioliterate activity fully reflects the importance that their professional contexts attach to certain “privileged” genres of professional communication (e.g., journal articles), despite the fact that the respondents value highly genres of socially responsible research (e.g., blogs, infographics). Statistical analyses further confirm that “disciplinary culture” is a determining factor in the extent to which respondents engage with collaborative genres and participatory science genres. We report significant differences in the use of digital mediation tools to communicate science online to both expert and lay audiences. Finally, we discuss several implications for writing pedagogy and the development of digital skills to support scientists, especially women, who want or need to promote and disseminate their research widely.

In the United States, the 2010s saw a significant, organized wave of public philanthropy among the very wealthy. We conducted a discourse analysis of legitimation in The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic endeavor that began in 2010 in which billionaires encourage each other to publicly pledge to give away the majority of their wealth in their life or upon their death. We approach these texts with the questions, “Why do these individuals make these public pledges?” and “What rhetorical work is being done by them?” From the perspective of legitimation theory, how do these public, rhetorical acts constitute the social and economic orders into which they are made? Our discourse analysis of the pledges finds that they constitute two parts of an economic system of wealth, both wealth acquisition and the philanthropic giving of wealth. These constitutions in The Giving Pledge reify an institutional order by appending a promise to give back.

This article demonstrates how an analysis of the net work of medical social work students in an interprofessional Standardized Patient Program (i.e., healthcare simulation) reveals the productive potential of a Critical Disability Studies orientation to writing studies and workplace research. Standardized Patient Programs were created as a method for uniformly assessing healthcare students’ interpersonal interactions with patients. In practice, they evolved to additionally standardize the professional attitudes and behaviors of students. Structured around three emergent claims, this article uses novel and established technical-rhetorical concepts to unpack how social work students comprehend and navigate issues of power, collaboration, and knowledge exchange within a Standardized Patient Program. And when these claims are further analyzed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, they reveal how disability-related disruptions can constructively challenge medicalized stances toward disability as well as understandings of collaborative labor, workplace/simulation-based writing, and professional discourse.

This study examines how supervisor-candidate coauthoring collaborations contribute to doctoral students’ writer identity. Three candidates’ coauthorship experiences with their supervisors were investigated in depth using a multiple-case study design. Interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence between coauthors enabled thick descriptions of these candidates’ writer identity formation. Guided by Burgess and Ivanič’s framework of writer identity, the multiple-case study showed how the candidates’ autobiographical selves, discoursal selves, authorial selves, and perceived writer were influenced through the experience of coauthoring with supervisors. Notably, the candidates benefited from supervisor-candidate coauthorship by engaging in scholarly collaborations, bolstering their confidence as academic writers, and strengthening their authorial voice and rhetorical awareness. This study also reveals potential pitfalls or challenges of such collaborations, highlighting key considerations for supervisors and candidates considering coauthorship.

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non–Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than English, complementing the traditionally Anglo-centric perspective in metadiscourse research. By analyzing 21 Estonian linguistics research articles, we offer a transparent procedure to address methodological issues in metadiscourse studies and demonstrate the need for language-specific adjustments in the framework. We introduce statistical methods for analyzing multidimensional associations among marker categories, linguistic level, and rhetorical text structure. The findings suggest that Hyland’s metadiscourse model can be adjusted for specific languages, highlighting the influence of language structure on metadiscourse category variation and linguistic expression levels. The study reinforces that the distribution and manifestation of metadiscourse are shaped, among other factors, by unique writing traditions.

Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal email writing. Findings reveal the influences of communicative situation, L1 background, and L2 proficiency on pragmatic competence in email writing. First, L2 learners show a significantly lower degree of situational variability compared with ES teachers. Second, L1 backgrounds have a significant impact on L2 writing performance. Third, L2 learners with higher English proficiency tend to use more indirect request strategies, but they have not developed pragmatic competence to adjust their usage across written contexts. Findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications for developing writing competence of L2 learners, which should be attuned to diverse rhetorical expectations and individual needs.

This essay analyzes the rhetorical framing tactics of a group of disability activists to understand how they use key words, topic shifts, and other framing maneuvers to amplify marginalized voices in public debates. Focusing on a town hall meeting and a legislator update meeting between activists and lawmakers, the author uses stasis theory to analyze how these maneuvers (1) create gateways for marginalized voices to enter the discussion and (2) anchor deliberations around topics of importance to the disabled community. This suggests a more complex role for framing in face-to-face deliberative contexts than studies of framing strategies in written texts have traditionally considered. I argue that a multidimensional view of framing uniting consideration of word choice with attention to interactive dynamics is necessary to appreciate how framing maneuvers can not only shape the content of debates but amplify the voices of people excluded by the tacit rules of democratic deliberation.

This article explores genres as recurrent acts of positioning that contribute to associating particular positions with the genre users as social actors. As an illustration, the study investigates the positioning of Chinese university presidents in their published opening convocation speeches. By combining rhetorical move analysis with the positioning triangle framework, this study demystifies three positions conventionally used by university presidents in the genre: guiding educator, morale builder, and university representative. These positions, legitimized by the role of the university president, establish specific types of social relations between the president and the students, which function as channels for the transmission of values, particularly collective values, to address relevant social expectations in Chinese society. This study suggests that the genre-based positioning analysis can offer valuable genre knowledge to novice practitioners, enabling them to familiarize themselves with adequate positionings that adhere to the code of conduct within a discourse community, thereby facilitating effective genre realization.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Synthesis Report’s (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

Many genre scholars have focused on how individuals might build genre knowledge, generally understood as the enculturation processes, gradual stages, or ingredients that lead to one’s facility with a genre in context. While genre knowledge describes whether people can engage genres, it does not describe the various factors that shape how people may engage genres. By consolidating scholarship across Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), this article characterizes genre access as the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genre. Furthermore, this article integrates Network Gatekeeping Theory to develop a micro-level analytical approach for explicitly describing genre access. The author demonstrates and develops genre access as a concept and analytical approach with an illustrative example from a larger ethnographic project. Specifically, this illustrative example explores genre access for the Staff Report, a common genre in local government that proposes recommendations from individual departments to their elected City Commissioners for voted approval. Overall, the purpose of this article is (1) to consolidate and extend RGS’s exploration of the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genres; (2) to identify and name genre access as a fundamental aspect of how genres work; and (3) to provide a micro-level analytical language for researchers to tease out the various factors the shape genre access.

In order to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the varied ways multiple language competencies are invoked in scientific communication and publication, this study features a content analysis of a collection of English, French, and Arabic abstracts from 14 articles of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant differences across abstracts in different languages suggests that EN/FR abstracts are tailored to an international specialist audience and Arabic abstracts favor a domestic policymaker audience in several key ways. The textual moves made to address these different audiences are typical of those studied by scholars of science communication, and accordingly this study indicates that plurilingual textual practices in scientific writing are associated with differences in audience and stakeholders. These findings carry implications for trans/pluri/multilingually oriented scholars of scientific communication, as well as for those who prepare future researchers for the demands of publication, suggesting that the flexible use of diverse linguistic resources is important to scientific practice in a globalized world.

This essay takes as its focus the everyday writing that people compose: the self-sponsored, nonobligatory texts that people write mainly outside of work and school. Through analysis of 713 survey responses and 27 interviews with accompanying writing samples, this study provides a panoramic view of the functions of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical activity for U.S. adults, ages 18 to 65+ years, from a range of geographic, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The Taxonomy of Life Writing presented in this essay demonstrates the range of ways that writing functions in people’s daily lives. It includes 19 key functions of life writing, organized into six metafunctions: Creativity and Expression, Identity and Relationships, Organization and Coordination, Preservation and Memory, Reflection and Emotion, and Teaching and Learning. Based on our findings, we affirm the important and diverse functions that life writing serves and propose expanding the threshold concepts of writing to include greater focus on nonobligatory, self-sponsored writing activity.

Despite students’ growing interest in entrepreneurship education (EE), the small body of research exploring rhetorical strategies for proposing new business ventures has focused only on the argument strategies that startup entrepreneurs use when delivering oral pitches to investors. This study, by contrast, explores the topoi, or lines of argument, that small business entrepreneurs use in written business plans created for bank lenders. Small business entrepreneurs use nine topoi in order to accomplish two rhetorical goals: justifying their ventures, via the creation of stability-focused value propositions, and establishing their entrepreneurial credibility. Ultimately, I argue that small business entrepreneurs use these topoi to frame their ventures as low-risk and stable, which contrasts with startup entrepreneurs’ arguments that their ventures are innovative and disruptive. In addition to learning strategies for highlighting innovation and disruption, EE students would likely benefit from learning rhetorical strategies for minimizing risk and emphasizing stability.

This article explores the mobile and material dimensions of a writing practice we call pocket writing. Emergent in our 6-year ethnographic fieldwork at a public high school, this practice involved adolescents composing and carrying their self-sponsored writing close to their bodies. We consider the pocket both a physical artifact—the place from which writing emerged at the right moment—and a metaphor describing how youth created small, portable boundaries around their writing to facilitate its invisibility and mobility. Using a transliteracies lens, we worked alongside youth to trace the circulatory pathways such writing took relative to the official institution of school. These high school students made agentive rhetorical choices, sometimes deliberately disconnecting their writing from school as an everyday resistance practice—an effort to keep school in its place. In theorizing pocket writing as a mobile and embodied extension of writing (for) the self, we argue its “pocketed” nature is key to its transformative power.

We report on a college-level study of student reflection and instructor prompts using scoring and corpus analysis methods. We collected 340 student reflections and 24 faculty prompts. Reflections were scored using trait and holistic scoring and then reflections and faculty prompts were analyzed using Natural Language Processing to identify linguistic features of high, middle, and low scoring reflections. The data sets were then connected to determine if there was a relationship between faculty prompts and scores. Additional analysis was completed to determine if there was a relationship between scores and students’ GPAs. The corpus linguistics analysis showed that higher-scoring reflections used words that referred to the self, the writing process, and specific rhetorical terms. Additional analysis showed student GPAs did not correlate with holistic scores but that higher scoring reflections were from faculty who included learning goals on reflective writing prompts. Results suggest that teachers can de-mystify reflective writing by linking learning outcomes to textual tasks and that corpus linguistics methods can provide an understanding of how local learning goals are transmitted to students.

The stagnation of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Writing scores demonstrates the need for research-based instruction that improves writing for all students, especially English learners. In this article, we synthesize the literature on effective instructional practices for this diverse group of learners and describe how these strategies are leveraged in a teacher professional development program that has been previously shown to improve students’ argument writing. Then, we share results of a study that focuses on distinct subgroups of secondary English learners students to (a) determine their needs and challenges and (b) examine the impact of a cognitive strategies approach on rhetorical and linguistic aspects of writing at posttest. Results show English learners have considerable challenges with higher-order tasks involved in writing literary arguments and with the linguistic demands of academic writing before receiving the intervention. However, after receiving the intervention, using descriptive statistics and multiple hierarchical linear regression, we show that these students grew in the areas of presentation of ideas, organization, evidence use, and language use. For example, students designated as reclassified English learners (RFEP [Reclassified Fluent English Proficient]) and students who have even more limited English proficiency (designated as EL [English learner] here) show improvements in many aspects of writing, especially in their ability to write claims and use evidence. In contrast, improvements in language use components were more limited for both groups of learners. Moreover, some of the gains due to being in the treatment were significant enough to bring the average EL student close to parity or beyond their EO (English Only) / IFEP (Initial Fluent English Proficient) peers in the control condition at posttest. We conclude by discussing pedagogical implications for English learners.

This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

The data article is a digital genre that has emerged in response to new exigencies, namely, to make data more transparent and research processes more trustable and reproducible. Following White’s framework of intersubjective stance, this article draws upon statistical tools and collocational and discourse analyses to examine the linguistic resources deployed by authors to respond to both exigencies. The results show a high presence of dialogically contractive resources (above all, passive constructions and, only in one data article section, inanimate subjects) by which authors do not fully engage with dialogic alternatives (heteroglossic disengagement). Dialogically expansive resources (anticipatory it-subjects and we-pronouns) are extremely rare, corroborating that the authors’ stance is neither monoglossic (undialogized) nor heteroglossically engaged. Further, the discourse functions and ensuing pragmatic effects of the prevailing intersubjective stance resources, significantly different between and among the data article sections, including their associated abstracts, reveal the construal of very distinct dialogic spaces for writer-reader interaction within this article type. Such intra-generic variation may be explained by the social (and rhetorical) action that the genre fulfills, namely, to describe and highlight the value of the research data.

Predatory publishers deliver neither the editorial oversight, nor the peer review of legitimate publishers, and benefit from those whose positions require academic publications. These publishers also provide a home for conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience promoters, as their lack of scrutiny offers fraudulent academic research articles a veneer of scholarly credibility. While most predatory journals were designed to dupe researchers, the fraudulent articles they often publish are designed to be found by members of the public, and their accessibility ensures that unlike legitimate research, they are likely to be employed as evidence by those seeking evidence. While studies have examined the common features of predatory journals, their emails, and their websites, this essay situates fraudulent academic articles in posttruth discourse, offers a taxonomy of illegitimate research articles, and highlights their common rhetorical features, in the hopes that the concepts discovered here can further contribute to pedagogy and public understanding.

Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceives of and teaches both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.

Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.

This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892–1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the mechanics of the devices by constructing a series of textual-visual relationships, requiring that the reader scan back and forth between the written text and the accompanying visual. These multimodal texts demonstrate how the students used writing activities to create a narrative of equipment development, which highlighted the centrality of trained vision in enculturating graduate students into disciplinary writing practices in the late 19th century. Through an analysis of the specific interactions and the network of visuals the students used to reconstruct a history of Ether investigation, scholars of writing and rhetoric can see how important inclusion of equipment and its detailed discussion was to graduate writing and disciplinary enculturation in the sciences.

Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students’ genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students reported on classroom genre experiences and wrote stories about college across three narrative genres (Letter, Best Experience, Worst Experience). Findings suggest that students’ engagement with classroom genres in community college helped them develop rhetorical reading and writing skills. When students wrote about their college lives across narrative genres, they reflected on higher education in varied ways to achieve differing sociocultural goals with distinct audiences. Finally, students’ experience with classroom and narrative genres predicted their GPA, implying that students’ genre knowledge signals and influences their academic success. These findings demonstrate how diverse students attending community college can use genres as resources to further their social and academic development.

This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the framing of opioid pharmacology, (b) the relative attention paid to pain management versus opioid dependence risks, and (c) the distribution of statements related to physicians’ primary ethical obligations. The results of these analyses largely disconfirm different current accounts of shifting physician rhetoric around opioids and pain management leading up to the recognition opioid epidemic. Most notably, the results also suggest that biomedical debates surrounding opioids are serving as proxy arguments for shifting primary bioethical obligations from individual patients to public health.

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.

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems “out there” to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift—along with the advent of online media, which similarly blurs traditional urban versus rural boundaries between communities—invites us to update classic studies of advocacy rhetoric from the 1990s and early 2000s. Accordingly, this study addresses advocates’ use of online media in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project. I reconstruct wildlife advocates’ attitudes toward the Project, as expressed online in press releases and blog posts, by using a combination of topology—a method that looks at patterns of topoi (shared beliefs, values, and norms) that a community expresses in a given rhetorical situation—and Kenneth Burke’s theories of attitudes and identification. I then compare advocates’ attitudes with the attitudes of project administrators and landowners in the reintroduction area, reconstructed in earlier work. I conclude that advocates amplify their identification with allies (chiefly wolves and supportive sectors of “the public”) and their alienation from competitors (chiefly public-land ranchers and project administrators) via the creation of “straw attitudes” for these communities that conflict both with their own attitude and with the documented attitudes of these communities. This rhetorical strategy creates a zero-sum political scenario for communication in the Project and recapitulates old political divisions in the southwestern United States. I finish by recommending rhetorical strategies aimed to increase identification, rather than alienation, in the Project and by showing what online advocacy rhetoric can teach us about the structure of Burkean theories of identification.

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are becoming a widespread corporate discourse practice and are often considered corporate image-building documents. The present study examines forward-looking statements in CSR reports from a genre-based perspective, aiming to better understand the textual practices of reporting genres in a globalized context and to raise awareness about ways they are used to shape perception of corporate activity. Using a corpus of 90 CSR reports in Chinese, English, and Italian and a subcorpus annotated with the “previewing future performance” move, the study combines a focus on genre-related contextual features and rhetorical patterns of CSR reports with a corpus-based study of future markers. The analysis reveals some cross-cultural variation in the distribution of the move, while its commissive function marks a common trend. Words indicating change ( miglior*/提升/improv*) are found to be frequently used for future reference in all three languages, suggesting that future discourse, though regarded as an optional element of the genre, is widely exploited by companies in actual practice to promote a committed corporate image in CSR. Based on this analysis, the study puts forward the notion of “writing conformity,” a general feature of many reporting genres, which may turn out to pose new and important challenges for professional writers.

The research article is a staple genre in the economy of scientific research, and although research articles have received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, little attention has been given to the important development of Registered Reports. Registered Reports are an emerging, hybrid genre that proceeds through a two-stage model of peer review. This article charts the emergence of Registered Reports and explores how this new form intervenes in the evolution of the research article genre by replacing the central topoi of novelty with methodological rigor. Specifically, I investigate this discursive and publishing phenomenon by describing current conversations about challenges in replicating research studies, the rhetorical exigence those conversations create, and how Registered Reports respond to this exigence. Then, to better understand this emerging form, I present an empirical study of the genre itself by closely examining four articles published under the Registered Report model from the journal Royal Society Open Science and then investigating the genre hybridity by examining 32 protocols (Stage 1 Registered Reports) and 77 completed (Stage 2 Registered Reports) from a range of journals in the life and psychological sciences. Findings from this study suggest Registered Reports mark a notable intervention in the research article genre for life and psychological sciences, centering the reporting of science in serious methodological debates.

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team’s related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how scientists conceptualize and adapt their multimodal writing for specialized scientific audiences as well as lay audiences interested in the work of scientific inquiry. Three concepts— meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—were used to analyze the multimodal strategies that scientists employ when composing for different audiences. Findings suggest that while scientists often restrict their writing practices to meaning compression to maintain the values and conventions of scientific genres, they also sometimes deploy a wider range of multimodal strategies when writing for nonspecialist audiences. These findings underscore the complex rhetorical environments scientists navigate and the need to support emerging scientific writers’ development as versatile writers able to adapt varied multimodal strategies to diverse rhetorical and epistemic goals.

The Internet has helped to change who writes about science in the news, how news is written, and how it is taken up by different audiences. However, few studies have examined how these changes have impacted the uptake of scientific claims in online news writing. This case study explores how online news genres take up knowledge claims from a research article on climate change over a period of one year and shows how shifting boundaries between rhetorical communities affect genre uptake. The study results show that online news writers predominantly use the news report genre to cover research findings for 48 hours, after which they predominantly use the news editorial genre to engage these findings. Analysis suggests that the news report genre uses the press release and the article abstract as intermediary genres, but the news editorial uses only the abstract. I argue that the switch between genres repositions the scientist, the journalist, and the public epistemologically, a reorientation that favors uptake in news media outlets supporting action to mitigate climate change and its effects.

Negotiating membership within a disciplinary community is as much an exercise in rhetorical facility as it is content expertise. Where individuals reside in the hierarchy of membership is determined by not only what they talk and write about, but how. Yet, there are many factors that can impact newcomers’ acculturation into a disciplinary community on a rhetorical level. In this article, I use positioning theory and intersectional identity to examine how Anne, a woman of color participating in undergraduate research in science, learned to read and write as a scientist and the ways her social position as a woman, person of color, and low-income and first-generation student influenced her perception and adoption of the discourse as her own. I argue that social positioning influences students’ views of scientific discourse and affects their rhetorical skill development as scientific writers. Because recognition as a group insider is heavily influenced by discourse, this research has potential implications for those interested in retention and persistence of women of color in STEM, as well as for those interested in changing learning cultures and incorporating writing instruction into disciplinary arenas.

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students’ design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action within a classroom simulation and support professional genre uptake. First, the range of rhetorical choices available to students in designing their simulation health records are discussed. Then, the article draws on an extended example of how student uptake of the patient health record within a clinical simulation emphasized its intertextual relationship to other genres, its role mediating social interactions with the patient and other providers, and its coordination of embodied actions. Connections to students’ experiences with professional genres are addressed throughout. The article concludes by considering initial implications of this research for disciplinary and professional writing courses.

Neuro-realism is a widely cited concept describing a textual phenomenon in popular science news wherein brain research uncritically validates or invalidates the “realness” of particular beliefs or practices. Currently, no research on neuro-realism examines the variable rhetorical roles of such statements, that is, how they support specialized arguments or enhance social functions across genres of public communication. This article details the nuances of neuro-realism, arguing that neuro-realism is much more than a singular textual phenomenon but a flexible rhetorical vehicle manifesting in at least three forms: commonsense, judicial, and rational. Each form serves a larger argumentative purpose, and each can be consistently linked to a popular news subgenre, illuminating how neuro-realism’s stunning lack of criticality proves permissible and reproducible in popular science publications.