An ALP writing assignment provides a forum for student-faculty dialogue about academic and non-cognitive issues and serves as both a program and student assessment tool. Qualitative and quantitative studies reveal that students often mistakenly believe they are proficient regarding grammar and success strategies alike. Faculty can support students by recognizing that student success is tightly bound to the context in which students learn and striving to create an environment that explicitly addresses grammar and success concepts.

Motivated by increasing international student writing center use to learn more about second language writing development and its assessment, we conducted a case study of an undergraduate writer who submitted drafts to online tutoring over two years. Synthesizing the perspectives and methods of Applied Linguistics with those of First-Language Composition, we assessed the writer's short-and long-term progress in the rhetorical, linguistic, and writing process components of her writing development. We found linguistic improvement in accuracy, especially short-term between drafts and revisions more so than over time, but only modest long-term improvement in both rhetorical and other linguistic components. We attributed these results to the writer's expedient writing process and her narrow conceptions of writing development and of her tutors' role in it. These expedient processes and narrow concep-

As Open Educational Resources (OER) increasingly receive attention from academics, educational foundations, and government agencies, exemplars will emerge that lower student textbook costs by moving away from commercial publishers through self-publishing or curating web-based resources. Joe Moxley’s Writing Commons serves as a scaled OER model in its careful consideration of the processes involved in producing accessible resources that meet user needs. Writing Commons hosts hundreds of peer-reviewed resources on writing instruction for use as a course text or supplement by students and faculty in a variety of disciplines. Moxley’s work on the site reflects the challenges and rewards of putting the entire publishing process of educational resources in the hands of faculty.

As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it “can become a means for proactive change” (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our “equal opportunity” writing program and our faculty-led assessment process work symbiotically to sustain, enhance and “revision” the curriculum and pedagogy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, first-year writing program. Our writing program strives to offer all students at the college a consistent and equivalent writing experience, regardless of what semester or in what section they enroll, as well as a coherent trajectory, where students encounter similar learning processes and literacy tasks throughout the course sequence. To ensure this consistency and coherence, our programmatic stakeholders designed program assessment to have direct impact on classroom learning by following multiple formative and summative assessments in an inquiry-based practice driven by local curricular contexts. In profiling the quid pro quo between writing program design and its accompanying assessment efforts, we demonstrate how program structure enables useful, progressive assessment, and, conversely, how assessment continuously informs and improves the infrastructures of pedagogy and curriculum in the writing classroom.

This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka’s approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka’s pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes educational theory that insists upon the importance of disequilibrium. We then report how our students respond to our disequilibrating pedagogy, collecting survey responses via an IRB approved study. We hope these responses can help instructors interested in our postpedagogical notion of creativity anticipate and prepare for student discomfort and resistance—to recognize the fine distinction between productively confused and hopelessly lost. With that goal in mind, we conclude by addressing difficult questions of assessment.

This essay provides a comparative analysis of a large number of texts devoted to writing assessment, analyses that help answer questions about writing assessment volumes and that provide a picture of writing assessment scholarship over a twenty-five-year period.

This essay provides a comparative analysis of a large number of texts devoted to writing assessment, analyses that help answer questions about writing assessment volumes and that provide a picture of writing assessment scholarship over a twenty-five-year period.

It has been established that in the Netherlands, as in other countries, a majority of students do not attain the desired level of writing skills at the end of elementary school. Time devoted to writing is limited, and only a minority of schools succeed in effectively teaching writing. An improvement in the way writing is taught in elementary school is clearly required. In order to identify effective instructional practices we conducted a meta-analysis of writing intervention studies aimed at grade 4 to 6 in a regular school setting. Average effect sizes were calculated for ten intervention categories: strategy instruction, text structure instruction, pre-writing activities, peer assistance, grammar instruction, feedback, evaluation, process approach, goal setting, and revision. Five of these categories yielded statistically significant results. Pairwise comparison of these categories revealed that goal setting (ES = 2.03) is the most effective intervention to improve students’ writing performance, followed by strategy instruction (ES = .96), text structure instruction (ES = .76), peer assistance (ES = .59), and feedback (ES = .88) respectively. Further research is needed to examine how these interventions can be implemented effectively in classrooms to improve elementary students’ writing performance.

that the ability to evaluate research papers critically 'is an important vehicle for promoting acculturation into a scientific discipline'.The article describes the authors' process of designing-and the key features of-an online resource for scaffolding undergraduate science students in critical evaluation.According to the authors, this resource encourages and enables students 'to be purposeful, inquisitive and critical in their reading of scientific papers' in order to inform their own writing and learning throughout the different stages of their degree study.

Background: A content-management project that proceeds with an incomplete understanding of the views, reservations, agendas, and attitudes held by stakeholders could likely encounter problems in implementation. The vast majority of content-management implementation projects proceed with very little visibility into the cultural dynamics that will eventually play such a central role in determining the success or failure of the projects. This case study examines the usefulness of deploying a needs assessment questionnaire to gather qualitative data that could help content-management project leaders understand participant needs, attitudes, and perceptions, and that could potentially improve the implementation of content-management projects. Research questions: How might previously published research questions for assessing cultural dynamics be adapted for a questionnaire intended to gather input from participants in the early stages of the implementation of two separate content-management projects? What kinds of issues does the questionnaire elicit from participants? To what extent is the questionnaire useful in assessing content-management project participant needs and how might it be revised and adapted for other organizational contexts? Situating the case: Implementing a content-management project results in a change to organizational processes; careful attention to managing this change is essential to the success of the project. Specific change-management issues emphasized in literature that addresses organizational and technological change include organizational readiness, stakeholder input, communication of project goals and plans with stakeholders, and training and time to learn and practice new approaches to operations. Organizational culture-a set of beliefs and values that members of an company share in common-plays a role in implementations of technology. Assessing organizational climate and stakeholder values and attitudes-characteristics of organizational culture-as part of a change-management plan can ensure that the culture is addressed when implementing a content-management project. Methodology: This project consisted of three parts: designing a pilot questionnaire based on a previous published methodology for assessing cultural dynamics, conducting the questionnaire within two organizations implementing content-management systems, and assessing the extent to which the questionnaire was useful in the context of the content-management projects. Responses were analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach. About the case: We developed a cultural dynamics needs assessment questionnaire and deployed it within two organizations with the purpose of gathering data about the attitudes and perceptions of project participants toward the impending content-management system implementation. The questionnaires informed the implementations of content management as anticipated. Conclusions: A questionnaire can help understand the cultural dynamics impacting the adoption of new technologies and processes; this method can be included as part of an overall needs assessment for a content-management project. This study also confirms the merit of the research methodology followed; the questionnaire design elicited thoughtful responses from participants and the analysis approach illuminated insights that were then used to engage participants and modify project implementation plans. The constructive outcome of this study suggests the need for more empirical studies and field evaluation studies that build on this one.

Our assessment research suggests that quantitative business courses that rely primarily on algorithmic problem solving may not produce the deep learning required for addressing real-world business problems. This article illustrates a strategy, supported by recent learning theory, for promoting deep learning by moving students gradually from “well-structured” algorithmic problems with single correct answers to “ill-structured” real-world business problems that may have multiple correct answers and require an argument addressed to a specific audience. We show how these scaffolded communication assignments promote deep learning, and suggest ways that interested faculty can adapt the assignments to their own courses.

The essay reports the findings of a study of 911 students’ academic outcomes in relation to their placement profiles and a closer, qualitative analysis of 54 participating

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the ongoing debate between pluralistic and monistic approaches to dealing with critical disagreement. I return to the theory of world hypotheses advanced by Stephen C. Pepper, an understudied figure in aesthetics and pragmatism, to enunciate a version of pluralism that centers on the nature of critical evidence and its functioning in social settings of argument. I argue that Pepper's expansive philosophy holds interesting implications for what can be called the metaphysics of criticism, a point missed by partisans of standard views of pluralism and monism. Building on his analysis of equally autonomous (but noncommensurable) world hypotheses, this study enunciates an explicit notion of rhetorical pluralism that goes beyond simple relativism. This account can be labeled “evidentiary pluralism,” since it internalizes standards for evaluation to specific worldviews and recognizes their changeable nature in the context of critical disagreement.

Our concern with the interaction and interplay between writers, writing instructors and assessors, and technology is part of our interest in understanding the complexities of infrastructure through this ecosystemic frame. In this text, we consider the foundational structures, the architectural supports, of our current writing ecology and then move on to survey the larger landscape of research and debate how to build and sustain a thriving ecosystem of writing and writing instruction and assessment.

New standards for writing provide the opportunity to rethink definitions of what writing is in schools. While traditional assessment methods align with many of the new standards and offer an important tool for gauging the success of some elements of writing, they often neglect other elements. In traditional assessment, the elements that are quantifiable become those that are valued. Teachers can promote consideration of other elements, those intangibles that change a text from an assignment to be completed into a powerful communicative act, by intervening in the prewriting or planning stage of the writing process. This article discusses one possible form of intervention in which the teacher has a conversation with a student that centers on the student’s investment of interest in her/his topic and helps the student plan a paper that will make a unique contribution and not just fulfill a task. By using a prewriting rubric to focus the conversation, the teacher is able to track student progress in understanding and enacting this important component of writing.

This paper, building on results from a large online embedded language and literacy development project, introduces the notions of ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’ in feedback and outlines steps that instructors can take to provide such feedback in their own contexts. Cohesion in feedback can be defined in terms of its goals, audience, and organisation; and coherence in terms of how instances of feedback work together to scaffold a student into developing a deeper understanding of issues in their writing. The paper argues that feedback which is cohesive and coherent is not a collection of reactions to student’s errors/mistakes, but it is a thoughtfully and carefully drafted text which responds to a student’s writing based on an assessment of their needs. The paper includes an evaluation of how students respond to such feedback by sharing examples of students’ drafts, the feedback they received, and their responses to the feedback. This paper helps us in understanding the nature of feedback as well as understanding how to apply it with the goal of making our students stronger, more independent, and self-regulating writers.

This article aims to engage specialists in writing pedagogy, assessment, genre study, and educational technologies in a constructive dialog and joint exploration of automated writing analysis as a potent instantiation of computer-enhanced assessment for learning. It recounts the values of writing pedagogy and, from this perspective, examines legitimate concerns with automated writing analysis. Emphasis is placed on the need to substantiate the construct-driven debate with systematic empirical evidence that would corroborate or refute interpretations, uses, and consequences of automated scoring and feedback tools intended for specific contexts. Such evidence can be obtained by adopting a validity argument framework. To demonstrate an application of this framework, the article presents a novel genre-based approach to automated analysis configured to support research writing and provides examples of validity evidence for using it with novice scholarly writers.

Reviews of: Very like a whale: The assessment of writing programs Edward M. White, Norbert Elliot, and Irvin Peckham (2015) ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-985-2. Pp. 202. Assessing and improving student writing in college Barbara E. Walvoord (2014) ISBN-13: 978-1-118-55736-5. Pp. xiii + 119.

Drawing on Shaw and Weir’s theoretical framework for validating writing tests (2007), this paper highlights the issues of the writing constructs measured in English writing tests in university entrance exams, and recommends improvements. The paper analysed the writing response formats of 66 English tests used by Japanese universities and one English test of National Centre Exams (NCE) for 2013 entry. It was found that translation was the most commonly used skill in the writing tests, and accounts for 45% of the total. The most common writing response format used by the state universities was translation, whereas word-reordering was commonly in use at the private universities and NCE. Because word-reordering and translation tasks can assess very limited English grammatical and lexical discrete writing skills, there is no conclusive proof that the task can assess writing skills needed by the applicants to write cohesive texts in English. However, there are potential reasons why indirect writing assessments have remained a key method for Japanese university admission in the system of designing the English tests: the number of applicants and time constraints. Taking these factors into account, alternative English tests should be introduced to Japanese university entrance examinations.

Peer assessment (PA), a process by which students' work (oral or written) is assessed by other students of equal status, has received a lot of attention recently (Assessment Reform Group, 1999, 2002). Using data collected from secondary schools in Cyprus, the current study investigates whether PA can improve the writing skills of adolescent students of English as a foreign language (EFL). The results showed that PA did have a positive impact on students’ writing performance, especially for students who provided peer assessment. The article discusses the important role of PA in the development of students’ writing skills and offers recommendations for the implementation of PA in EFL contexts.

Supported by artificial intelligence (AI), the most advanced Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have gained increasing attention for their ability to provide immediate scoring and formative feedback, yet teachers have been hesitant to implement them into their classes because correlations between the grades they assign and the AWE scores have generally been low. This begs the question of where improvements in evaluation may need to be made, and what approaches are available to carry out this improvement. This mixed-method study involved 59 cause and effect essays collected from English language learners enrolled in six different sections of a college level academic writing course and utilized theory proposed by Slater and Mohan (2010) regarding the developmental path of cause. The study compared the results of raters who used this developmental path with the accuracy of AWE scores produced by Criterion, an AWE tool developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), and the grades reported by teachers. Findings suggested that if Criterion is to be used successfully in the classroom, writing teachers need to take a meaning-based approach to their assessment, which would allow them and their students to understand more fully how language constructs cause and effect. Using the developmental path of cause as an analytical framework for assessment may then help teachers assign grades that are more in sync with AWE scores, which in turn can help students gain more trust in the scores they receive from both their teachers and Criterion.

Although many second language writing classes use a process approach, anecdotal evidence suggests that assessment of writing in such classes often still focuses on the written product alone. This assessment practice continues despite specialists having recommended that both process and product be assessed. This study compares second-year university students in Japan who were assessed on feedback processes and product with others assessed on product alone in terms of perceptions of the feedback received. Perceptions were determined through a post-treatment questionnaire. Neither the assessment of the use of teacher feedback in revisions nor the assessment of the quality and quantity of peer feedback was found to have a clear benefit in terms of students’ perceptions of the feedback received. This finding suggests the need for further research to confirm whether the assessment of both process and product is worth the considerable time investment required.

Guest editorial

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

When games are approached as a pedagogical methodology, the homologies between games and technical communication are highlighted: pedagogy that teaches people to play and succeed within certain confines; classroom assessment that provides meaningful feedback to encourage self-improvement; instructional design that incorporates gaming theory and game design principles; and usability to ensure optimum success. This article provides an overview of these topics for instructors to consider when designing a technical writing course as a game.

The design of interactive applications for online communication is an ongoing area of research within technical communication. This study reports on the development of an interactive sea-level rise (SLR) viewer, a data visualization tool that communicates about the potential effects of SLR along coastlines. It describes the formative evaluation of a location-specific SLR viewer created via integral stakeholder engagement. Participants performed a series of tasks, answered questions about the tool's usability and communicative effectiveness, and made suggestions for ways to improve its application to desired tasks. The authors discuss the implications of this study for visual risk communication and make recommendations for others developing similar interactive data visualization tools with audience input.

Our daily activities now heavily rely on data, and sometimes are even controlled by them. Integrating InfoVis into people's daily lives can help them to access, explore, understand, and utilize the vast variance of data. This paper aims to explore and discuss the idea exchange between the traditional domain of industrial design and the novel field of InfoVis. There are three potential approaches. Extending InfoVis into a product design can fill up the small screen on the product and make the product more user friendly. Appling the 3D form of industrial design to InfoVis can bring it to the physical world and enhance the information qualify in our lives. We also argue that there could be a harmonious combination of industrial design and InfoVis that integrate the benefits from both. To understand this hybrid domain, we introduce some preliminary research explorations that covers both the industrial design and InfoVis, along with our education practices, including our assessment framework, research outcomes, education approaches, and student design projects.

In technical communication education, design is often narrowly and essentially framed as execution of features. This approach fails to account for the innovative phase of user research, the iterative design process, and contextual factors such as workflow and governance. Inspired by Alan Cooper's Goal-Directed Design (2014), this paper advocates for a "design strategy" approach to the practice and pedagogy of design in technical communication. In particular, it calls for treating design as a process of research, discovery, prototyping, execution, and evaluation. This design process must strategically serve organizational objectives and user goals.

Genre analysis has become an important tool for teaching writing across the disciplines to non-native English-speaking (EL2) and native English-speaking (EL1) graduate students alike. Since the pressing needs of EL2 graduate students have meant that educators often teach them in separate classes, and since genre-based research into teaching higher-level writing has been largely generated in fields such as English for Academic Purposes, we have an insufficient understanding of whether this instructional mode plays out similarly in EL1 and EL2 classrooms. Launching a genre-based course on writing research articles in parallel sections for EL1 and EL2 graduate students provided an opportunity to address this knowledge shortfall. This article qualitatively examines the different classroom behaviors observed in each version of the course when a common curriculum was used and specifically explores three key themes: initial receptivity, nature of student engagement, and overall assessment. Our study shows that although EL2 and EL1 learners have similar needs, the obstacles to their benefitting from genre-based instruction are different; EL2 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support that transcends linguistic matters, while EL1 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support despite their linguistic competence. Providing the same mode of instruction can benefit both populations as long as educators are sensitive to the specific challenges each population presents in the classroom. The insights gained contribute to the scholarship on genre-based teaching and offer ways of better meeting the needs of EL1 and EL2 students alike.

Research problem: No study has explored how incorporating personas into heuristic evaluation of products, namely websites, affects the kinds of findings reported and the recommendations presented by usability evaluators. Research questions: (1) Do findings resulting from heuristic evaluations of a website without the use of personas differ from findings resulting from heuristic evaluations of the same website with the use of personas? (2) Do findings from persona-based heuristic evaluations in which evaluators develop their own personas differ from findings from persona-based heuristic evaluations in which evaluators are given personas? (3) If findings and recommendations are different, how do they differ? (4) How does the use of personas affect the evaluators' confidence in the findings of a heuristic evaluation? Literature review: First, previous research of heuristic evaluation has concluded that although heuristic evaluation is inexpensive and does not require advance planning, it has several shortcomings, including its too-intense focus on minor issues and its inability to capture all usability issues. Second, data-driven personas, which have long been a resource in user-centered design, have been suggested as a way to improve or enhance heuristic evaluation, and several studies suggest that usability professionals are indeed using personas in their evaluations. However, no empirical study has assessed heuristic evaluations that include personas. Methodology: In this exploratory study involving three sections of an advanced technical writing course, groups of evaluators conducted a heuristic evaluation of a website. Each section was randomly assigned a different condition with which they would conduct the heuristic evaluation: (a) a traditional heuristic evaluation, (b) a persona-led heuristic evaluation in which the personas were given to the evaluators, or (c) a persona-led heuristic evaluation in which the evaluators themselves created their own personas. Each group wrote a report identifying the major problems with the website and provided recommendations to solve the identified problems. The evaluators completed pretesting demographic surveys and posttesting confidence surveys. Results and discussion: This exploratory study found few detectable differences in the findings reported by groups that used personas in heuristic evaluation and groups that did not use personas. The groups that used personas were more likely to report findings related to navigation than the groups that did not use personas, while the groups that did not use personas were more likely to report findings related to design than the groups that used personas. The groups that created their own personas were more likely than the other groups to include complex issues in their reports and include language that directly references users and user needs. All groups were confident in their findings.

Background: Virtual teams collaborate across distances using information communication technologies (ICTs). A distinctive set of communication skills is needed by people who work successfully in virtual teams, and few universities or companies provide structured education and training in virtual teamwork. At a midsized southeastern Masters Comprehensive University, professors from the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education came together to explore how they might use cross-disciplinary student teams (groups comprised of students with different backgrounds and educational goals) to teach concepts in their own disciplines while providing students with the opportunity to become more proficient in virtual team communication. Research questions: (1) Can cross-disciplinary student team projects successfully support learning in virtual team communication as well as address the learning objectives of specific courses? (2) What can faculty learn from a cross-disciplinary teaching model that can be applied to virtual teams? Situating the case: Experiential learning is based on performing real tasks and reflecting on that process; it benefits learners by engaging them in complex, authentic situations. Virtual teams are significant because they support a great deal of the work currently taking place in our global economy; they are significant in higher education because students need to develop skills in international virtual communication before they are introduced to high-stakes work environments. In previous cases, students have collaborated across national cultures to develop project deliverables, such as websites, reports, and usability studies and present them in virtual environments using such tools as WebEx, Skype, and live streaming. How this case was studied: The findings from this case are based on individual student reflections, which were used to create a data matrix for each project, and instructor observation and evaluation. About the case: In Spring 2013, six faculty from the same university worked together to incorporate virtual teams into their classrooms. These six faculty members were divided into two groups of three with each group representing three colleges mentioned earlier. The faculty developed two interdisciplinary projects (one on infographics and another on social media) that enabled rich and diverse student collaboration. In both groups, the three faculty leaders worked together to define a project scope that students could achieve and that would relate to learning goals in each discipline. Conclusions: The lessons learned from this experience are that: (1) technical challenges will occur; (2) students from all disciplines must receive the same information; (3) instructors must balance respect for their colleagues and support for their students; (4) team assignments need to be consistent and fair; (5) instructors need to establish appropriate and fair assessment measurements for their own students; and (6) projects need to be realistic in order to show the students the value of virtual work.

Critically evaluating research papers is an important vehicle for promoting acculturation into a scientific discipline. As science students progress through their undergraduate studies, their critical abilities are expected to become heightened, and research papers are read and cited in order to support a variety of assignments, such as essays, critical reviews and presentations, progressing to shaping laboratory research projects and dissertation-writing. This article describes the process of designing a modular online resource. The resource is aimed at familiarising students with the structural conventions and argumentative devices used in research papers and supporting them in deep-reading a research paper in life sciences or chemistry. The modules employ audio- and video-recorded extracts from interviews with a key author to provide a context for the origins, motivations and processes behind the writing of a specific paper, plus scaffolded questions to encourage critical evaluation of the paper. Notable features of the project were the employment of a multi-disciplinary team of staff and research postgraduates coupled with the developmental testing of the resource by undergraduates. Lessons learnt from the project are considered, including the resource’s integration within the curriculum and the challenges of writing such interactive resources for different disciplines.

In this article, we outline a competency-based approach to teaching business communication. At the heart of this approach, classroom instruction, assignments, and evaluation center on a goals-oriented and receiver-centric understanding of communication in which students are taught strategies for meeting five core competencies of business communication: professional, clear, concise, evidence driven, and persuasive. This is not a reinvention of the curriculum but instead a pivot that positions existing disciplinary knowledge and best practices into a clear, memorable, and professionally oriented framework to help students build critical communication skills that can be applied strategically across a range of business situations.

Abstract President Ronald Reagan’s June 6, 1984, “Address on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day” is one of his most celebrated speeches, and yet no critical assessment of the address exists in rhetorical scholarship. In this article, I examine this speech as a deictic epideictic address, or a speech in which the rhetor uses the physical place, the immediate scene/setting, and the assembled audience as evidence to commemorate the past and chart a clear course for the future. Through this analysis, I argue that Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc is exemplary because it relies on rhetorical vision and deixis to connect a past moment to the present, and in so doing, invites the audience to participate in the discourse emotionally, mentally, and even physically. I conclude by suggesting that a deictic approach to rhetorical criticism offers scholars a vocabulary to describe how speakers can “point” or refer to the physical and material elements of a speech setting as evidence for their argument.

In 1934, Kenneth Burke published an essay, "The Matter of the Document," as an introduction to Charles Reznikoff's book Testimony . The text is not included in standard bibliographies of Burke's writings. This note examines the circumstances of the composition, publication, and failure of Testimony , which may help explain why Burke's introduction has been overlooked. The note then offers an overview of Burke's argument, which characterizes documentary forms of literary composition as both artful and moral. This assessment anticipated Prokofieff's development as a poet, as well as later critical assessments of his work. Burke's view of literary composition from existing documents may be valuable in critically assessing the wide range of contemporary documentary and conceptual poetics in the United States.

This paper is a response to an invitation from the editors of the special issue to comment on the ingredients of effective writing to learn interventions as reflected in the contributions to the special issue. The six papers in the issue vary widely in approach and underlying theoretical frameworks but share the broad common theme of writing to learn. Within this, they vary along three main dimensions: (i) how learning is defined and assessed, and in particular whether they assess effects of the writing intervention on content knowledge; (ii) related to this, whether they are primarily focussed on discipline specific skills or on more general effects of writing; and (iii) whether they are designed to carry out a controlled evaluation of the writing intervention or rather are concerned with describing the design and purpose of a specific intervention. In what follows, I will first consider the general characteristics of the papers in relation to these three dimensions. I will then reflect on the findings of the individual papers, and then conclude by relating the papers to my personal understanding of writing to learn in terms of a dual-process model of writing.

Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts.These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.

This review takes on the assumption that readers of College English believe in democratic practice and the possibility that education can play a role in supporting and cultivating those practices. The books reviewed here are a good reminder that education does not have to be focused on competition and achievement, about defining intelligence through academic aptitude, a reminder well served as the Common Core and its impending assessment shape the nature of public education and its goals.

Timothy Barney is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. His scholarship revolves around Cold War–era public address and visual rhetoric (particularly through the medium of cartography) as well as the political culture of post–Cold War transitions in Germany and the Czech Republic. His book, titled Mapping the Cold War, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He is also working on a new project about the European Union and its promotional activities in the United States.András Bozóki is a professor of political science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, Central/Eastern European politics, the transformation of Communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), and Virtual Republic (2012). He has taught at Columbia University, Tübingen University, Nottingham University, Bologna University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and, in his native Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University. He has been a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS); the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; the Sussex European Institute in Brighton; and the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.Senkou Chou is an affirmative cultural critic. His work bridges rhetoric, media theory, French philosophy, and Chinese culture.Matthew deTar is a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric studies at Whitman College. He recently completed his doctorate in the rhetoric and public culture program at Northwestern University. His research focuses on narratives and figures of public discourse that influence national identity and political speech, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University.Jason A. Edwards is an associate professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Navigating the Post–Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and coeditor of The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. In addition, he has authored more than thirty articles and book chapters appearing in venues such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The Howard Journal of Communications.Martina Klicperová-Baker is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; she is also affiliated with the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health (C-BEACH), San Diego State University. Her research interests include the psychology of democracy, the psychology of democratic transitions, totalitarian experience, assessment of time perspective, moral behavior, and civility.Noemi Marin is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Marin is the author of the book After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (2007) and contributor to several other books, including Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (2007); Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diaspora, and Eastern European Voices (2005); Intercultural Communication and Creative Practices (2005); Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (2000). In addition, she was the coeditor with Cezar M. Ornatowski of the Collocutio section in Advances in the History of Rhetoric in 2006 and 2008–2009. Dr. Marin is the recipient of the 2009 researcher/creative scholar of the year award, Florida Atlantic University, and the 2009 presidential leadership award, Florida Atlantic University; and was named the Fulbright summer institute expert on Eastern Europe in 2003, 2004, and 2011.Cezar M. Ornatowski is a professor of rhetoric and writing studies and is associated faculty in the master of science program in homeland security at San Diego State University. His research includes rhetoric and political transformation (especially in Central/Eastern Europe) as well as intersections between rhetoric, totalitarianism, democracy, and security. In 1999, he was a senior Fulbright research scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary fellow of the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Jane Robinett is a professor emerita of rhetoric and writing studies and English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Her current research interests include rhetoric and trauma studies; rhetoric and nonviolence; and rhetoric and resistance literature. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Costa Rica in 1993.Philippe-Joseph Salazar was educated at Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca) and Louis-le-Grand (Paris), and is a graduate from École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory under Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. He is a sometime director in rhetoric and democracy at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida, and distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a 2009 Laureate recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer award, Africa’s premier research prize, in recognition of his pioneering work in rhetoric studies. His chronicles can be read on http://www.lesinfluences.fr/-Comment-raisonnent-ils-.html and http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/philippejosephsalazar.Anna Szilágyi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in Hungarian language and literature from Eötvös University and a master’s degree in political science from Central European University (both in Budapest, Hungary). She is a multilingual discourse analyst whose research concerns politics, political discourses, media, and journalism in post-Communist Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, especially the rhetorics of nationalism, populism, and far-right radicalism. Her recent publications include “Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Anti-Semitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011” (coauthored with András Kovács) in editors Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson’s collection Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013).David Cratis Williams is a professor of communication studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research broadly concerns rhetorical theory and criticism, public argument, and the synergistic connections between rhetoric and democracy. He focuses both on the study of political argument in Russia and on the life and works of Kenneth Burke. Williams is the executive director of both the Eurasian Communication Association of North America and the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.Marilyn J. Young is the Wayne C. Minnick professor of communication emerita at Florida State University. Her research has focused on political argument with an emphasis on the development of political rhetoric and argument in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. She remains an active scholar in retirement.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

An explanation of the history of standardized tests in the US reveals the ways they have shifted from tools of articulation to tools of accountability not only in K–12 classrooms but also in higher education. Understanding the competing interests at play and the potential effects of the Common Core State Standards at the college level is crucial to reasserting assessment as a teaching and learning practice instead of a system of accountability.

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The study narrates the lives of two Mexican students’ engagements with ecological literacy to argue that literacy as tested and valued in international organizations (PISA, UNESCO, etc.) is highly overrated; indeed, it is a “literacy myth” that success in autonomous literacy has any redeeming effect on the majority of material lives in countries such as Mexico, who suffer from uneven effects of the global economy. In ecological literacy, students have opportunities for action—affordances that alter lives if perceived and utilized. The author argues for a new narrative about literacy, one that understands literacy as ecological by tracing the embodied and experienced literacies of two students, ultimately elaborating on what literacy might look like if we open ourselves to the multiple literacies of most of the world. This essay also argues that traditional literacy assessments neglect to consider how individuals use literacy to navigate an environment impacted by certain global economic policies.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.

In this study, teams in a strategic management classroom were given one of two versions of an assignment related to the development of a team contract: independent individual reflections on desired team behaviors versus team-level reflections on desired behavioral norms. Results of a multivariate analysis of covariance, controlling for gender and individual prior achievement, indicated that teams who engaged in team-level reflection on desired team behavioral norms did not report higher teamwork satisfaction than those who had engaged in individual-level reflection on desired norms, but did report higher team effectiveness, effectiveness of their team member evaluation tool, and higher project scores.