Through a case study of a community organization, The Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, I present a new framework for circulation strategies. The organization composed and distributed research reports on the gendered inequalities in their local economy, which they aimed to circulate locally. However, they encountered local publics that often resisted discourse on gender and gender-related issues. So, the organization developed a strategy focused not on circulating their work, but on challenging the discursive norms of their local publics that structured circulation and engendered the resistance. My case study reveals new ways to research and strategize circulation—aiming not to circulate texts or disrupt ongoing circulation but to challenge and/or make anew the norms that structure circulation.

Reviews James J. Murphy, ed., Demosthenes' On the Crown: Rhetorical Perspec­ tives, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 232 pp. ISBN: 9780809335107 This book has a curious history. First published in 1967 by Random House under the title, Demosthenes' On the Crown: A Critical Case Study of a Masterpiece of Ancient Oratory, the exact same work was then republished in 1983 under the same name by Hermagoras Press. The current volume is a "revised version" of the 1983 publication; the 1967 publication is not acknowledged but is mentioned by one author (201, n. 30). The revision consists of a new Introduction by Murphy, five new chap­ ters (out of eight), and a new half-page epilogue by Murphy. The three retained chapters (from the 1967 publication) are chapter two, a brief sum­ mary of Aeschines' career followed by a summary of his speech Against Ctesiphon by Donovan Ochs; chapter three, a translation of On the Crown (OTC) by John J. Keaney; and chapter four, a brief structural abstract of OTC by Francis Donnelly, first published in 1941. The five new chapters are chapter one, a background chapter on Demosthenes and his times by Lois Agnew, chapters on Aristotle's three main rhetorical divisions - includ­ ing chapter five on ethos by David Mirhady, chapter six on pathos by Richard Katula, and chapter seven on logos by Jeffrey Walker - and an eighth chapter on lexis by Richard Enos. The goal of the volume, according to the introduction is to make OTC "come alive"; in more modest terms, the book seems to be aiming to pro­ vide everything a student unacquainted with the speech might need to appreciate Demosthenes's rhetorical ability and, for more advanced stu­ dents and scholars, to demonstrate how the principles of Aristotle's Rheto­ ric can help appreciate the greatness of OTC. In my view, several chapters succeed quite well in accomplishing this latter goal, while several are less successful. In chapter one, "Demosthenes and his Times," Agnew gives a thor­ ough account of Demosthenes's life and career; she is particularly good at sorting out facts from legends, and she produces a more balanced assess­ ment than the many pro-Demosthenes accounts. I note only two minor mis­ takes. On page 25, the three charges Aeschines brought against Ctesiphon's decree are misstated; the first (not having completed his term in office) is Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 4, pp. 430-439. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.4.430. Reviews 431 stated twice (in slightly different forms) and the second (presenting the crown in the theater) is omitted (the correct charges are on 38, 153). And in the Harpalus affair Demosthenes was not tried in the Areopagus but by a popular jury (see 29). Chapters two and three are adequate, though barely so. Ochs's account of Aeschines's career is highly oversimplified, especially after Agnew's more complex treatment, and his summary of the speech is based on the 1928 Bude edition; a few more recent studies could have been noted (espe­ cially Harris), which are in fact in the bibliography. I cannot see any use for Donnelley's structural abstract, chapter four, which I just find confusing. In chapter five, Mirhady uses Aristotle's view of ethos to understand Demosthenes's sustained and generally successful attempt to portray him­ self as a good democratic citizen, better than his rival Aeschines. Mirhady is a bit dismayed, however, by the (also successful) use of vitriolic rhetoric to portray Aeschines as a piece of scum. In his final thought, Mirhady cau­ tions that this "sustained invective should give readers today some uneasi­ ness about the tendency of democracies to fall under the sway of negative discourse" (126). Mirhadv's concern must be even greater now than it was when his chapter was written. Katula's assignment, chapter six, is pathos. Using Aristotle's theory...

Based on teacher research conducted in an ethnography course in a writing studies department, this ethnographic case study demonstrates the pedagogical benefits of institutional review board–approved, collaborative student research projects. Implementing an experiential learning approach to teaching undergraduate research also revealed that students’ perceptions of what counts as “real” research are more complex than previous studies have indicated.

This paper examines a rhetorical case - Mother Teresa's narrative - for evidence of prophetic qualities, including social calls to action. Mother Teresa's story is considered through established methods of investigating prophecy, such as themes of announcements of judgment and reason and the Messenger formula. Her rhetoric is also examined through the theoretical lens of Walter Fisher's narrative coherence for evidence of biblical ideals and body language. Her lived experiences are also considered evidence of her prophetic nature. Mother Teresa's narrative is read and better valued as part of a wider context of social action consistent with prophecy.

This study offers a critical evaluation of news values by four selected contemporary media outlets: BBC News, The Federalist, OneEurope and Dagbladet. The material covers the controversy around the Norwegian Child Welfare Service with cases of children being taken away from their families, thus it involves cultural and legal aspects of the issue. The analytic categories are based on news value research guidelines that were introduced in the study by Johan Galtung and Mari H. Ruge (1965). In parallel, the philosophical reference is construed through the works by Artur Schopenhauer and Anton Powell. This, in turn, allows evaluating the language that construes newsworthiness from an eristic perspective. The study demonstrates how the eristic application of news values may influence the fair presentation of an issue, at least when a case is presented as involving a controversy. The focus is on the eristic tools of news value enhancement which lead to channeling consumers’ attention in a desirable manner.

Introduction: This case study examines the impacts of component content management (CCM) on the ways global technical communication (TC) stakeholders practice multilingual quality. About the case: The case study is based on the results of a 12-month qualitative case study of global technical communication stakeholders at DreamMedi, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of medical devices. Situating the case:Three areas of inquiry informed the study. Academic and trade literature from technical communication and technical translation revealed disagreements and contradictions that surround multilingual quality in CCM environments. Rhetorical genre theory allowed analyzing multilingual quality by distinguishing content components as a new genre, a unit of analysis, and a mediator of global technical communication. Activity theory provided the theoretical foundation for examining a global TC activity system at its nodes and then elucidating the contradictions within these nodes.Methods/approach:The case study was a multiple-method research project that included observations, in-depth interviews, questionnaires, document collection/content analysis, and software exploration. The Institutional Review Board-approved study focused on technical communicators, translators, and bilingual reviewers. Results/discussion: Relying on thick descriptions of the storylines of global TC stakeholders, this paper pinpoints contradictions in how stakeholders understand and approach multilingual quality. These contradictions are rooted in stakeholders' backgrounds and experience, and become more dramatic after the transition to CCM. Conclusions: Global TC stakeholders lacked strategies for negotiating their understandings of and approaches to multilingual quality in the new information development and management paradigm. Developing such strategies is the key prerequisite for effective cross-functional and cross-cultural collaboration in multilingual CCM environments. Technical communicators are well-positioned to take on leadership roles in developing such strategies.

Reviews 213 concerned primarily with prescriptive correctness. He traces pedagogies that have used these ideas at various times in western schools, but his biggest con­ tribution is examining theories that challenge this paradigm. For example, feminist stylistics, he contends, challenges the rules of convention. Pointing to the works of Cixous and Kristeva, Ray shows that textual structure and organization should be challenged as points of gendering stylistic choice. The last two chapters are on researching style and teaching style. Ray's chapter on researching style shows that there are still major gaps in the research; for instance, he notes that there have been no ethnographic studies on writing styles to date. Additionally, he describes the use of quantitative methods used to describe style, and data mining to describe stylistic featu­ res of writing. Beyond this, there are opportunities for research in rhetorical analysis, stylistics, and discourse analysis. The concluding chapter argues for better teaching strategies in the classroom. The fear is that teaching style will not liberate a curriculum but rather enslave it to prescriptive grammar study. Ray assuages these fears with suggestions for incorporating style in the classroom to develop writing, including ways in which classical rhetoric informs writing instruction in current theory. He invites interdisciplinary work in the classroom to discuss style from the perspective of various dis­ course communities enabling students to see diverse approaches to compo­ sition. Ray ends the chapter on a hopeful note: "For those teachers who adopt them, these guiding principles bring style out of the shadows of col­ lege writing classes, helping to improve students' writing while also per­ haps increasing their satisfaction in producing academic texts required for their success" (p. 219). A significant issue with Ray's book is that it does not quite live up to its lofty claim that "an in-depth, historical, and theoretical understanding of style helps teachers make writing more satisfying and relevant to stu­ dents" (p. 5). This may be true, but the topic is immense, and this is a rather slim volume. At best, Style is, as the title suggests, an introduction. The chapters do establish a framework for style, but they are not genuinely indepth discussions. However, Brian Ray's Style is an invitation for scholars to fill in those gaps, and I believe this book paves the way helpfully for future research. Robert L. Lively Arizona State University A. Pennacini, Discorsi eloquenti da Ulisse a Obama e oltre, Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta, Alessandria: Edizioni dell Orso, 2017 (I ed., 2015), 592 pp. ISBN 9788862746090. Adriano Pennacini é stato uno dei precursori, nell'universitá italiana, del tentativo di intrecciare lo studio delTantica técnica retorica con gli studi classici e con le nuove discipline della comumcazione. Presidente della 214 RHETORICA International Society for the History of Rhetoric dal 1991 al 1993, ha affidato a un corposo volume un 'eloquente' saggio del suo método di analisi della comunicazione persuasiva, che spazia dalla prima 'retorica' omerica fino a quella del (penúltimo) Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e comprende nell'oltre del titolo un esempio della origínale eloquenza di Jorge Bergoglio, papa Francesco. Raccolte di discorsi non mancano nelle biblioteche degli studiosi di retorica. Attingendo alia rinfusa in quella personale (assolutamente parziale e selettiva), posso ricordare: F. Sallustio, Belle parole. I grandi discorsi della storia dalla Bibbia a Paperino, Milano: Bompiani 2004 (anche in questo caso, una diacronicitá quasi esaustiva); G. Pedullá (cur.), Parole al potere. Discorsi politici italiani, Milano: Rizzoli, 2011; C. Ellis, S. Drury Smith (eds.), Say it Plain. A Century of Great African American Speeches, New York-London: The New Press, 2005; C.M. Copeland, Farewell Goodspeed. The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time, New York: Harmony Books, 2003; C. Knorowski (ed.), Gettysburg Replies. The World Respond to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Guilford, Connecticut: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Raccolte importanti (e ne ho elencate davvero pochissime fra le tante circolanti nelle varié parti del mondo), che offrono testi accompagnati spesso da riflessioni e inquadramenti generali, ma che difficilmente si prefiggono e realizzano lo scopo che ha avuto in mente Pennacini nel raccogliere discorsi anti­ chi e moderni accompagnati ciascuno da prove di analisi: quello, cioé, di«mostrare la durata...

Despite the excellent work by scholars who invite us to consider disability, social justice, and business and professional communication pedagogy, little attention has been given to what a disability- and social-justice-centered business and professional communication course might look like in design and implementation. This case study offers an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways disability advocacy and civic engagement manifest themselves in foundational business writing theories and practices. This simulation enabled students to engage with social justice issues by understanding access as an essential part of business and professional communication.

This article, based on a qualitative research study, analyzes the connections between students’ perceptions of power and their varied levels of oral participation in classroom discussion.

As wearable medical technologies take on an increasingly prominent role in how health care is delivered, pressure to make the development process for such devices shorter increases. This case study will recount one attempt at a do-it-yourself (DIY) development process and collaborative usability testing. I argue that these efforts can complement traditional usability methods used in the development process of a wearable diabetes technology and provide more immediate access to technologies that can meet the diverse needs of end users. The case involves an open source DIY project developed by parents of children with type 1 diabetes in order to remotely monitor the blood sugar levels of their children.

This study identifies communication design challenges associated with firefighters' personal protective equipment (PPE), an assemblage of wearable technologies that shield these workers from occupational hazards. Considering two components of modern firefighting PPE through Zuboff's (1998) theorization of information technology, we offer an extended case study that illustrates how these wearables, as interfaces, automate or informate firefighters' practice of safety. Often lauded for their abilities to augment firefighters' work capacities and increase safety outcomes, our analysis revealed that these wearables engender practices that expose firefighters to unforeseen hazards and displace the "tacit craft skills and knowledge" that these workers mobilize to mitigate workplace risk (Spinuzzi, 2005, p. 164). Drawing from these insights, we sketch four points of tension that communication designers, system architects, and practitioners may utilize to consider the informating potential of smart-firefighting PPE equipped with physiological sensors.

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer's rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company's promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions in multiple hearing situations. Reliance on ubiquitous, familiar hardware such as smart phones and intuitive interface design can drive patient comfort and adoption rates of these complex technologies that influence cognitive health, social connectedness, and crucial information access.

As usability research and user-centered design become more prevalent areas of study within technical and professional communication (TPC), it has become important to examine the best practices in designing courses and programs that help students better understand these concepts. This article reports on a case study about how usability research and user-centered design were introduced to TPC students. The article examines how students responded to and articulated new concepts and looks forward to ways TPC programs can develop comprehensive curricula that introduces students to these topics.

Drawing from a larger qualitative research project focused on Black women’s naming practices, I consider how Black women employ Black feminist consciousness practices of self-definition and self-valuation to name, define, and describe their identities. Given the complex history and popularity of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) image within public and private discourses, I focus on how five self-identified Black women claim, utilize, and theorize strong in relation to their identities and as part of their everyday lives. This research calls for more critical engagement of the individual and collective meanings behind words commonly associated with Black womanhood, but doing so by prioritizing the voices and lived experiences of Black women.

This article offers a case study of the development and implementation of a free activist and leadership course for members of the community planning on running for elected office. The article describes how the course was developed, including an explanation of the partnership between the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) and the University of Central Florida’s United Faculty of Florida (UCF-UFF), which resulted in the creation of an Orlando LLI chapter. The Electoral Activism and Leadership Academy (EALA), as the course was called, was motivated by two disability methodologies: first, a “madness narrative methodology” (Fields), wherein “representations are fragmented and nonrational,” even “resisting objectivity, linearity, and rational progression,” and secondly, a “nothing about us without us” methodology (Fields), which advocates the need for open discussions about action with populations who would be affected by such action. These methodologies helped reduce anxiety around the subject, offering a space for instructors and participants to participate as and when they could, share their stories, and get advice. This paper demonstrates that when oppressive cultural and political climates fragment bodies and identities of marginalized people, that fragmentation becomes the catalyst for opportunities of resistance. These fragmentations ultimately are representative of the cracks in oppressive systems, giving rise to the urgent need for the inclusivity of underrepresented or neglected perspectives, voices, and bodies to achieve everyday rhetorical resistance.

In 2012 The New York Times’s “Ethicist” column hosted a public writing contest, asking participants to defend eating meat. The contest sparked controversy due to its panel of judges—all white men. Analyzing this case study and the debate it catalyzed—a dynamic conversation about the problem of yoking animal ethics expertise to white masculine authority—issues calls for a feminist food rhetoric. Applying such an analytical lens illustrates both who may address food with authority and how such power is cultivated from gender stereotypes.

This article reports on a study focused on understanding the relationship between teachers’ emotional responses and the larger contextual factors that shape response practices. Drawing from response and emotion scholarship, this article proposes affective tensions as a way for understanding the tug and pull that teachers experience between what they feel they should do (mostly driven from a pedagogical perspective) and what they are expected to do (mostly driven by an institutional perspective) in a contextual moment. The case study of Kim, a community college instructor, offers an analysis of two affective tensions that emerged from her think-aloud protocol (TAP): responding to grammar/sentence errors over content and responding critically to students she likes. Kim’s case reveals the underlying affective tensions between individual emotions, cultural constructions, and institutional contexts that are negotiated while she responds to student writing. This article concludes with suggestions for identifying emotions and affective tensions that both influence and paralyze writing teachers’ response practices.

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the extent to which an accredited Academic Writing and Publishing (AWP) module for faculty and graduate students helped them develop as scholars and how, over time, it affected their instructional beliefs and attitudes in working with their own undergraduate students. For the two module tutors, it was important to know how the participants applied what they learned from the module in their own teaching practice and to identify particularly effective aspects of the module that translated to this other context. Therefore, key themes explored in this paper are the impact of the module’s critical thinking-reading-writing (CTRW) strategies on faculty writing practice and their subsequent transference to students across a range of disciplines. The module participants include faculty from higher and further education, PhD students, and professional educators (consultants and trainers). While the module tends to draw in new faculty and PhD students, in particular, for the support it provides for increasing their academic publications, this support is balanced with the assistance it can give participants to subsequently help their own students navigate critical thinking, reading and writing in the disciplines. Academic reading and writing, as well as research strategies and the ability to engage with ideas critically, are core expectations in most fields of study in higher education (Spiller & Ferguson, 2011). Complementing these generic competencies are the unique requirements associated with reading, writing and methods of inquiry in particular disciplines. However, Migliaccio and Carrigan (2017) reported that programs often struggle to address writing adequately because of the difficulty of fully evaluating student work and responding to any identified limitations, largely because of the impact on staff workload. Faculty may understand that teaching students to write is nevertheless a shared responsibility, not left to dedicated writing centers or foundational writing/composition courses alone. There are simple strategies that can form part of their daily teaching, such as those suggested by Angelo and Cross (1993) and Bean (2011)—strategies that can help students to deepen their intellectual grasp of a subject and develop the capacity to manage complex ideas in writing. Menary (2007) maintained that “writing is thinking in action” and “the act of writing is itself a process of thinking” (p. 622). Writing can force the clarification of ideas, attention to details and the logical assembly of reasons. However, designing writing activities that can only be completed with mind engagement takes effort on the part of the faculty member, and again, professional development has a role to play here. Clarence (2011) argued that there is a gap between what faculty think students need to do to develop as competent writers and thinkers and what these faculty are doing to help students achieve this goal. The AWP module, which is focused on supporting faculty writing and publishing, can, in turn, be applied pedagogically to students’ holistic writing development in order to begin to close the gap. The next section of this paper describes the context for the study (the AWP module and the participants who provided the data for the study). A literature review discussing critical thinking-reading-writing in the disciplines is then included. A subsequent section explains how this theoretical discussion informs aspects of the module. The research design of the qualitative study (with the module as its context) is then described, followed by an outline of how data were analysed using appropriate qualitative methods, including a process for coding transcripts. Given next is a presentation of the findings, which offer a basis for generalization and conclusions.

Collection and analysis of students' writing samples on a large scale is a part of the research agenda of the emerging writing analytics community that promises to deliver an unprecedented insight into characteristics of student writing. Yet with a large scale often comes variability of contexts in which the samples were produced-different institutions, different purposes of writing, different author demographics, to name just a few possible dimensions of variation. What are the implications of such variation for the ability of automated methods to create indices/features based on the writing samples that would be valid and meaningful? This paper presents a case study in system generalization. Building on a system developed to assess the expression of utility value (a social-psychology-based construct) in essays written by first-year biology students at one postsecondary institution, we vary data parameters and observe system performance. From the point of view of social psychology, all these variants represent the same underlying construct (i.e., utility value), and it is thus very tempting to think that an automatically produced utility-value score could provide a meaningful analytic, consistently, on a large collection of essays. However, findings from this research show that there are challenges: Some variations are easier to deal with than others, and some components of the automated system generalize better than others. The findings are then discussed both in the context of the case study and more generally.

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.

This report details the second phase of an ongoing research project investigating the visual invention and composition processes of scientific researchers. In this phase, four academic researchers completed think-aloud protocols as they composed graphics for research presentations; they also answered follow-up questions about their visual education, pedagogy, genres of practice, and interactions with publics. Results are presented first as narratives and then as topologies—visualizations of the communal beliefs, values, and norms ( topoi) that connect the individual narratives to wider community practices. Results point toward an ecological model of visual invention and composition strategies in the crafting of research graphics. They also suggest that these strategies may be underrepresented in scientists’ education. More explicit attention to them may help improve STEM visual literacy for nonexperts.

This essay argues that institutional ethnography, a methodology LaFrance and Nicolas (2012) describe and advocate for in writing studies, provides a means by which writing center scholars can add to their maps of how their writing center programs coordinate with other writing programs at their institutions. From these maps, we can better articulate what writing center work is and what it is not, advocating for an institutional culture of interdependence. The essay extends the findings from a local institutional ethnography to add insights from multiple institutions. The findings suggest that writing center administrators may advocate for our work not only by arguing for parity with other writing programs, but also by communicating with others within the institution to align our internal narratives with external images. In addition, the findings imply that methodologies such as institutional ethnography are critical for examining the radical relationality central to writing center work.

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers’ understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving conceptions of genre among thirty-three new first-year writing teachers, examining their understandings--and, occasionally, tensions--at different points in time as they encounter the concept in their teacher preparation and with their own students. Through written reflections and focus group interviews, we identify key patterns in how the teachers define genre over time and some of the influences on those dynamic conceptions. Findings from this research have implications for teacher preparation and curriculum development in the context of U.S. college composition.

Expert readers’ responses to texts offer specific, meaningful insights useful in building English language arts models (ELA) for student writers. In the case of academic peer review, previous research has demonstrated that expert reviewers have specific expectations involving readers, texts, and processes. Identifying congruence between research on expert readers and the design of ELA models, however, has proven elusive—and detrimental to the advancement of student learning. One promising integrative direction is the study of two complementary ELA models, one emphasizing the role of meta-reading and the other of cognition. To explore the capability of an ELA model for writing studies informed by expert reader practice, we present a case study that has educative implications for the teaching of writing. Specifically, the study reports the observations of six expert readers reviewing manuscripts for an academic journal in writing studies. Following completion of an online survey of their reading aims as they reviewed manuscripts for publication, colleagues participated in a 30-minute semi-structured recorded interview about their strategies. The interview responses were coded using both meta-reading and cognitive models. Based on analysis of 529 reviewer comments included in the analysis, the findings support conceptualization of integrated, multi-faceted ELA models. While limited, our study has generative research and classroom implications for the development of writing studies pedagogy.

Background: In policy and law contexts, plain-language practice and research tend to focus on the benefits of plain language for specific nonexpert or public audiences. However, as plain-language use has proliferated, documents targeted for revision increasingly include those with insider and expert primary audiences. This study investigates the effects of plain-language revision on insider audiences following the adoption of a revised city charter in a Midwestern US city. Research questions: 1. How does plain-language revision affect the way that insider city-government users make sense of the city charter? 2. How does plain-language revision affect the way that insider city-government users act on the city charter? Literature review: Plain language-a strategy that writers use to make texts more effective for users-is historically and ideologically associated with helping public or vulnerable audiences to access complex information. This core priority toward public or nonexpert audiences is important; however, it has also resulted in a limited understanding of the full scope of plain-language audiences, especially in contexts where insider and expert audiences are primary users. Methodology: This study, informed by genre theory, is a qualitative case study in which textual artifacts and interview data were collected and analyzed using a two-cycle qualitative coding process. Results: The analysis showed many effects, nearly all positive, for insiders and experts. Conclusions: This article focuses on two areas of impact: charter authority and user practices. I explore these areas, which include improved navigation, organization, and processes, through the concept of interplay between the unrevised and revised charters.

Can argumentation schemes play a part in the critical processing of argumentation by lay people? In a qualitative study, participants were invited to come up with strong and weak arguments for a given claim and were subsequently interviewed for why they thought the strong argument was stronger than the weak one. Next, they were presented with a list of arguments and asked to rank these arguments from strongest to weakest, upon which they were asked to motivate their judgments in an interview. In order to assess whether lay people apply argument scheme specific criteria when performing these tasks, five different argumentation schemes were included in this study: argumentation from authority, from example, from analogy, from cause to effect, and from consequences. Laypeople’s use of criteria for argument quality was inferred from interview protocols. The results revealed that participants combined general criteria from informal logic (such as relevance and acceptability) and scheme-specific criteria (such as expertise for argumentation from authority, similarity for argumentation from analogy, effectiveness for argumentation from consequences). The results supported the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical argument scheme rule in a strong sense and provided a more fine-grained view of central processing in the Elaboration Likelihood Model.

This article shares findings from a qualitative study on the experiences of students with disabilities in college-level writing and writing-intensive classrooms. I argue that normative conceptions of time and production can negatively constrain student performance, and I offer the concept of crip time (borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists) as an alternative pedagogical framework.

There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.

This article describes an after-school family literacy program as a model of multiliterate collaboration under and against English Only and anti-immigrant conditions. The model reveals how state politics surrounding language, ethnicity, and citizenship may interact with the activity systems of family literacy programs to redefine what counts as sanctioned language and literacy learning within school spaces. This article details the findings of a qualitative study and includes the goals and curriculum of the program, as well as the recruiting mechanisms, participants, participant feedback, and participant experiences. Findings from the study reveal the role of parental investment in language and literacy learning, language co-construction, and honoring of all languages, cultures, and experiences. This family literacy model contributes to literacy studies by offering possibilities for future school-sponsored, multiliterate family literacy research collaborations to draw from and extend the language and literacy practices and funds of knowledge of ELL students, parents, teachers, and literacy scholars working within English Only and anti-immigrant contexts.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

This article presents a case study using ethnographic and visual methods to investigate the framing activity of engineering students. Findings suggest students use the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis to produce the vivid images needed to frame engineering constraints. Data reveal students multimodally inducing collaboration between group members to construct images as ways to configure engineering constraints. The author argues for the usefulness of hypotyposis for understanding the framing of engineers, technical communicators, and other designers.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

Engineering disciplines have focused on recruiting and retaining women, assessing factors that contribute to decisions to enter or exit the field at every level. While many studies have examined writing in engineering disciplines, few have looked at writing’s role in women’s decisions to remain in or leave engineering. Using a case study of a professional civil engineer, Katy, this study examines the role that writing played in her dissatisfaction with engineering and her ultimate decision to leave the field. The author analyzes two genres of writing, meeting minutes and a preliminary engineering report, to explore how Katy’s writing practices often ran counter to her coworkers’ or supervisors’ approaches. While a single case study makes generalization impossible, this work opens the door to future research that accounts for writing in recruiting and retaining women.

Under the rapid advances of digital technology, traditional paper-based forms of reading and writing are steadily giving way to digital-based literacies, in theory as well as in application. Drawing on a study of literacy in a medical workplace context, this article examines critically the shift toward computer-mediated textual practices. While a considerable body of research has investigated benefits and issues associated with digital literacy tools in medicine, we consider the affordances of paper-based practices. Our analysis of verbal interaction and textual artifacts drawn from a qualitative study of oncology visits indicates that the uses of pen and paper are advantageous for both doctor and patient. Specifically, they allow doctors to process and package information in ways that are favorable to their personal modus operandi, and they enable patients to participate in the medical visit and take an active role in managing their medical treatment. Understanding the affordances of paper-based literacy provides insights for refining digital tools as well as for motivating the design of possible hybrid forms and digital-analog intersections that can best support medical practices.

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.

This article explores the dynamic practice of inviting community members to grade college students on their work in community-engaged partnerships. The authors articulate theories of writing assessment with theories of reciprocity to argue that community-based student evaluations can be a valid and ethical form of assessment, and discuss a case study in which local youth graded college students to offer eight best practices for implementing community-based assessment. As reciprocity is often underemphasized in practice, community evaluations provide a strategy for shifting power toward community members, potentially reinvigorating applications of reciprocity to make them more substantial and meaningful.

This case study reports on the experiences of designing and assessing the effectiveness of a faculty development program on writing across the curriculum (WAC). The report focuses on the question: What are the key components of an effective faculty development program to integrate WAC into engineering and scientific courses taught by faculty in those disciplines? Situating the case: Two main models of WAC implementation exist: direct instruction, which uses writing specialists to deliver instruction to engineering and science students, and the department-centered model, which instructs faculty in engineering and scientific disciplines to teach writing as part of technical courses. How the case was studied: A report of the experiences of the authors and the feedback from the participants. About the case: The workshop was aimed at teachers in various disciplines and covered these main topics: fundamentals of writing theory and pedagogy, writing assignment design and assessment, and situating writing assignments in courses across the disciplinary curriculum. It took place over 10 weeks during a 15-week semester and included large- and small-group meetings, consultations with the members of the university WAC program, and peer review of writing assignment drafts. Conclusions, limitations, and suggestions for future research: Key challenges in developing the workshop included designing ways to bridge the conceptual gap between the participants' and WAC instructors' understanding of the role of writing in disciplinary courses, limited time available to the participants, and scheduling challenges. The workshop was given seven times. Most of the faculty participants (90%) generally found it to be very effective or effective. Studies of workshops with larger populations of trainees are suggested.

Expectancy violations theory, a communicative framework, is applied in this study to understand how recent college graduates form, evaluate, and respond to violated job-searching expectations. In-depth interviews of college seniors ( N = 20) who were currently job searching helped answer the three research questions posed. Using a thematic analysis, the findings indicate that young job seekers evaluate some negative information positively because it reduces their uncertainty and that expectations and responses to expectancy violations change over time and are not stagnant, as the theory originally predicted. Other contributions, limitations, and teaching implications are discussed.

Tracing the literacy practices of an Israeli soldier, this case study examines how his engagement in multilingual and multimodal (MML) composing affects his ways of thinking about and doing literacy. It specifically attends to how MML practices dispose writers to certain orientations to reading, writing, speaking, and design.

In this article, I analyze the debate between Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton on the rhetorical practices appropriate to achieving lucidity (full attention to moral reality). I concentrate on the deployment of untimely terms (taking “soul” as my central example) as a means by which both Gaita and Hamilton attempt to provoke lucidity in the reader. In the final sections of the article, I use this case study of the moral term “soul” to set out a theoretical model for the process of becoming lucid in order to (partially) defend Gaita's philosophical style against Hamilton's criticisms. At stake is the possibility of other forms of rigor, other forms of clarity, and other forms of cogency than analytic philosophizing typically presumes.

This paper examines how the cognitive framework of collective mindfulness complements tenets of user experience in public health crisis communication. Collective mindfulness attunes an organization into preemptively identifying and avoiding potential failures that can have adverse safety and public relations outcomes. To illustrate the connection between this cognitive framework and user experience, this article shares findings from a case study with the 2014 Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, whose primary goals were to improve the usability of Ebola personal protective equipment protocols and to prepare healthcare providers for a U.S. Ebola crisis. Based on a grounded theory investigation, this article suggests that the collective mindfulness principles of deference to expertise, resilience, and refusal to simplify complex procedures informed the team's ability to avoid a catastrophic communication failure. Additionally, these principles allowed the team to attune to key user experience principles, including addressing user context and user limitations.

This article discusses findings from two interconnected ethnographic studies on the out-of-school literacy practices of Black adolescent males: 18-year-old Khaleeq from the US Northeast, and 18-year-old Rendell from the US Midwest. The data analyzed derive from their engagements in nonschool, community-based, social justice initiatives that, we argue, represent rejections of deficit narratives about who they are (their racialized and gendered identities) and what they allegedly cannot do (their literacy capacities and capabilities). Utilizing a critical literacy approach that attends to out-of-school contexts, race, and counternarratives allows us to demonstrate how they questioned narratives of failure that unfairly place blame on Black youth and not on the structural inequalities endemic to US society. These narratives include (among others): the widening gap in achievement and high school graduation rates between Black and White male students in the United States; the school-to-prison pipeline and increasing drop-out and push-out rates that impact high school–aged Black males; and the overrepresentation of Black males in special education classes. Khaleeq and Rendell used literacies to question these racialized narratives and their consequences, and to produce counternarratives to negative assumptions about Black adolescents. As a result, we focus on how they cultivated their literacies, nurtured their spirits, and charted their own trajectories within community spaces when school was not enough. This analysis offers implications for how literacy practitioners and researchers can narrow the school community divide by lovingly attending to the out-of-school literacies of Black adolescents.

Two disabled researchers draw from their experiences conducting an interview study with a population of self-identified disabled faculty members to question some long-held commonplaces about qualitative interviewing. They use the phrase centering disability to emphasize disability as a critical lens and form of embodied experience that has theoretical and methodological implications for qualitative interviewing research design, implementation, and analysis.

Visualizing Digital Seriality" explores the modding community surrounding video games through a case study exploring how serialization relates to digital cultures. Through a series of data visualizations, the topic of seriality and methods of distant reading are offered to enhance critical code studies through digital humanities methods.

Methodologically, this webtext takes up a diversity of modes of making, documenting and reflecting on this shared learning journey, including photography, interviews, participant observation, and a documentary film. This is conveyed through a spatial rhetoric that is designed to evince and allow access to different thematics and elements in the interface so that readers—students, educators, researchers—may differentially traverse the multimodal account of the learning journey.

Safaliba is an understudied indigenous language. Approximately 7–9,000 Ghanaians speak it in a country with a population of about 26.3 million. It is one of an estimated 73 indigenous Ghanaian languages, none of which have a majority of first language speakers. Safaliba speakers are for the most part subsistence farmers, while a minority are teachers, shopkeepers, tradespeople, and craftspeople who often farm too. The purpose of this essay is to share an encapsulated history of literacy of this proud and strong people, as well as document a Safaliba activist’s resistance to hegemonic discourses in Ghanaian language policy. It is a captivating story because of its intergenerational activism, quiet resistance to government materials, and Safaliba materials development from talk to text. The paper frames Safaliba activism as an indigenous people’s late modern resistance to global pressures that are causing languages to disappear at an unprecedented rate. Data are from a larger linguistic ethnography.

Technical communication research has critically engaged with organizational trends toward flattened organizations like networks, horizontal arrangements, and adhocracies, assemblages that hybridize top-down management in favor of autonomous groups. There has been no engagement with a related but distinct trend: worker cooperatives. Co-ops promise similar advantages but are distinct as they claim to deliver what flat organizations promise: access to governance, empowerment, and autonomy. In this article, I survey literature on flattened organizations, apply technical communication theory to account for cooperative communication, and conclude with an analysis from a qualitative study at a cooperative site.