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September 2024

  1. Investigating Multimodal Feedback Methods in Asynchronous Tutoring at the Writing Center
    Abstract

    This study explores the impact of multimodal feedback types on student experiences with asynchronous writing tutoring. Through analysis of survey responses from students who utilized Drop-Off Essay Review appointments at a small, private college, this study finds that the combination of written and video feedback enables students to better understand and engage with asynchronous feedback from their tutors. Findings indicate that most students prefer video feedback or a combination of video and written feedback, noting that the video feedback helps elaborate on the tutor’s written comments. Results also suggest that offering multiple feedback options may help writing centers reach a wider range of students, as participants expressed varying individual preferences for different feedback types. Furthermore, the asynchronous format appears to provide a more comfortable entry point into tutoring for some students. This study contributes to the limited research on multimodal feedback in asynchronous writing tutoring and highlights the importance of examining how combined feedback types impact student experiences. Keywords : asynchronous tutoring, multimodal feedback, writing centers, student engagement, inclusivity Asynchronous methods of tutoring, in which tutors and students provide and review feedback on their own schedule, have been increasingly introduced in many college and university writing centers. While asynchronous tutoring is not a new concept, such tutoring methods provide the opportunity for students to receive feedback on their writing without ever needing to meet with a tutor, which brought great value during the online times of Covid-19 and led to these methods becoming more widespread during and after Covid restrictions. Often, asynchronous feedback is received in a written format, though asynchronous tutoring can also utilize audio and video feedback from tutors. As a new tutor providing asynchronous feedback to students, I often noticed students would not review all forms of feedback provided to them; many would ignore the screencast video provided with their written feedback, and this brought forth the question: were both feedback methods necessary? This study aims to understand how multiple feedback types (written feedback, in which the reviewer uses forms of written communication such as imbedded comments, emails, or letters; audio feedback, in which the reviewer records their voice talking through their feedback; and video feedback, an expansion on audio feedback in which the reviewer provides a video both talking through and showing their feedback) impact student experiences with online writing tutoring when used in combination with one another. This article will first examine previous research on asynchronous feedback methods, looking at comparisons between asynchronous and in-person feedback, considering the specific pros and cons of asynchronous tutoring, and exploring the impact of written versus media feedback, before presenting data from a study that explores student experiences and perceptions of online, multimodal feedback. Overall, I argue that using multiple feedback types creates a valuable relationship between those methods, allowing students to better understand and address asynchronous feedback from their tutors. Previous research has compared asynchronous and face-to-face tutoring (where tutors and students meet at the same time to discuss that paper), finding that the online format can change various aspects within tutoring. In Bell’s study on 10 asynchronous sessions, she found that “tutors are not simply applying the tutoring techniques and strategies they use in in-person session in a new online setting, but they are adapting these tools and approaches” (2019). Buck et al.’s study investigating online tutoring comments also notes how an online setting impacts feedback, explaining that the asynchronous format “introduces many interpretations of the tone” which can shift how feedback is received (2021, p. 38). Separate pieces of research investigating the difference between in-person and online formats also comment on how this difference impacts the tutor-tutee relationship. Buck et al. explain that the “tutor and writer cannot have conversations setting the agenda for the upcoming session,” and that this lack of communication among each leads to a shift in focus between the two, with the tutor and tutee often maintaining different priorities (2021, p. 39). These researchers continue to explain that the lack of contact between the two results in the tutor being unable to adjust their tutoring style in ways that is often done within face-to-face sessions. As tutors are unable to see how students will respond to their feedback, they are unable to get to know their student as a writer in their session, which is often vital to adjusting tutoring feedback based on the writer’s abilities (Buck et al., 2021, p.  39). Bell also explores the tutor-tutee relationships in her research, noting that tutors often made more attempts to define roles between themselves and the student in their sessions in order to “define relationships in an asynchronous setting where participants are not both present to otherwise negotiate and establish roles” ( 2019). Bell also found that tutors adapted to the online setting by finding different approaches to keeping attention on the subject at hand. Within face-to-face tutoring, it is common for tutors to read papers aloud in order to stay on the same page as their tutees. Within Bell’s study, she found that asynchronous tutors utilized screencast videos as a visual prompt to draw attention to the section tutors focused on ( 2019) . Other findings on the shifts between in-person and asynchronous tutoring consist of the format itself. Breuch (2005) explains that the media within face-to-face tutoring remains consistent across sessions, with tutoring always occurring within a physical space and through speaking to one another. In online writing centers, however, there are numerous options to communicate, and communications can take place in a variety of formats such as email or Microsoft Word (p. 23). These differences between the tutoring methods can ultimately impact a student’s experience with writing tutoring. Various literature also demonstrates that many students prefer and value online options for tutoring specifically. A study conducted by Bell and others finds three common variables for why students opt for asynchronous appointments: time, physical space, and feedback. Students feel asynchronous options make “best use of what little time” they have available in their busy schedules, provide a space for those with distance to travel to reach the center or that is more comfortable for those not finding the physical center accommodating for their needs, and provide feedback types that students find favorable (Bell et al., 2021, pp. 6-7). Another study highlighting how many students appreciate online options for tutoring found that 40% of participants from asynchronous appointments said that they would only come for online tutoring, while 57% of in-person respondents said that they would only come for in-person tutoring (Barron et al., 2023 ). This fact highlights the value placed on each tutoring form by students and shows that despite the changes from in-person to online, both options are valued by different students. Aside from students’ preference for the option, online tutoring brings many advantages. As mentioned, previous research establishes the benefits of time, change in physical space, and feedback (Bell et al., 2021, pp. 7-6). Chewning (2015) also comments on the benefit of time in online tutoring, elaborating that such methods provide more freedom to students “particularly in terms of when contributions to the process can be made by either party,” allowing for both tutors and tutees to address the appointment when they are ready and able to (p. 59). Gallagher and Maxfield echo this sentiment, explaining that the online format allows for students to “take breaks and work on certain revisions” before revisiting feedback, allowing for students who might get overwhelmed from large portions of comments to review their tutor’s feedback at their own pace (2019). Another benefit brought from asynchronous tutoring is the permanence of the feedback. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) explain, while students have to rely on memory and any potential notes taken in face-to-face tutoring to inform them while making revisions after an appointment, students in asynchronous appointments are left with written or multimodal artifacts to reference at any point when working on revisions. They further explain that such an artifact can be utilized by students “to build a personal library of supplemental material over time” (2019). Bell and others also discuss this advantage in their study, explaining that because feedback is given in a more permanent format through comments or videos, students are able to revisit this feedback whenever they desire (2021, p. 7). Finally, an interesting benefit brought from asynchronous tutoring methods is that such options provide the ability to reach new students, bringing an aspect of inclusivity that may be lacking from in-person opportunities. In a study that incorporated several new tutoring options onto their campus, including an asynchronous option that they refer to as Written Feedback, it was found that “the more traditional in-person modality was the only modality where a majority (54%) of writers identified as white (191 of 356 respondents)” which suggested that while white students opted for “traditional in-person tutoring,” non-white students tended to prefer non-traditional methods of tutoring (Barron et al., 2023 ). Thus, this study concluded that nontraditional tutoring such as asynchronous tutoring allowed the typical boundaries of the writing center to be stretched in order to reach students who wouldn’t utilize in-person options. A similar finding came in a study investigating why students choose asynchronous options, stating that “those using online tutoring services may do so because in-person writing center programming is not always easy to access and not always designed to be inclusive” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). Thus, various research indicates that asynchronous and online tutoring reaches new audiences, often including students within marginalized groups, who might not feel comfortable visiting the physical writing center. There are also various findings displaying the disadvantages of asynchronous or online tutoring. For instance, Chewning (2015) explains in his findings through implementing online tutoring in his institution that there is value from in-person tutoring that simply cannot be recreated through online tutoring without proper resources which come with financial cost and the need for more staff or training. Due to this need, he states that a hybrid approach where writing centers offer a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous tutoring options, rather than solely replacing face-to-face tutoring with online options, would be more effective for institutions like his that are unable to provide the necessary funding and staffing (p. 61). Breuch (2005) discusses how the frustration people have with online writing centers stems from expecting these online options to function the same as in-person tutoring, but online writing centers need to have their own approach and adapt to the online format in order to be best suited for their format (p. 32). Chewning (2015) discusses how personal preference also means that some writers or even professors may be more receptive to face-to-face tutoring over online options (p. 59). Other research establishes, however, that there is a lot of preference for online formats. A study conducted by Wolfe and Griffin (2012) found that “87% of student writers who participated in an online session either preferred the online environment or had no environment preference” (p. 81). Satisfaction with feedback was also analyzed, and the study “found no significant differences in our expert raters’ perception of the instructional quality of the sessions; moreover, participants were equally satisfied with the consultations regardless of environment” (p. 83). Research on the use of different feedback methods is also crucial to understanding how asynchronous tutoring works. While there has been investigation of the use of video feedback within instructors’ feedback to students for over 10 years, only in recent years have there been writing center-specific research about asynchronous videos. Despite this drawback, findings from outside of the writing center can still inform how writers interact with different feedback types. Research on written feedback is wide with many interesting results. First, there are various ways that written feedback can be provided. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) discuss how asynchronous feedback delivers writing in the format of advice letters, which differs from the common practice of utilizing embedded comments in student papers. These researchers explain how this format “still allows the tutor to address very specific passages, just as embedded comments do, by copying and pasting them into the advice and making them an integrated part of a more global discussion,” allowing the written feedback to focus on larger portions of the text more easily than is done when embedding comments, which focus on a specific section of the paper. Another study incorporated a pilot program testing different online tutoring options. In this study, both email and message board tutorials were utilized as written feedback forms, and it was found that message board tutorials were more effective for this institution (Chewning, 2015, pp. 60-61). As marginal or embedded comments are a more common form of written feedback, however, most research focuses on this type. A study on the effectiveness of online tutoring (ETutoring) comments found that this feedback type results in effective revision from students, explaining that “student revision in response to tutor commentary is typically of a high quality” (Buck et al., 2021, p. 38). A study utilizing Microsoft Word to make marginal comments as a form of written feedback to students in the classroom found that this feedback type tends not to be perceived as conversational by students, even if the instructor makes specific attempts for feedback to be worded conversationally (Silva, 2012). In discussing audio feedback, many researchers point out the humanity that this feedback type brings to the table. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) comment that “A student then knows from page one that the work submitted was reviewed by another person, that a human being has invested time and energy in the student’s success.” This sentiment is echoed within studies done in the classroom setting, in which students comment that their instructor’s video feedback “added a more personal touch” and that “it was fun to put a voice with a name” (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, p. 126). Research on video feedback specifically, rather than simply audio feedback, finds that “Satisfaction with online asynchronous screencast tutoring was readily visible throughout the data, but the importance of offering other tutoring options was also clear” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). In her own study, Bell (2019) also analyzes how screencast videos impacts tutor feedback, explaining that “tutors rarely relied on a single technique or strategy” while creating their video feedback, and that “In addition to providing feedback, tutors appeared to use multiple tutoring strategies and techniques to encourage audience awareness, reflection, and critical thinking, encouraging and engaging writers in the learning process.” Furthermore, in video format, it is found that the combination of visual and auditory feedback provides opportunities for focus on larger concerns while still providing the opportunity to point out specific portions of text (Silva), similarly to how embedded or marginal comments function. Cavanaugh and Song’s (2014) research also noted some comparisons between the two feedback types. They explain, “Students in the study noted that the instructor’s tone was quite favorable when receiving audio comments. They found this in contrast to the tone communicated in written format” (p. 126). Their research also highlighted another difference between the two feedback types in which the focus of feedback provided shifted depending on the feedback type. Within written feedback, it was found that professors often focused on micro-level issues such as grammar and mechanics, while audio feedback typically focused on macro-level issues such as organization and overall topic of the paper (pp. 126-127). This finding was echoed within Silva’s (2012) research in which she explains that written feedback drew attention to specific sections of the paper such as specific words or sentences, while video feedback “afforded detailed discussion of macro level issues.” Students further noted that written feedback tended to be more specific, but audio feedback often was more detailed in providing examples (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 127-128). In discussion of these findings, the researchers suggest that audio feedback provides a more similar experience to face-to-face instruction, which is echoed by some students’ opinions on how the audio feedback was more engaging in maintaining attention similar to when in the classroom (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 128-129). Buck and others (2021) comment on similar findings as it pertains to written feedback, finding that students often utilized written comments from their tutors “to make the most formal revisions, such as changes in spelling, punctuation, and usage” (p. 38). In fact, this study finds that even when tutors do focus on macro-level issues in their written feedback, students “do not respond to those comments most frequently,” and instead opt to focus on micro-level issues (p. 38). Student preferences for feedback types tended to differ, with these studies by Silva, and Cavanaugh and Song highlighting the importance of both options. Both studies show that students found written feedback to be valuable for the revision process but enjoyed the more personal mode of feedback within the video or audio feedback (Silva, 2012; Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 127-129). In the case of Silva’s research, the students who participated requested that their professor utilize a “hybrid approach” of the differing feedback types at the end of the study. While the research above highlights many findings on asynchronous tutoring, this study intends to fill the gap in research on multimodal feedback methods within asynchronous writing tutoring. This study emphasizes the importance of how student experiences may change depending on various feedback types, particularly when one type of feedback is used in combination with another type. While previous research focuses on the impacts of separate feedback types, often not within a tutoring setting, this study investigates how a structure containing multiple feedback methods enables students to engage with their writing feedback in a tutoring setting. At a small, private, comprehensive college in the Mid-Atlantic, Drop-Off Essay Review (Drop-Off) was introduced to the Writing Center in the fall of 2019 to implement asynchronous tutoring alongside in-person and Zoom options. Students are able to sign up their paper, prompt, and rubric through an online submission form for a Drop-Off appointment and receive feedback from a writing tutor by 9 pm the same day as their appointment. Drop-Off utilizes three main forms of feedback: marginal comments left directly on the student’s paper, a cover page attached to the top of the student’s paper, and a screencast video made through Vidgrid provided through a link in the cover page. Tutors are provided instructions for conducting Drop-Off appointments. Such guidelines include leaving feedback that address higher-order concerns such as organization and local concerns such as grammar and mechanics feedback where appropriate. These guidelines also instruct tutors to utilize their recordings to either summarize or explain the feedback they provide through comments and the cover page summary. Finally, tutor instructions for Drop-Off are to spend up to 60 minutes on each appointment without going over this time limit. The cover page summary portion of feedback includes various pieces of information for students to review. First, the rubric provides a section for the tutor to greet the student and introduce themself by name. The next section of the cover page provides a link to the video summary or explanation that the tutor created, while the third section is optional for tutors to utilize whenever additional disclaimers are needed. A notable disclaimer is one warning the student that the tutor did not receive the assignment instructions, and, as such, was not able to ensure that the paper met all requirements; however, multiple disclaimers exist for tutors to utilize (Fig. 1). The rest of the cover page provides the assignment requirements and tells the student which requirements were met, provided that the student attached instructions to their appointment, and gives the three priorities that the tutor focused on when providing feedback. Then, the cover page provides sections for the tutor to point out what the student did well in their paper and what they could change to improve upon their paper. To view the full Drop-Off cover page and its contents, see Appendix A.

July 2024

  1. Beyond accuracy gains: Investigating the impact of individual and collaborative feedback processing on L2 writing development
    Abstract

    Despite the burgeoning research on exploring learner engagement with feedback, how second language (L2) learners’ engagement with feedback in different processing conditions influences their subsequent writing development is under-explored. This study examines the effects of individual and collaborative processing (languaging) of teacher feedback on Chinese lower-secondary school EFL learners’ writing development. Eighty-one students aged 13–14 with A1-A2 levels of English proficiency (according to the Common European Framework of Reference) from two classes and two experienced English teachers participated in the study. Students were provided with comprehensive teacher feedback and were asked to process feedback provided on three writing tasks through either individual written or collaborative oral languaging over six weeks. Pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests were administered. Students’ writing development was analysed using complexity, accuracy, and fluency measures, as well as content and organisation writing scores. Findings showed that the two conditions did not influence students’ writing complexity and fluency differently, while only the collaborative oral languaging condition contributed to students’ sustainable accuracy gains. Results based on the analytic writing scores suggested that students in the two conditions significantly improved content and organisation scores over time. Pedagogical and research implications regarding implementing the two feedback processing conditions are discussed.

    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2024.100876

May 2024

  1. Generous Audience, Activist, Evaluator: Tutor-Teachers’ Knowledge, Practices, and Values for Response to Writing
    Abstract

    The relationship between tutoring and teaching has been a recurrent topic of interest among writing center directors and writing program administrators. While scholarship agrees tutoring experience aids composition teachers with implementing process pedagogy and fostering a collaborative classroom, the relationship between tutoring and assessment of student writing is less clear. This qualitative study uses interviews with eight graduate teaching assistants with tutoring experience to examine how they transfer and juxtapose knowledge, practices, and values for response between the writing center and classroom. Like previous scholarship, this research finds writing center tutoring contributes to teachers’ enactment of constructivist, student-centered pedagogy and enhances their understanding of students’ relationship to writing and feedback, standard language ideology, and systemic inequities in education. However, evaluation led these instructors to experience tension between their values and preferred respondent roles, with many reporting anxious grading processes and some experimenting with alternatives to traditional grading. The article concludes with suggestions to build bridges between tutoring and teaching contexts, particularly through explicit attention to antiracist pedagogy and alternative assessment practices.

  2. What Counts as Legitimate College Writing? An Exploration of Knowledge Structures in Written Feedback
    Abstract

    Research in feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018; Molloy, Boud, & Henderson, 2020; Yu & Liu, 2021; Zhang & Mao, 2023) explores student use of written feedback and barriers to feedback uptake; the role of faculty in designing contextually appropriate feedback has been termed teacher feedback literacy (Carless & Winstone, 2023). When feedback does not achieve desired results, faculty must evaluate their feedback practices; they may be unaware of underlying features that hinder feedback effectiveness. In this paper, a long-time instructor of first-year college composition (FYC) interrogates her own feedback practices using tools from the specialization dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT, Maton 2014; Maton 2016a; Maton 2016b). A translation device (Maton & Chen, 2016) connecting feedback data to LCT concepts was constructed to code responses to 105 student drafts. Subsequent analysis reveals that knowledge codes, which legitimate student achievement through demonstration of specialized knowledge and skills, predominate in the feedback. Comments foregrounding the dispositions, intentions, and agency of the student writers occur much less frequently. From these results, the instructor identifies potential barriers to student feedback uptake, including code mismatches and code confusion, which may be mitigated through adjustments to written responses and classroom instruction.

  3. Transforming Feedback Practices through the Use of Screencast Video Feedback in L2 Writing Classrooms
    Abstract

    Giving feedback to student writing is one of the writing teacher’s most important tasks in the classroom, and there are many forms of feedback that writing teachers can use such as written feedback, teacher-student conferencing, peer feedback or self-assessment. More than these options, the influx of technologies into writing classrooms provides teachers with the use of screencast video feedback when responding to student writing. In this article, two second language writing teachers questioned their feedback practices when responding to students’ texts and implemented feedback innovation by using screencast video feedback in their classrooms with the goal of exploring how their attempts to use video feedback affected their individual practices. The implementation of video feedback opened their eyes as writing teachers because of its multimodality. The combination of aural, visual, textual, and gestural modes was particularly innovative for them because it helps them to envision feedback as a tool for promoting the improvement and learning of writing instead of correcting students’ immediate errors in writing. This article provides ideas and suggestions for writing teachers interested in improving feedback practices with screencast video feedback.

  4. “With a little help from my friends”: Effects of a self-reflection tool and social interaction on orthographic performance
    Abstract

    This study investigates the impact of peer orthographic revision using a self-reflection tool on orthographic performance in order to improve the understanding and applying of phonological, contextual and morphological rules in third-grade students. Children were assigned to one of three groups: two experimental groups (individual group, dyadic interaction group) and a control group. In the experimental training programme, a self-correction orthographic rubric was used, but while children in the individual group self-corrected the words, children in the dyadic interaction group did it in pairs and interacted in a way such that they should always reach an agreement on the correct spelling. The results showed that although both experimental groups decreased the number of misspellings in the post-test, the dyadic interaction group had the best results, differing significantly from the others, suggesting that self-correction strategies based on rubrics that explicitly display orthographical rules along with collaborative peer learning have a very positive impact on orthographic.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2024.16.02.05

April 2024

  1. Visualizing formative feedback in statistics writing: An exploratory study of student motivation using DocuScope Write & Audit
    Abstract

    Recently, formative feedback in writing instruction has been supported by technologies generally referred to as Automated Writing Evaluation tools. However, such tools are limited in their capacity to explore specific disciplinary genres, and they have shown mixed results in student writing improvement. We explore how technology-enhanced writing interventions can positively affect student attitudes toward and beliefs about writing, both reinforcing content knowledge and increasing student motivation. Using a student-facing text-visualization tool called Write & Audit, we hosted revision workshops for students (n = 30) in an introductory-level statistics course at a large North American University. The tool is designed to be flexible: instructors of various courses can create expectations and predefine topics that are genre-specific. In this way, students are offered non-evaluative formative feedback which redirects them to field-specific strategies. To gauge the usefulness of Write & Audit, we used a previously validated survey instrument designed to measure the construct model of student motivation (Ling et al. 2021). Our results show significant increases in student self-efficacy and beliefs about the importance of content in successful writing. We contextualize these findings with data from three student think-aloud interviews, which demonstrate metacognitive awareness while using the tool. Ultimately, this exploratory study is non-experimental, but it contributes a novel approach to automated formative feedback and confirms the promising potential of Write & Audit.

    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2024.100830
  2. Developing Dispositions for Transfer
    Abstract

    Abstract This article suggests pedagogical practices to help first-generation students gain effective problem-solving strategies for the future transfer of writing knowledge and skills. The retention of first-generation students depends on developing four positive dispositions for learning: success attribution, self-efficacy, expectancy value, and self-regulation. Meaningful writing assignments with a connection to students’ cultural experiences are an essential foundation for improving transfer. Specific reflective activities are detailed for analyzing emotional reactions to writing experiences, evaluating procedural writing strategies, and solving current and future writing-related problems. A reflective problem-solving pedagogy promotes deep learning by emphasizing students’ agency in responding to writing difficulties and their resourcefulness in creating successful solutions.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-11030760

March 2024

  1. Back to the Basics: Uncovering the Rhetoric Student Learning Outcome
    Abstract

    Using an evaluative approach within a professional communication service course, we used student documents and instructor feedback to uncover how students and instructors were understanding the rhetoric student learning outcome (SLO). Because rhetoric is central to the course, our driving questions were, Can we locate language that actualizes the rhetoric SLO in student documents? How does faculty feedback articulate the rhetoric SLO to facilitate effective revision? Overall, we found that whether identifying rhetoric in student documents or instructor feedback, the interpretation was varied and opens up room in pedagogical practices. We offer three implications for teaching: enhancing attention to teaching rhetoric, improving assignment design, and focusing on professional development for faculty.

    doi:10.1177/23294906231213631

February 2024

  1. Problem-solving activity during the foreign language writing process: A proposal for categorisation and visualisation of source use and a new take on fluency in multilingual writing
    Abstract

    Writing processes constitute a complex interplay of planning, formulation and revision. Ideas take shape through the activation of previous knowledge and, when permitted, also its synthesis with information from sources that help to complement it and resolve doubts and shortcomings arising during writing. The possibility to use external help can be especially useful to those writing in a foreign language, and questions about the nature of the sources consulted can contribute new insights into language processing in the multilingual mind, as well as expand our notion of fluency. While leaving the target text is often considered a distraction, a ‘breakdown’ in fluency, it is, in fact, a part of language processing and text creation.       This article proposes a novel way to use keylogging data from Inputlog (Leijten and Van Waes 2013) to visualise the crosslinguistic nature of solving language and content problems in L3+ writing: creating process graphs to display the temporal dynamics of different types of sources used. The example data comes from a university-level course on Spanish linguistics, where Spanish was a third or subsequent language for the participants. Evidently, the vast majority of their external activity was language-related and brief, and, interestingly, a great part of it recurs to a lingua franca, English. Some social context and reasoning is offered to explain such an observation.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2024.16.01.05
  2. How Do We Know It Works? Feedback Loops to Raise the Messy Middle in Online Formative Peer Assessment
    Abstract

    Qualitative and then quantitative analysis of student review comments assessing peer review instructions found that students needed even more direction and structure than initially given. Specifically, shorter feedback statements—a twenty-one-to forty-word range—can be useful if they provide both evaluative and suggestive comments to guide revision.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2024753513

January 2024

  1. Reading, receiving, revising: A case study on the relationship between peer review and revision in writing-to-learn
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2024.100808
  2. Challenging Assessment Practices, and the Need for Multimodal Applications to Service Learning in First-Year Composition
    Abstract

    To be editors in what is now the Age of Artificial Intelligence is not without a feeling of jamais vu.Our practices are predicated upon the existence of the author, which has been called into question by large language models.Although artificial intelligence is not an author because it cannot produce an original text, its texts are, or soon will be, indistinguishable from those produced by an author.In other words, if the original text and the unoriginal text are identical, then any author is simultaneously a nonauthor.We see this paradox, in its mix of the strange and the familiar, as part of an epistemic transformation of our relationship to the text.This paradox is sustained by a cultural resistance to our changing understanding of authorship.Despite the prominence of such essays as Barthes' (1977) "The Death of the Author" and Foucault's ( 1978) "What is an Author?", which dispute historical assumptions about the author as the origin of the text, these theories have never made "the pedagogical turn" (Graff, 1995) into a praxis for relocating the text's origin.Writing is still widely taught as a response to prompts, which locate the origin of the text inside the student.This method of instruction directs attention to the text as it tacitly perpetuates a belief that writing well is a "gift" innate to the individual.Michael Palmquist and Richard Young (1992) observed that this belief does indeed reappear in the writing classroom and pointed out that students who consider themselves ungifted may not pursue opportunities for learning, given the futility of trying to improve an ability they do not possess.There is a symbolic violence to this process by which students embody a belief that they cannot write but are nevertheless confronted with prompts to revise their writing.Consequently, they may avoid revision because they see it not as practice for improvement but as "punishment" (Downs, 2015, p. 67) for being wrong.This symbolic violence can, however, be converted into critical thinking if the text's origin is relocated.Consider an instruction to produce a piece of writing not by responding to the prompt but by replacing its interrogative pronoun (what, which, who, whom, whose) with its antecedent.The student thereby locates the origin of the text outside themself in a preexisting first draft they make present in writing.The instructor, in turn, decides what part of the text is still missing and adds to the draft the interrogative pronoun or proadverb (why, where, when, how) in a prompt for revision.The student, in turn, replaces the interrogative with its antecedent to produce a second draft.And as an interrogative can be addressed to any draft, revision, as a reversal of proformation, is the disclosure of a text that ever exceeds it.Through revision students gradually embody improvement as "a feel for the game" (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25), a practical sense of which words go where, and through prompts they reflect on how their manipulation of these words enacts meaningful

    doi:10.37514/dbh-j.2024.12.1.06
  3. Reflections on Learning: Revision Reflections As Insight into the Influences on Students� Revisions on a Writing-to-Learn Assignment
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2024.35.1.02
  4. Developing Symbiotic Institutional Partnerships: An FYC and Library Collaboration to Increase Multimodal Instruction
    Abstract

    Describing the incorporation, assessment, and revision of a multimodal project partnership between a first-year writing program and a studio library, this webtext argues for more in-depth partnerships between writing programs and libraries.

2024

  1. Fostering Sustainable Student Revision Practices: A Call to Reimagine Revision’s Place in the Composition Classroom
    Abstract

    In this article, I argue for centralizing revision in FYC classrooms, thereby establishing it as the vital component of composition that it is. I show that engagement with revision in FYC courses tends to be minimal, relegated to the end of a project, or completely omitted. These low standards for revision pedagogy can result in students not having the know-how or confidence to revise their work as they advance in their careers. Thus, one aim of mine is to invigorate the conversation surrounding revision pedagogy and, in doing so, invite composition instructors to consider altering their own approaches to guiding student revision. To this end, I offer FYC instructors several pedagogical strategies which are easy to implement and which may help students establish and build effective revision practices they can carry with them throughout their college careers and beyond.

  2. Using Content Analysis and Text Mining to Examine the Effects of Asynchronous Online Tutoring on Revision
    Abstract

    What do writers do with the feedback they receive? While the answer will vary depending on the writer’s experience and the rhetorical situation, understanding what writers do can provide important information for course redesign and professional development of tutors and instructors. In this first of two manuscripts, the authors examine how first-semester, first-year writing students use responses provided via asynchronous online tutoring (AOT) in revising their assignments. Our primary research question was: What was happening in—and after—those tutorials? We addressed this question by a process of narrowing and refining of data analysis toward increasingly precise inferences as we progressed from automated to coded analysis, which culminated in examining the drafts submitted for tutoring, tutor feedback, and the subsequent assignments submitted for evaluation in the students’ FYW courses. In parallel, we describe the writing analytics–informed methods used to do so in hopes that others will be compelled to replicate or extend this work in their own contexts. We found that students made corresponding revisions at both macro and microstructural levels when provided with directive or declarative feedback, and they made few revisions when tutors provided open-ended questions.

    doi:10.7771/2832-9414.1943

July 2023

  1. The development of teacher feedback literacy in situ: EFL writing teachers’ endeavor to human-computer-AWE integral feedback innovation
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2023.100739
  2. The development and validation of a scale on L2 writing teacher feedback literacy
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2023.100743

June 2023

  1. Engineering Students’ Writing Perceptions Impact Their Conceptual Learning
    Abstract

    <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Technical writing is a critical professional skill for engineers, but engineering students often perceive writing as less important. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Research suggests feedback, revision, and reflective writing support conceptual learning. However, just as student beliefs about intelligence impact engagement and learning outcomes, beliefs about writing may likewise affect how valuable writing is to learning. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. Do student beliefs—expressed in reflections—depict writing as a learning process or as a deterministic artifact? 2. To what extent do these expressed beliefs explain variance in their conceptual learning in a chemical engineering laboratory course? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> A design-based research study was conducted in three semesters of an upper division chemical engineering laboratory course to jointly study the use of feedback, revision, and reflection, and to develop contextualized theory about the relationships between these and students’ conceptual learning. Students’ writing was analyzed qualitatively. Regression modelling explained variance in scores of students’ conceptual understanding. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> We found that students who elaborated on errors and corrections scored significantly lower on conceptual understanding in their final submission, while students who described writing as an ongoing process scored significantly higher on conceptual understanding in their final reports. We found a similar trend for students who completed a second cycle, and especially that a focus on perfecting a written artifact corresponded to lesser gains. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Our findings lend support for assisting engineering students to approach writing as a developmental and learning process and for engaging them in multiple rounds of feedback, revision, and reflection across their programs of study.

    doi:10.1109/tpc.2023.3251159
  2. Exploring how response technologies shape instructor feedback: A comparison of Canvas Speedgrader, Google Docs, and Turnitin GradeMark
    Abstract

    There have been few studies examining the variation that exists within modes of feedback: for example, comparing how electronic text feedback created using Google Docs differs from electronic text feedback created using Microsoft Word or how audiovisual feedback created using TechSmith Capture differs from audiovisual feedback created using Screencast-O-Matic. However, the programs that instructors use to create feedback have different affordances, meaning that even within a single mode, the feedback students receive on their writing can vary significantly. To better understand the variation that exists within a single mode, this study investigates how affordances of Canvas Speedgrader, Google Docs, and Turnitin GradeMark impacted electronic text feedback.Based on analysis of 131 feedback files created using the 3 programs, in conjunction with 5 student surveys, and 2 instructor interviews, the study provides insights into how instructor written commentary (location, form, type, focus, and mitigation) varied by program and how participants perceived of feedback provided through the 3 programs. The study...s primary finding is that the affordances of the programs used to create electronic text feedbackresulted in significant differences ininstructorcommentary and instructor and student perceptions of feedback.

    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2023.102777

May 2023

  1. (An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon
    Abstract

    To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2200701

April 2023

  1. Written corrective feedback and learner engagement: A case study of a French as a second language program
    Abstract

    Within the context of second language (L2) writing, learner engagement with feedback has elicited significant theoretical and empirical interest (e.g., Zhang & Hyland, 2018; Zheng & Yu, 2018). Research has highlighted the dynamic nature of learner engagement with corrective feedback (WCF), but the ways in which learner and contextual factors impact such engagement with WCF in authentic classrooms are still underexplored (Han, 2019). Furthermore, little is known about how L2 learners engage with WCF from an ecological perspective, which considers the relationships between learners and their surrounding environments (Bronfenbrenner,1993; van Lier, 2000). Situated in an adult French as a second language (FSL) setting in Canada, this study adopted an ecological perspective to analyze the influence of learner and contextual factors on learners’ affective, cognitive, and behavioural engagement with WCF on linguistic errors. Participants in this study were five adult students registered in an FSL program in the francophone province of Quebec. Data were collected from multiple sources, including students’ drafts with written feedback provided, semi-structured interviews, retrospective verbal reports, and other class documents. Findings show that learner and contextual factors influence learners’ affective, cognitive, and behavioural engagement with WCF in a number of complex ways.

  2. Teaching Students to Close Read Feedback
    Abstract

    This article describes an exercise that can be implemented in a range of writing classrooms in order to help students unpack and craft a revision plan based on instructor or peer feedback that they received on their writing.

  3. Stylizing Peer Feedback through Playful Shells
    Abstract

    In this teaching tip, I introduce a hermit crab review activity. In the hermit crab review, students take an unusual form to contain their peer feedback, a form that frames and curates their peer response. This playful form of peer feedback makes peer review more accessible to students who are not proficient in providing feedback.

  4. Developing teacher feedback literacy through self-study: Exploring written commentary in a critical language writing curriculum
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2023.100709
  5. Feedback on writing through the lens of activity theory: An exploration of changes to peer-to-peer interactions
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2023.100720
  6. The relationship between peer feedback features and revision sources mediated by feedback acceptance: The effect on undergraduate students’ writing performance
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2023.100725

February 2023

  1. Field Guide to Lost Futures: A Collaborative Engagement with the Anthropocene
    Abstract

    The Field Guide to Lost Futures is a collaborative digital humanities assignment created for an upper-year English and cultural studies seminar. The course engaged with the expansive and complex topic of the Anthropocene, from a humanities and specifically cultural studies perspective. To focus student’s engagements with the many catastrophes associated with the Anthropocene, the assignment asked them to profile a single, concrete example of loss related to ongoing environmental crises in a brief contribution to the Field Guide website. Designed with the isolation and dispersal of students due to COVID-19 virtual learning, the Field Guide assignment brought students together in a collective project without the pressures of group work. The assignment was organized as a portfolio of four low-stakes activities that led to the final Field Guide entry. The scaffolded design and experiential nature of the assignment emphasized the multi-stage nature of writing and revision, as well as editorial considerations unique to writing for an online audience.

    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v7i1.117
  2. Screencasting for technical writing students
    Abstract

    Significant research has been conducted in the past several decades on best practices in providing feedback to students’ writing. Over the past two decades, feedback methods have evolved as writing classes have transitioned from face-to-face traditional classrooms to online classrooms and as technology has advanced. Written feedback has moved from handwritten notes in the margins of a paper to typed feedback using commenting tools. Audio feedback has gone from the cassette tape to the MP3 file. One of the most recent trends in feedback to students’ writing is in video form using screencasting technology. Video feedback through screencasting is especially beneficial in the technical writing classroom, where students often need to see the problems in their document. Students often benefit from seeing why they need more white space, why their graphics are not clear, why their alignment is off, why their instructions are not precise for their audience, why their numbered steps are not developed correctly, and why a host of other design principles could be improved. Moreover, video feedback through screencasting technology is becoming more popular in the workplace. Exposing students in technical writing classes to screencasting feedback has the potential not only to improve their writing but also to enhance their readiness for the workplace.

    doi:10.1558/wap.22505

January 2023

  1. Trivialization and Disembodiment of the Black Lives Matter Movement through the Hashtag #BlackLinesMatter
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 I am grateful to RR reviewers Brandee Easter and Bridget Gelms for their help and guidance in the revision process and to Erin Johns Speese for her invaluable feedback throughout my work on this manuscript.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2022.2148235
  2. Learner Engagement with Written Corrective Feedback: The Case of Automated Writing Evaluation
    Abstract

    The study explored six ESL university students’ behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement with e-rater feedback on local issues and examined any changes in students’ engagement over two weeks. We explored behavioral engagement through the analysis of screencasts of students’ e-rater usage and writing assignments. We measured cognitive and affective engagement by analyzing students’ comments during the think-aloud protocol and reflection surveys. The findings indicated that the students had varying levels of engagement with the feedback. Behaviorally, all students used a range of revision operations to address errors based on the provided feedback. Cognitively, some students were more engaged than others. Affectively, students experienced both positive and negative reactions toward e-rater feedback. While some students’ engagement with feedback did not change over two weeks, others’ engagement grew more negative. We conclude that e-rater feedback could positively impact students’ accuracy in local aspects of writing if students are actively engaged with the feedback.

  3. Writing Process Feedback Based on Keystroke Logging and Comparison With Exemplars: Effects on the Quality and Process of Synthesis Texts
    Abstract

    This intervention study aimed to test the effect of writing process feedback. Sixty-five Grade 10 students received a personal report based on keystroke logging data, including information on several writing process aspects. Participants compared their writing process to exemplar processes of equally scoring (position-setting condition) or higher-scoring students (feed-forward condition). The effect of the feedback on writing performance and process was compared to a national baseline study. Results showed that feed-forward process feedback had an effect on text quality comparable to one grade of regular schooling. The feedback had an effect on production, pausing, revision, and source use, which indicates that it supported participants in self-regulating their writing process. Additionally, we explored the students’ perception of the feedback to get an insight into its strengths and weaknesses. This study shows the potential of writing process feedback and discusses pedagogical implications and options for future research.

    doi:10.1177/07410883221127998

December 2022

  1. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
    Abstract

    The cover art for Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World is startling and alluring.1 A Black female human-animal defiantly meets one’s gaze. With bull-like horns and ears jutting out of both sides of the head, thick, matted hair (fur?) migrating from the crown of the head to the brow, this portrait of a hybrid species challenges the senses and the imaginary. Leaning into the spectator’s eyeline with shoulders angled and breasts partly obscured by the enveloping shadows out of which she emerges and seems to crouch into, this Black female human-animal provokes questions: What sort of being is this? What kind of being is the Black woman? Becoming Human is a complex, and at times dense, meditation on these and related queries into anti-Blackness, new materialism, and the roles that Black women’s bodies have played historically and contemporaneously in philosophical and biological discourses on the human. Recent studies interrogating the “genre” of “Man” range across literary studies, aesthetics, geography, Black studies, and animal studies. Jackson’s work thinks alongside and rebuts claims developed in these fields by centering “gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness” (4).Becoming Human is expansive and involves eclectic case studies: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” the mercurial artistry of Wangechi Mutu, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. What links these diverse aesthetic “objects” and artistic practices are their interventions into how we come to see, feel, and know the (non)being of Blackness and the ongoing reproduction of Blackened bodies. There is much to commend in Becoming Human—its explorations and critiques of the supposed binarism involved in positing human/culture divides, its explications of some foundational philosophies assembling the tenets of anti-Blackness, and its recognition of the significance of signification; that is, its mobilization of a mode of rhetorical thinking. Moreover, Jackson delivers some truly engaging and unique discussions of discursive forms, paying particular attention to “blackness’s abject generativity” (69), a phenomenon she also calls Blackness’s “natal function” (70). This ambitious project unfolds along three interdependent, yet distinct registers: (1) a philosophical questioning of the underpinnings of anti-Blackness, (2) a robust critique of aesthetic formations and their potentiality for altering the terms of (non)humanity, (3) an encounter with materiality’s discursivity—or, discourse’s materiality. This review delineates each register, keeping in mind that each register is deeply imbricated in the others.It has become relatively normative in thinking about anti-Blackness and racism to assert or proffer the notion that Blackness is barred from the ontological status of human (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). That is, to premise one’s intervention into racialization of diverse kinds on how technologies of slavery and colonialism (and their afterlives) deny Blackness ontological ground as a human being, indeed, to repudiate (Black) being as such. There is, of course, strong evidence of such an absolute exile operating as the condition of possibility for what counts as human life and the fungibility of Blackened bodies. But since Jackson seeks to trouble binarism itself, she asserts the “concept of plasticity, which maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously . . . being everything and nothing for an order . . . constructs black(ened) humanity as privation and exorbitance of form” (35). In this formulation, the essential question is no longer whether or not Blackness is animalistic, it’s what specific labors are accomplished through discursive practices of animalization? Jackson posits that there is a “selective recognition” of Black humanity alongside violent exclusion. And so, what logics govern the selection? In short, these logics go by the name anti-Blackness and generate historically contingent abjection, debility, and disposability. Jackson interrogates foundational Western philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger to show how treatises like the latter’s Introduction to Metaphysics worked to separate what counts as philosophy from “Hottentots” and primitivism writ large. Jackson asserts that Hegel’s perceptions of Africa and Africans as possessing no history or development, representing the antithesis of the fullness of Dasein as human essence, haunts Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, the philosophical capacity for human being to build worlds (utilizing the natural resources of earth) gets counterposed in Heidegger to those Black bodies that lack this human capacity—those bodies and populations that are locked permanently within the animal-earth relation, the Black (98–99). Becoming Human, then, seeks to disturb these foundations by reiterating “that blackness, and the abject fleshy figures that bear the weight of the world, is a being (something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything), and I aim to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest blackness is nothingness” (83).The more difficult challenge facing readers of this work is embedded within the relations among the various figurations of the Black female body as a sexuating, reproducing organism. Here the conceptualization relies on how the Black female body is treated in discourses of biology as capable of bringing new (male and female) bodies into the world and not capable of being truly feminine, a caesura that begets and preserves white femininity. Jackson relies on queer science fiction to illuminate and cast doubt upon these anti-Black operations. Chapter 2 features an analysis of the “postcolonial science fiction” (88) of Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and chapter 3 forwards the “insect poetics” (121) of Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Although each work offers very different versions of Black woman futurity, they allow for Jackson to think about Blackened female bodies and the biopolitical imperatives of reproduction. How might, Jackson asks, Blackened female bodies resist or transform the ongoing commands issued by biopolitics to make more bodies even as this reproduction diminishes the self? In the case of “Bloodchild,” Jackson contemplates how discourses of species are racialized to provide warrants for the domination of not only animals—like Blackened female bodies—but also “insects and microorganisms, such as parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi, and bacteria” (132). Jackson is, in short, attempting to illustrate how anti-Blackness invents multiple forms of organisms as the “‘enemy of man’” (136), thus proposing that (inter)planetary alliances among Blackened bodies (even microscopic ones) are possible and necessary for liberation.To offer plasticity as the mode of anti-Blackness is to conceive of racism as an exceptionally potent assemblage of aesthetic practices organized by and housed within biopolitical aesthetic regimes like the slave plantation. From this perspective, Becoming Human contemplates the shaping, constituting, and mutating forces acting on individual and social bodies and things. Importantly, among these “things” are Black female bodies and the artistic practices of those very bodies. Hence, Jackson understands anti-Blackness as a biopolitical and economic generative force through which one can witness how “the coordinates of the human body are forcefully altered into a different shape or form—bizarre and fantastic: human personality is made ‘wild’ under the weight of blackness’s production as seemingly pure potentiality” (70–71). In the case of chattel slavery, the slave body was made to become whatever it must become to serve the fickle and gratuitous interests of the slaver’s fears and desires—to bear the lash, to bear children, to bear unimaginable grief. The Black female human-animal is an object of an aesthetics that cannot be dissociated (in reality or in phantasy) from the conceits of the aesthetic values attributed to whiteness. Becoming Human, therefore, engages a variety of aesthetic forms as it maps the terrain of anti-Blackness. For the purposes of this review, there are two notable examples in addition to the Black female human-animal worth elaborating upon: the slave narrative and the novel’s unique status as a literary form.Prior to taking up Morrison’s Beloved as a neo–slave narrative, Jackson comments on the genre of slave narration and Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical performances. A genre is not simply an arrangement of elements that constrain artistic practices—although it is that—it constitutes and mobilizes affective logics governing systems of social relations. As such, the slave narrative depends on “sentimentality,” a “privileged rhetorical mode” that establishes “empathic identification” among speakers and audiences (56). Although this rhetorical mode may build “bonds of kindness” important to abolitionism, it also reifies racial hierarchies and social laws pertinent to anti-Blackness’s continuation and revision. Douglass’s “‘formal mastery’ of genres of masculine, republican elocution” (56) cannot disable the racist aesthetics of animalization. Nor can it transfer his conditional humanity onto other Black bodies. In this respect, the genre of the slave narrative has less to do with Black freedom; it solicits Black artistic practices as a “pretext for racial hierarchy in the form of a pedagogy in white ideality and the pathologization and criminalization of blackness” (58).Jackson’s critique of the racializing affects of Western aesthetics continues with a consideration of the historical context of the emergence of the novel as honored literary form. The prestige of the novel as a literary form is involved in the elevation of rational man and its forms of speech. Taken to be a reflection of immanent subjectivity and the transcendence of nature, the novel operates as a metaphor; it signifies the attainment of high culture and the vulgar existence of Black flesh that lacks the powers of self-reflection. The novel is also popularized through market economies constitutive of global colonialism and chattel slavery. Importantly, the novel participates in and furthers a “certain nationalist myth of language” engendering a reverence for its literary form as white-nation speech. This is the historical-aesthetical formulation into which Beloved and Brown Girl intervene—as counterstatements to this racist aesthetics and as ways to imagine worldly relations differently (90–99) (see also Bakhtin 1986).By centering the concept of plasticity in its analysis, Becoming Human produces an aperture through which one can appreciate the rhetorical character of anti-Blackness and the aesthetics of racism. Throughout the work Jackson reveals a sensitivity to discursivity. When discussing the genre of the slave narrative, she refers to the “rhetorical inheritance” passed down from the “literary cultural industry” regulating the form slave narratives can take (52). Genre, therefore, offers up and excludes from consideration specific topoi for rhetorical invention. But as Jackson works her way through this register involving the entanglement of genre, trope, and the Black female body, the “natal function” of Blackness ushers into view the idea that “the slave is the discursive-material site that must contend with the demand for seemingly infinite malleability, a demand whose limits are set merely by the tyrannies of will and imagination” (72). Plasticity is an effect of this discursive-material relation as it violently seizes and molds bodies, in part, by continuously enlisting various forms of biopolitical administration. The implications and limitations of this relation get teased out in the work’s final chapter, “Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde” (159–98). Rather than explore Jackson’s examination of Mutu and Lorde, the final stage of this review tries to clarify the stakes for rhetorical theory expressed by Jackson’s staging of her critique.Beginning with the traditional biocentric view that human beings are determined by biological processes, and that culture is subsidiary, Jackson utilizes the work of Sylvia Wynter to engage “sociogeny” as a refutation of biocentricity that has gained traction over the past two decades. Instead of privileging biology (forgetting that biology is itself discursive like metaphysics), Becoming Human questions the “and” posited in “discursivity and materiality” (160). Indeed, “antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-called biological sex is modulated by ‘culture’ . . . at the registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness produces differential biocultural effects of gender and sex” (159). In this sense, patterns and forms of discourse are biotropological—they are assemblages of biotropes (Daut 2015; Watts 2021). Such discourses habituate bodily (and subjective) responses, neurochemical processes that have values and feelings inscribed through them; they have the capacity to trigger ideas, preferences, ways of knowing, modes of visuality operating “as if it was instinctual.” This “as if” is paramount, for it elides the fact that the human subject is “semiotically defined” (162). Matter itself can be understood as an effect, at least in part, of the mechanics of discourse. Becoming Human understands this “as if” as a racist rhetorical strategy: it sponsors “mutations” in human-animal, calls them nature’s “monsters,” and “reasons” that they need to be studied, dissected, policed, and incarcerated or killed. To be sure, Jackson does not label the work as an investment in rhetorical theory one might suspect because her assessments and critiques of philosophy and metaphysics tend to treat rhetoric as a set of devices that “biological discourses” mobilize. From this reviewer’s point of view, this tendency is another effect of “as if”—as if biological discourses, especially when manufacturing the Black female human-animal, are not rhetorical through and through. Despite this quibble, Becoming Human offers provocative analyses of anti-Blackness and the multifaceted worlds it repetitively and distressingly (rhetorically) invents.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.55.4.0411
  2. Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading
    Abstract

    As labor-based grading contracts gain momentum in first year writing classrooms, new kinds of response to writing take center stage. We explore how session notes composed by embedded peer tutors and students become rich tools in a writing process and create a gateway to the writing center for first-year students. By reading session notes in conversation with students’ reflective writing, we put forward three key findings: students articulate a relationship between building confidence in their writing and their willingness to seek, receive, and value feedback; students discuss how the labor required for an ‘A’ pushed them to access and learn about resources outside of the classroom; and students’ interactions with the Writer’s Workshop during their first two semesters of college indicate that they can build long-term relationships with peers and with the Writer’s Workshop (including as staff members) beyond first-year-writing and beyond their first semester.

September 2022

  1. Writing practices of university students in an online academic English course in Uzbekistan
    Abstract

    This reflection focuses on teaching writing online for the first-year students in the Academic English course at the Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), Uzbekistan. Academic English is a core course for all incoming first-year students and aims to develop students’ proficiency in listening, reading, and writing skills. A great emphasis is placed on the development of writing skills, and students are required to write at least four summaries, two essays, and one reflection during the twelve weeks of the first semester. A new challenging component in the autumn 2020 semester was teaching writing online, due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The classroom writing processes were examined through the lens of the Self- and Socially-Regulated Multilingual Writing model (Akhmedjanova, 2020), which revealed prevalence of socially-regulated rather than self-regulated writing practices. Also, teachers instructed students to use revision strategies more than planning and formulating writing strategies. A cursory examination of students’ reflections suggested that many students struggled with the environment and time management skills. Future revisions to the Academic English course should include explicit teaching of planning and formulating writing strategies along with planning and time management skills.

    doi:10.1558/wap.20895

July 2022

  1. Black Professional Communicators Testifying to Black Technical Joy
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2022.2069287

June 2022

  1. Preparing Students to Engage With Teacher Feedback
  2. Using the “CARD” Response Technique to Assist Middle School Students in the Revision Process
    Abstract

    Although revision is essential to the writing process, it is often neglected in schools. However, when revision is taught successfully, through reflection, conferencing, positive teacher feedback, specific instruction linked to reading strategies, and time between drafts in order for students to think about their writing (including the expectation of multiple drafts), students not only revise more, but at a deeper level. This study investigates how middle school students’ writing drafts as well as attitudes and beliefs toward revision changed based on introducing a specific revision strategy called the CARD response technique, which is both a self-response and peer-response strategy. CARD stands for the ways in which revision might occur in writing via holistic categories, such as change, add, rearrange, and delete. Research questions included the following: 1) How does middle school students’ writing change based on the revision technique, CARD?; and 2) in what ways, if any, does the CARD response technique enhance middle school students’ thinking about revision, specifically, regarding their attitudes and perceptions of revision? It adds to the literature a way to understand students’ perceptions and beliefs toward revision, in general, and a way to encourage revision via student-led decisions in their writing.

  3. Improving First- and Second-Year Student Writing Using a Metacognitive and Integrated Assessment Approach
    Abstract

    Metacognition emphasizes an awareness and understanding of one’s thought and cognitive processes, along with management of cognition through multiple strategies including organizing, monitoring, and adapting. Before students can truly become effective writers, they must develop an appreciation for the amount of planning, organization, and revision that comprises a writing assignment. In order to improve student writing, the exam autopsy approach, an integrated post-exam assessment model that draws upon self-assessment, peer review, and instructor feedback, was modified to include metacognitive components for use with essay exams and writing assignments. The current study employed a mixed-methods design with a quasi-experimental, non-equivalent group component across four institutions over two semesters, with the fall semester classes (T1) functioning as the control group and the spring semester classes (T2) functioning as the experimental group. During the spring semester of each class, the modified version of the exam autopsy process (EA 2.0) was used between two submissions of student writing (either essay exams or drafts of papers). The process was found to be significant in terms of its impact on student scores in lower division classes, but not in upper division classes. Qualitative data analysis reveals some of the reasons behind the observable improvements (or lack thereof) in student writing. These, as well as possible future implications for both teaching and research, are offered in this article.

  4. Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States
    Abstract

    With precise phrasing and dramatic flourish, Laura Mielke's Provocative Eloquence1 invites us into the performance cultures of the late antebellum era, showcasing the interplay between theater and oratory, politics and entertainment, ethical imperative and prevailing opinion. Violence suffused culture, language, and everyday experience in a time that found melodrama, minstrelsy, and spectacle in the ascendant, racial hierarchies and American slavery at the epicenter of political debates and popular culture, and a troubled white masculinity asserting its heroism. Mielke's book documents anti-Black oppressions of the antebellum stage and oratorical platform, and it also takes a fresh perspective: Mielke argues persuasively that theatrical forms offered strategic resources for abolitionist argument, that oratorical provocations permeated the stage, and that the theater and the rostrum provided sites for antebellum Americans to think together about the power of words and the justifications for force in the cause of freedom.This nuanced argument challenges assumptions that form is conjoined to stable ideologies and instead highlights creative adaptation, recitation, revision, and “political portability.”2 Drawing evidence from a wide variety of source material, Mielke develops compelling, intricate case studies of print and performance that instruct and surprise. Before turning primary attention to the late 1850s, she sets the stage two decades earlier with Edwin Forrest, entertainingly described as a “theatrical star and noted egomaniac”3 best known for “yoking articulacy to brawn.”4 A deft, deeply contextualized analysis of Forrest's calm, reasoned 1838 Fourth of July address at New York's Broadway Tabernacle shows the intertextual and interperformative dimensions of Forrest's Democratic partisanship, available for audience interpretation in light of his heroic, explosive roles like Spartacus, Metamora, and Macbeth. The orator recommended deliberation and gradualism; the actor regularly linked speech to revolt. Forrest's varied performances probed free expression, white working-class populism, and militancy in word and deed, while they resonated with staged rebellions, Romantic poetry, and defiance of all sorts. Mielke asks of the “stubbornly elusive”5 Forrest and of U.S. performance cultures more broadly: “Does one who speaks of liberty for all necessarily attack slavery, even if inadvertently?”6With the stage thus set—with an analytic focus on paradox and opposition and an analytic method characterized by deep historicization and sophisticated, imaginative readings across genres—Mielke moves on to the 1850s. The dramatic readings of Mary Webb and William Wells Brown highlight the suasory potentials of African American performance in what Mielke elucidates as the “rhetorically strategic recasting of the antislavery lecture into the drama.”7 In an increasingly menacing political climate, performers like Webb and Wells Brown began to signal the potential for physical resistance to slavery. As they vocalized a range of tragic or comedic characters—enslaved captives, cruel slaveholders, or overwrought white abolitionists—these artists adapted popular caricature and imitative form to their own ends while exemplifying control, decorum, and performative skill. Mielke compellingly shows how the form of the dramatic reading created conditions for the presentation of highly incendiary words while deflecting physical threat.The viciousness of proslavery political argument crystallized in 1856 when Preston Brooks took a cane to Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate the day after Sumner's “Crime against Kansas” speech had maligned proslavery argument and proslavery senator Andrew Butler, Brooks's cousin. The famous lithograph of this scene by John Magee, which Mielke aptly identifies as a theatrical tableau, efficiently encapsulates a drama of violent villainy and oratorical martyrdom. Building from this scene—reproduced on the book's cover—Mielke analyzes the political oratory of Sumner and Butler before turning attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred and its stage adaptations. Whereas the senators drew analogies and interpretative frameworks from dramatic literature, Stowe's novel incorporates a significant amount of public speaking, “from school recitation and revival preaching to courtroom address and lynch mob inducement,”8 in service of a wide array of perspectives on slavery and violence. The stagings of Dred, whether they reinforce calls to action or suppress radical potential, whether they play for laughs or highlight prophetic voice, embody the oxymoron of a slaveholding democracy.John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry grounds Mielke's investigation of legal discourse as the nation pressed ever forward toward war. Dexterously combining Portia's ironic eloquence in Merchant of Venice with abolitionist argument and nineteenth-century racial melodramas like Neighbor Jackwood and The Octoroon, Mielke shows how Portia's “redirection of legal violence and challenge to the contractual claim on another's flesh”9 were adapted in the late antebellum period to interpret physical violence, from armed revolt to capital punishment. Readily available in educational texts of the time, Merchant's trial scene offered the possibility that eloquence in the courtroom might conquer opponents without bloodshed. This theatrical form, whether explicitly cited or only presented in “family resemblance,”10 offered scripts for thinking through speech and violence even as battle beckoned.Mielke's concluding chapter is less a conventional summation than a final act, rehearsing key questions and arguments presented throughout the book and then comparing instances of theater and oratory that responded to Brown's raid, trial, and execution, climactic scenes in the drama of word and violence of the 1850s. Developing an interpretive framework through analysis of statements of Brown's detractors and defenders, Mielke explores themes of oath-taking, vengeance, aggression, and martyrdom in Kate Edwards Swayze's play Ossawattomie Brown and Henry David Thoreau's speech “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Here, again, forms like the theatrical tableau and the speech of moral principle occur in multiple genres, and when they recur, revised and recited, they help to constitute a performance culture and a basis for belief and action.Mielke's Provocative Eloquence will be of abiding interest to scholars of rhetoric and performance as it offers compelling insights into the ways that cultures are created, maintained, and changed in and through performance practices and as it centers the fraught histories of eloquence and violence in the deeply racialized context of U.S. history. Mielke's analytic perspective offers instruction for scholars and students since her book enacts an adroit blending of history, theory, and practice as simultaneously text and context. The comparative analysis of Forrest's theatrical and oratorical productions, the thoughtfully imagined presentation of Mary Webb's polyvocal dramatic readings, and the demonstration that Portia's irony haunts so much nineteenth-century public commentary on the law—these were favorite sections of mine, although I learned much from every chapter. Mielke's book, engagingly written and filled with dramatic historical nuggets, provides foundational arguments and analytic methods, and it prompts further reflection on topics like the scope of an identifiable theatrical (or rhetorical) form and on the range of spectatorial response. Reading this book will also inspire questions about continuity and change in the enactments of eloquence and violence up to our own time, in the persistent struggles to realize the hope of Black freedom and democratic equality. Mielke asks, “Can a true distinction be maintained between rhetoric and force? Can words alone provoke or justify violence, and under what conditions and for whom?”11 Such questions, pertinent to the 1850s, reverberate today.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.2.0135

April 2022

  1. The mediating effects of student beliefs on engagement with written feedback in preparation for high-stakes English writing assessment
    Abstract

    Research in L2 writing contexts has shown developing writers’ beliefs exert a powerful mediating effect on how they respond to written feedback. The mediating role of beliefs is magnified in preparation for high-stakes English writing assessment contexts, where tangible outcomes pivot on successful test performance. The present qualitative case study utilises data from semi-structured interviews to investigate how the beliefs of three self-directed IELTS preparation candidates mediated their affective, behavioural, and cognitive engagement with electronic teacher written feedback across three multi-draft Task 2 rehearsal essays. Utilising a metacognitive conceptual approach (Wenden, 1998), the study identified seven themes: 1) self-concept beliefs regulated engagement, 2) reliance on the expertise of a quality teacher, 3) engagement was mediated by individuals’ learning-to-write beliefs, 4) belief in comprehensive, critical written feedback, 5) feedback deemed transferable was more comprehensively engaged with, 6) entrenched test-taking strategy beliefs hindered engagement, and 7) supplementary self-directed learning activities were considered of limited value. The implications for practitioners of IELTS Writing preparation and the IELTS co-owners are discussed.

    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2022.100611
  2. Automated writing evaluation: Does spelling and grammar feedback support high-quality writing and revision?
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2022.100608
  3. Exploring the impact of teacher feedback modes and features on students' text revisions in writing
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2022.100610

March 2022

  1. “I Don't Have a Gun Stop Shooting”: Rhetorical Analysis of Law Enforcement Use of Force Policy Documents
    Abstract

    Background : Under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, law enforcement agencies are required to draft and uphold a Use of Force document to safeguard the rights of the public. This document, in its most successful form, defines use of force and offers specific core principles that outline de-escalation tactics and techniques to reinforce use of force and deadly force as a last resort. What is missing from the conversation of this policy is an analysis of the rhetorical choices within each document, and the understanding that these documents are rarely written with social justice in mind; rather, they are focused on legalese and protecting the individual departments and the police officer responsible for using force. Literature review : The Use of Force document is a genre of policy that academics have been drawn to, especially in consideration of social justice. With a rise in law enforcement violent interactions with historically marginalized groups of the public, policy analysis is necessary. Research questions : 1. What key terms, concepts, and narratives are used within each document to reinforce oppressive ideology? 2. What rhetorical moves give agency of force to officers through various terminology? 3. What does an analysis of these policy documents reveal for technical and professional communicators regarding our role in social-justice-driven work? Research methods : I performed a rhetorical analysis of each document, pinpointing words, phrases, and sections that were unique to the specific text. NVivo qualitative research software was used to create word trees, where word frequencies were analyzed to uncover each department's situational position and the implication of such. Results and discussion : The analysis revealed that of the two documents under review, one tended to humanize not only the situational officer, who is incapable of being neutral, and the person whom force is being used against. The other tended to reflect policy-driven terminology that works to dehumanize the person involved with the officer and continues to uphold oppressive rhetoric. Conclusion : Technical communicators have a responsibility to insert themselves in issues of injustice. An analysis of these policy documents reveals areas of revision, areas where the public should be involved, and is a move toward further accountability regarding police brutality against historically marginalized communities.

    doi:10.1109/tpc.2022.3144824
  2. Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership
    Abstract

    As the bicentennial of the momentous 1824 election approaches, Andrew Jackson is as relevant as ever. Jackson's shadow looms large over contemporary discussions regarding populism, democracy, and America's history of racism and colonization. Moreover, interest in Jackson has grown thanks to President Trump's efforts to frame Jackson as a precursor to his own brand of nationalist populism. A variety of analysts, from historian Mark Cheathem in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson to Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade in Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans, have recently revisited the Jacksonian period both to enrich our understanding of that unique historical moment and to offer insights about present day affairs. Amos Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership is a welcome addition to the conversation that provides valuable perspective about Jackson's presidency and the rhetorical nature of presidential authority in general.Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal aims to “give voice to the seventh president” by creating “an account of major addresses’ development, the reasoning and constraints behind them, and ultimately, their impact on the polity” (1–2). The book represents the most comprehensive rhetorical examination of Jackson's public remarks to date. Kiewe not only provides a window into the inner machinations of Jackson's administration and the painstaking process of crafting a public address; he challenges existing understandings of the presidency as an institution. Although Jeffrey Tulis, in The Rhetorical Presidency, argued that the presidency became a seat of popular (rather than constitutional) leadership in the twentieth century, Kiewe persuasively demonstrates that Jackson may have in fact been “the first rhetorical president,” arguing that Jackson's public addresses changed the trajectory of his administration and fundamentally altered the presidency itself (243).Kiewe accomplishes this through in-depth rhetorical histories of Jackson's public addresses. In chapter 1, Kiewe argues that Jackson's 1824 campaign was innovative; Jackson debuted a novel campaign strategy of “writing letters to private individuals for public distribution” (16) and inaugurated a “new era” of party politics featuring populist appeals (36). In chapters 2 through 9, Kiewe conducts case studies of Jackson's inaugural addresses, his first annual message to Congress, his rhetoric regarding the Nullification Crisis and Indian removal policies, and his rhetoric supporting his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Kiewe also devotes attention to addresses of seemingly “minor importance,” such as the Maysville road bill veto, which involved a proposal to improve a sixty-mile stretch of road in Kentucky and foreshadowed the pro-Union rhetoric that would define Jackson's response to the Nullification Crisis (77).Chapter 10 takes a step back from Jackson's rhetoric to analyze public images of Jackson. Kiewe, using a visual rhetoric approach, argues that Jackson's popular leadership was reinforced by his supporters’ construction of Jackson as a military hero and populist icon through political cartoons and other portraits. This chapter is a detour from the book's main line of argument, but a welcome one that provides enlightening context about how audiences of the time understood Jackson's leadership. In chapter 11, Kiewe analyzes Jackson's farewell address and credits him with further developing the farewell address as a unique genre of presidential rhetoric.Through these case studies, Kiewe develops several insights about Jackson and his rhetoric. First, Kiewe challenges portrayals of Jackson as “brute, rough, savage, and backward” by documenting his rhetorical skill, strategic acumen, and principled devotion to the Union (4). Second, Kiewe sheds light on the “cumulative effort” that underpinned Jackson's rhetorical presidency (68). Jackson's most famous addresses often underwent several stages of drafting. Jackson would create a first draft that would undergo subsequent vetting and revision from his inner circle, such as Andrew Jackson Donelson, Amos Kendall, Martin Van Buren, John Eaton, James Hamilton, Roger Taney, and others. Kiewe describes Jackson's initial drafts as containing partisan and “forceful language” (75), whereas the revised final forms are “moderate relative to his initial points” (90, 248). These detailed accounts of the administration's speechwriting colorfully illustrate Jackson's behind-the-scenes struggle to balance popular leadership with adherence to the norms of his office. Third, Jackson is revealed to be a rhetorical president cognizant of the extra-constitutional powers of his office, who frequently “appealed directly” to the public and “used his rhetoric as a political tool . . . for governing purposes” (243).Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal provides a granular look at a crucial chapter of American history, using a rhetorical perspective that highlights how presidential authority is in part constructed through discourse. Given the book's nineteenth-century subject matter, Kiewe's meticulous account of Jackson's governance and speechwriting process is impressive. Nonetheless, Kiewe's characterizations of Jackson are occasionally questionable. At several points, he describes Jackson as a “progressive” (164, 178), an interpretation that is hard to sustain in light of Jackson's vigorous opposition to policies that would utilize government on behalf of national development and his plainly regressive attitudes and actions towards Indigenous peoples and the abolitionist cause. Kiewe's choice to analyze Jackson in the context of his times bolsters the book's primary strength; it allows for a thorough account of the dynamics and constraints of the era and how Jackson responded to them. However, some readers may be frustrated by Kiewe's hesitance to more forthrightly acknowledge Jackson's complicity with genocide and chattel slavery or to criticize the exclusionary definition of “the people” imagined by Jackson's populist rhetoric. For instance, Kiewe's recognition of Jackson's condescending, paternalistic attitude towards Indigenous peoples in chapter 6 may have been strengthened by conversing more extensively with texts such as Michael Rogin's Fathers and Children that explain the colonialist attitudes that underpinned Jackson's paternalism.As a book that sits “at the intersection of history, politics, and rhetoric,” Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal will prove useful to a variety of readers (1). Historians and scholars interested in the nineteenth-century United States may find this rhetorical study of Jackson a complement to other accounts of the era, as the book's special attention to the development of Jackson's addresses and their impact on the public is relatively unique. Scholars of the presidency may appreciate the book's intervention into the debate about the extent to which the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century affair or a phenomenon that can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Rhetorical scholars should appreciate the central place that Kiewe assigns rhetoric in the process of governance, even in an era where communication mediums were considerably more limited in reach and scope than today. Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal suggests that scholars should pay attention to how rhetoric can strengthen or weaken institutions such as the presidency, and how presidents influence and are influenced by evolving modes of mass communication. Above all, Kiewe's book highlights the need for scholars to conduct rigorous rhetorical analyses of other nineteenth-century rhetorical presidents, to enrich understanding of the era and to illustrate how rhetorical choices made centuries ago exert influence on the present-day institution of the presidency.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.1.0148

February 2022

  1. A Social-Constructionist Review of Feedback and Revision Research: How Perceptions of Written Feedback Might Influence Understandings of Revision Processes
    Abstract

    This social-constructionist review of research illuminates the ways in which feedback, reflection, and revision are all inherently relational processes. Research suggests that university students’ perceptions of feedback shape their revision processes, though it appears that their preferred types of feedback may not always lead them to make effective revisions.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202231879

January 2022

  1. Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly David L. Marshall Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 There exists a set of topoi still alive—undead—within ancient, medieval, and early modem historiographies of rhetoric that circles “the loss of politics” as the crucial fact when it comes to narrating the coming into being and passing away of rhetoric. Politics itself as an object of such attachment may take several forms, but it is the beginning and sine qua non of rhetorical [End Page 91] application. In her disciplined yet frequently humorous Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly boils the politics-as-lost-object topoi down to the bone: “oratory flourishes in democracies only, the Hellenistic age [for example] was undemocratic, ergo there were no speeches worth preserving” (56). Kennerly tilts at the politics-as-lost-object topoi (and contests this characterization of the Hellenic) from a refreshing and subtle angle—that of editing, revision, what she terms “ corpus-care” (15). For her, turning to the curation of texts with rhetorical attention is not the reluctant decision of a culture that has lost its opportunities to speak and decide together in public. As Kennerly puts it, “rather than being indicators of political decline or decadence, polished and published prose and verse point to contestation over what sort of words best sustain communal life,” and, in this way, “writing is no less democratic or republican than speaking: the two verbal forms live parallel lives” (209). Hers is also a re-reading of the early histories of both Greek and Roman rhetoric showing how concern for the written record was always at issue alongside concern for the oral performance. Kennerly’s approach yields instructive angles on a series of authors. We encounter what she calls “Horace’s meticulous file,” his editorial metaphor of choice for smoothing stylistic burrs. But Kennerly pushes against “a prevailing view on Horace’s strictures on the stilus-, that he ‘made a virtue out of a political necessity’”—“the ‘necessity’ being the need to watch one’s words as the imperial period gained force” (109). In her reading, Ovid is someone who “displays his editorial body” cultivating thereby “the image of a man trying to correct his mistakes” (134), and this leads to “the (cultivated) shabbiness of his corpora,” which for Kennerly “accords with their tristis situation” (139). Political exile means disheveled self-consuming textual performance. In reference to Quintilian, editing implies compilation and overview stemming from care, and “the enmbased lexical family is the progenitor of ‘curative’ and ‘curation,’ both of which apply to Quintilian’s labors: he sees what ails various oratorical corpora and means to cure them through his curation of rhetoric’s traditions and orations” (164). Editing, reworking, compiling, creating a summative edition—all these should be understood in terms of established rhetorical topoi. Just so, in Quintilian, compiling is also a form of ethopoetic exercise, and such processes become “habituation hexis (Greek, lit. ‘having’)” rendered sometimes, as we know, “in Latin as facilitas (ease)” (162). Always, Kennerly is attentive to the embodiments of writing and editing. In Latin, she relays, the “edowords”—at the root of “edit” and its variants—were themselves richly enmeshed in a slew of metaphors “from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it” and did not denote “prepublic textual activities” (2). And the terms ancient Romans did use for textual revision drew on a range of artisan prototypes: “they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved” (2). On the Greek side, “gluing” was an important metaphor domain because it had pertinent literal applications too: “writers would glue papyrus patches atop errors to hide them or to insert emendations on top of them” (29). Again, [End Page 92] Kennerly is quick to note that “turning the stilus” was “idiomatic for rubbing out with the flat end of the stilus something written into a wax tablet with the pointed end” (79). It should thus come as no surprise that, although this work is ancient in...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2022.0006
  2. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Denise Stodola Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 It is unusual but incredibly useful when authors challenge their readers to think about familiar terms in unfamiliar ways, which is what Steele Nowlin has done here. Calling upon his readers to view the terms “affect” and “invention” through a different lens, he shows us that these two concepts are intimately linked even though “affect” is often used as a synonym for emotion. For Nowlin, affect and emotion are separate concepts that interact with each other. In fact, in his configuration, affect [End Page 98] is a type of “emergence” that precedes an actual feeling or emotion. Because affect concerns an “emerging” potential, it is thus linked to invention, which is, itself, an emerging potential. More specifically, affect emerges and then “collapses” into emotion, and this is analogous to the way in which invention “collapses” into poetic form. By reshaping our perceptions of how affect precedes emotion and is therefore analogous to invention preceding form, we are then able to view poetic invention differently. Ultimately, invention not only shapes poetic form, but can, in many cases, expose cultural narratives that are themselves in need of revision. Moreover, Nowlin does a fine job of contextualizing his theoretical approach within the introductory chapter. He asserts that his work relies heavily on Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, as well as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick. He also uses the work of scholars like Eric Shouse, Brian Massumi, Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, Lauren Berlant, Mary Carruthers, and Rita Copeland. By showing the relationship of his work to that of other scholars—not only those focused on critical theory, but also those who specialize in “feeling theory,” as well as medieval scholars and rhetoricians— Nowlin provides a solid foundation for his theoretical approach. On the other hand, the order of the subsequent chapters is somewhat strained. In the first two chapters, he focuses on Chaucer, first on House of Fame in Chapter 1, and then on Legend of Good Women in Chapter 2. The placement of these chapters makes sense insofar as they both focus on Chaucer and illustrate not only how Chaucer’s works can been seen to deploy Nowlin’s formulation but also how neither of the works pushes past a potential realization of cultural narratives into any sort of action. In House of Fame, physical movement aligns affect with invention, bringing together the literary with the political and ultimately illustrating how the affective dynamic helps us to understand “patterns of cultural power.” In this case, that power is the power of literary men to find their own fame by using women. Dido, in fact, becomes a symbol for what Nowlin calls the “coemergence” of affect and invention, and the form resulting from invention does not provide any answer to Dido’s plight. Legend of Good Women, however, addresses misogyny and antifeminism more fully. Ultimately, though, it does not move past its own misogyny, but rather leaves the reader understanding how unethical that misogyny is. As such, it reveals the cultural narratives in which the work itself exists. By putting these two chapters next to each other, we are able to see both poems rely on affective invention and how the Legend of Good Women moves closer to an invention that more clearly articulates the misogyny of the culture in which it was produced. Chapters 3 and 4 could be brought together into one chapter as both focus on Gower’s Gonfessio Amantis, and both illustrate Gower’s success with the use of affective invention to effect potential change. Chapter 3 shows that the affective invention in the Confessio reveals masculinist cultural discourses and how they shape cultural reality, suggesting a potential need to transform the culture in which it was produced. Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that the chronicle form as a means of codifying significant cultural events and providing an authoritative version of those events has fundamentally opposite [End Page 99] impulses from what Gower’s poem ultimately achieves: invention of not only a...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2022.0009
  3. A Product- and Process-Oriented Tagset for Revisions in Writing
    Abstract

    The study of revision has been a topic of interest in writing research over the past decades. Numerous studies have, for instance, shown that learning-to-revise is one of the key competences in writing development. Moreover, several models of revision have been developed, and a variety of taxonomies have been used to measure revision in empirical studies. Current advances in data collection and analysis have made it possible to study revision in increasingly precise detail. The present study aimed to combine previous models and current advances by providing a comprehensive product- and process-oriented tagset of revision. The presented tagset includes properties of external revisions: trigger, orientation, evaluation, action, linguistic domain, spatial location, temporal location, duration, and sequencing. We identified how keystroke logging, screen replays, and eye tracking can be used to extract both manually and automatically extract features related to these properties. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate how this tagset can be used to annotate revisions made by higher education students in various academic tasks. To conclude, we discuss how this tagset forms a scalable basis for studying revision in writing in depth.

    doi:10.1177/07410883211052104