Book Review| March 01 2018 Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk. Edited by Barry Brummett. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014; pp. ix + 210. $60 hardback. Andrea J. Severson Andrea J. Severson Arizona State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 180–183. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0180 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrea J. Severson; Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 180–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0180 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| March 01 2018 Kant’s Philosophy of Communication Kant’s Philosophy of Communication. By Gina L. Ercolini. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016; pp. viii + 251; $30 paper. Nathan Crick Nathan Crick Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 186–189. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0186 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan Crick; Kant’s Philosophy of Communication. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 186–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0186 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| March 01 2018 Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies. By Rebecca S. Richards. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015; pp. vii + 231. $90.00 cloth. Tiara R. Na’puti Tiara R. Na’puti University of Colorado Boulder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 196–199. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0196 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tiara R. Na’puti; Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 196–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0196 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| March 01 2018 Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency. By David Greenberg. New York, NY: WW Norton, 2016; pp. xvii + 576. $35.00 cloth; $18.00 paper. Mary E. Stuckey Mary E. Stuckey Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 175–177. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0175 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mary E. Stuckey; Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 175–177. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0175 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review Article| March 01 2018 Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. By Cara A. Finnegan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015; pp. xiii + 240. $50.00 cloth.Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action. By Thomas W. Benson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; pp. viii + 214. $29.95 paper.Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. By Laurie E. Gries. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015; pp. xxiii +311. $27.95 paper. Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 157–174. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Scott Jenkins; Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 157–174. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAY You do not currently have access to this content.

Other| February 21 2018 Books of Interest Mark Schaukowitch; Mark Schaukowitch Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2018) 51 (1): 98–104. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.1.0098 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Schaukowitch, Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 21 February 2018; 51 (1): 98–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.1.0098 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2018The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

With this issue, Philosophy & Rhetoric begins its fifty-first year. It is an honor to play a role in this turn and a privilege to serve the journal as editor.Looking back for a moment, I remember my first encounter with P&R as a young graduate student at Northwestern—Tom Farrell gave me the galleys of a forthcoming article, a gift that led me into the journal's archive and left me to hope that my first piece of scholarship would appear in its pages (almost, but not quite). Since then, P&R has been a constant source of inspiration, provocation, and understanding. In 2005, I was quick to accept Gerard Hauser's invitation to serve as the journal's book review editor, all the more so as it offered a chance to work closely with a scholar that I had long admired. The opportunity exceeded every expectation. Over the course of a twelve-year collaboration, I benefited so very much from Hauser's sharp insight, intellectual generosity, and friendship. Jerry is a cherished colleague and a good friend.This is a moment to underscore the importance of the inquiry that has defined and distinguished Philosophy & Rhetoric from its very first issue—with respect to this remarkable history, I strongly recommend reading Hauser's introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue (50.4). Whether one looks inside or outside the academy, there is an evident if not urgent need for original scholarship that addresses the intersection of philosophy and rhetoric. This is a moment to extend and deepen P&R's longstanding mission, not least in light of emerging lines of inquiry, shifting disciplinary constellations, new forms of writing and reading, and popular skepticism about the value of the humanities.The work ahead is a joint effort. From the beginning, I want to express my thanks to each member of the journal's editorial board, including several individuals who agreed to serve after the print deadline for this issue. In the same breath, it is my pleasure to announce Daniel M. Gross as the journal's new essay and forum editor and Kelly Happe as the P&R book review editor. I am grateful for their willingness to serve the journal. All editors should be so lucky as to have the chance to work with such talented and thoughtful colleagues.Perhaps transition is the norm, not least for philosophical-rhetorical and rhetorical-philosophical inquiry. But transition is neither uninterrupted continuity nor unhinged change. With its fifty-first volume, the journal publishes articles that exemplify its best traditions. They are an original and important mix, a set of jointly-edited inquiries that ask after our most important questions, afford theoretical and practice insight, and open space for debate. With them appear select book reviews and a variety of forums and critical essays, along with a new “books of interest” list. The volume's fourth issue will be a guest-edited special issue.There will be time to speak more about what's to come. Here, in this moment, there is a more pressing call, a need to pause and reflect on a truly remarkable record of intellectual leadership and scholarly service.Gerard Hauser edited Philosophy & Rhetoric for fourteen years, assuming the position in 2003. Fourteen years! Before that, between 1976 and 2002, he served variously as the journal's coeditor, associate editor, and consulting editor. And before that, from 1970 to 1976, he held the post of book review editor. One of Hauser's many articles appeared in the journal's second issue.This record is not simply commendable, though it is that. It is astounding, a truly extraordinary accomplishment, one that testifies to Hauser's sustained intellectual vision, tireless leadership, and steadfast commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, all of which have served the interests of multiple fields, supported groundbreaking scholarship, and promoted crucial intellectual exchange. For the vast majority of the last fifty years, Hauser has served if not led Philosophy & Rhetoric. He has broadened the journal's audience and deepened its reach. His patient and visionary work has distinguished the journal—nationally and internationally. Hauser's contribution to Philosophy & Rhetoric is not simply self-evident—it is indelible, properly so.In this light, and on behalf of the journal and the Pennsylvania State University Press, it is my utmost pleasure to name Gerard Hauser as Philosophy & Rhetoric's editor emeritus. I do so with abiding gratitude and in the hope that there will be moments in the future when I have the good fortune to work closely with Jerry.Last but by no means least, I want to express my deepest thanks to Jean Hauser, who has served as P&R's managing editor for the last ten years. This extraordinary service demands the fullest possible recognition. As so many well know, Jean's work has made a crucial difference—to the journal's editorial group, its contributing authors, and its readers. I have personally relied very much on her skill, insight, dedication, and wit. On more than a few occasions, she has kept me out of the tall grass. In the last months, she has taken the time to introduce me to some of the more hidden ways and means of the journal—I am very grateful for this help.In the coming weeks, I hope that Philosophy & Rhetoric's readers will take a moment to reach out and express their appreciation to both Gerard Hauser and Jean Hauser. Individually and together, they have served—and indeed built—Philosophy & Rhetoric with grace and with the greatest distinction.

Over the past 100 years, user-centered design (UCD) has evolved from an idea to a developed area of research in design communication for academics and practitioners. Since UCD was coined by Donald Norman in 1986, it has slowly become a guiding theory behind many design practices, pushing user needs over technological desires. In Fundamentals of User-Centered Design: A Practical Approach , Brian Still and Kate Crane illustrate the history, implementation, and best and worst practices in UCD. This book pulls from expertise in both academia and industry to create a handbook on UCD in both a print and eBook edition. Using their combined experiences, Still and Crane provide thoughtful commentary on the current state of UCD by establishing theory and applying it to their own work and the work of others within the field of design.

Coding, like other forms of written communication, is both science and art. This is not a new or revolutionary idea. In 1974, Donald Knuth published "Computer Programming as an Art" and declared that "[a] programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better" (p. 673). In 1984, Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution introduced us to the Hacker Ethic, one tenet of which is that we can create art and beauty on the computer (p. 31). Many other authors and coders have argued similar cases about the socially situated nature of programming since.

Book Review| February 01 2018 Review: Menegaldi in Ciceronis Rhetorica Glose, Edizione critica a cura di Filippo Bognini Menegaldi in Ciceronis Rhetorica Glose, Edizione critica a cura di Filippo Bognini, Firenze, SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo 2015, pp. CLII-286. ISBN: 9788884505910 Francesco Caparrotta Francesco Caparrotta Francesco Caparrotta Liceo Classico “F. Scaduto” – Bagheria (Palermo) Via D. D'Amico, 37 - 90011 Bagheria (Palermo) Italy fr.caparrotta@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2018) 36 (1): 92–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.1.92 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Francesco Caparrotta; Review: Menegaldi in Ciceronis Rhetorica Glose, Edizione critica a cura di Filippo Bognini. Rhetorica 1 February 2018; 36 (1): 92–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.1.92 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2018 Review: Aristotele. Retorica, Introduzione, traduzione e commento, by Silvia Gastaldi and [Aristotele]. Retorica ad Alessandro, by Maria Fernanda Ferrini Silvia Gastaldi, Aristotele. Retorica, Introduzione, traduzione e commento, Roma, Carocci 2014 (ristampa 2017) ISBN: 9788843074198; Maria Fernanda Ferrini, [Aristotele]. Retorica ad Alessandro, Milano, Bompiani 2015. ISBN: 9788845279249 Cristina Pepe Cristina Pepe Cristina Pepe Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli cristina.pepe@unina2.it Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2018) 36 (1): 96–99. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.1.96 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Cristina Pepe; Review: Aristotele. Retorica, Introduzione, traduzione e commento, by Silvia Gastaldi and [Aristotele]. Retorica ad Alessandro, by Maria Fernanda Ferrini. Rhetorica 1 February 2018; 36 (1): 96–99. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.1.96 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2018 Review: “Guiguzi,” China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary, by Hui Wu Hui Wu, “Guiguzi,” China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, xiv + 180 pp. 2016. ISBN: 9780809335268 Hua Zhu Hua Zhu Hua Zhu College of Arts and Sciences Miami University 143 Upham Hall Oxford, OH 45056 USA zhuh3@miamioh.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2018) 36 (1): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.1.100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hua Zhu; Review: “Guiguzi,” China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary, by Hui Wu. Rhetorica 1 February 2018; 36 (1): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.1.100 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The present book addresses strategy-focused instruction in writing.This type of instruction proposes a global package of content and components, which together have shown effects in improving writing competence in children.Strategy instruction has been proven to be one of the most effective teaching practices for improving writing skills, as well as writing to learn in different content domains.The book starts with an introduction by the editors about the importance of strategy-focused instruction to promote writing in the school context, both as a content and as a learning tool.This book has a total of 12 chapters, divided in four sections.The first section includes an introduction and three chapters that approach writing instruction from different perspectives.The second section presents well-validated intervention programs for learning to write.This section includes two chapters presenting two specific instructional programs that can be used with full-range students in classrooms, across different educational contexts.The third part is composed of three chapters that address instructional programs focused on writing-to-learn.Finally, the fourth section includes the conclusion, as well as three chapters that discuss the strategy-instruction models presented in the previous sections.

“Reddit is like a tiny internet: a place full of memes that are often offensive and hilarious at once. A place for activism and knowledge-sharing, shitposting and trolling. A place where mob mentality and anonymity more often lead to abuse campaigns and conspiracy theories than not.”

Background: Research incorporating large data sets and data and text mining methodologies is making initial contributions to writing studies. In writing program administration (WPA) work, one could best characterize the body of publications as small but growing, led by such work as Moxley and Eubanks’ 2015 “On Keeping Score: Instructors' vs. Students' Rubric Ratings of 46,689 Essays” and Arizona State University’s Science of Learning & Educational Technology (SoLET) Lab. Given the information that large-scale textual analysis can provide, it seems incumbent on program administrators to explore ways to make regular and aggressive use of such opportunities to give both students and instructors more resources for learning and development. This project is one attempt to add to this corpus of work; the sample for the study consisted of 17,534 pieces of student writing representing 141,659 discrete comments on that writing, with 58,300 unique words out of over 8.25 million total words written. This data is used to examine trends in the program’s instructor commentary over five years’ time.  By doing so, this study revisits a fundamental task of writing instruction—responding to student writing, and from the data’s results considers how large writing programs with constant turnover of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) might manage their ongoing instructor professional development and how those GTAs will improve their ability to teach and respond to writing.Literature Review: Researchers have attempted to unpack and understand the task of instructor commentary for several decades; the published literature demonstrates a complex and occasionally ambivalent relationship with this central task of writing instruction. Recent scholarship has moved from the small-scale studies long used by the field to implement large-scale examinations of the instruction occurring in writing programs. Research questions: Three questions guided the inquiry:Does the work of new instructors (MA1s) more closely resemble the lexicon of novice or experienced responders to student writing?How does the new instructors’ work compare to that of more experienced (PHD1 or INS) instructors in the program throughout their time?How does their work evolve over a four-semester longitudinal time frame (as MA1 or MA2 experience levels) in the first-year writing program? [Please note that the abbreviations used above and throughout the article to designate instructor experience levels are as follows: MA1 (first-year master’s students); MA2 (second-year master’s students); PHD1 (first-year doctoral students); INS (instructors—those with 3 or more years’ experience teaching and who are not currently pursuing an additional degree—nearly all of these individuals held a Master’s degree)].Methodology: This study extends the work of Anson and Anson (2017) who first surveyed writing instructors and program administrators to create wordlists that survey respondents associated with “high-quality” and “novice” responses, and then examined a corpus of nearly 50,000 peer responses produced at a single university to learn to what extent instructors and student peers adopted this lexicon. Specifically, the study analyzes a corpus of instructor comments to students using the Anson and Anson wordlists associated with principled and novice commentary to see if new writing instructors align more closely with the concepts represented in either list during their first semester in the program.  It then tracks four cohorts for evolution and change in their vocabulary of feedback over their next three semesters in the program; the study also compares the vocabulary used in their comments to that used by experienced instructors in the program over the same time.Results: The study found that from the outset, the new instructors (MA1) incorporated more of the principled response terms than the novice response terms. Overall, in comparing the MA1 instructors with the most experienced group (INS), the results reveal three important findings about the feedback of both MA1s and INSs in this program.While there are some differences in commentary as seen via examination of the two lexicons, the differences are perhaps less than one might assume.The cohorts do increase their use of the principled terms as they move through the two years’ appointment in the program, but few of the increases demonstrate statistical significance.Few of the terms from either the novice or principled lexicon, with the exception of terms that also appear in the assignment descriptions, what I label as “content terms,” appear frequently in the overall corpus.Discussion: Based on the results, the instructors in this program had acquired a more consistent vocabulary, but not primarily one based on Anson and Anson’s two lexicons—instead, the most frequent and commonly used terms seem to come from a more local “canon,” that is, one based on the assignment descriptions and course outcomes. Regardless of whether the acquisition of a common vocabulary came from more global concepts or an assignment-based local canon, using common terms is something that Nancy Sommers (1982) saw as contributing to “thoughtful commentary” on student writing. As no one has previously studied how quickly new instructors acquire a professional vocabulary for responding to student writing, it is hard to know whether or not the results of this particular group of instructors would be considered “typical.” However, it may well be that the context of this writing program contributed to a more accelerated acquisition.Conclusions: Working with the lexicons developed via Anson and Anson’s survey is a useful starting point for understanding more of what our instructors actually do when responding to student writing, as well as for identifying critical differences in our instructors’ comments. The lexicons, though, only provide us with a subset of expected (thus acceptable) terms included in commentary—terms that afford students the opportunity to act upon receiving them via revision or transfer. Directions for Future Research: Additional research is necessary to expand and refine the lexicons and their impact on student writing. One possibility is to return to the current data set to engage in additional lexical analysis of both the novice and principled lexicons as well as the overall frequency tables to understand how terms are used in the context of response by the various instructor groups. Differences in the application of the terms might help us understand why comments might be labeled as more or less helpful to writers.  Another strategy is to examine the data in terms of markers of stance; finally, topic modeling could be used to locate more subtle differences in the instructor comments that are not as easily identifiable with lexical analysis. Such examinations could serve as a baseline for broadening the study out to other sets of assignments and commentary, perhaps helping us build a set of threshold concepts for talking about writing with our students. Ultimately, it is important to replicate and expand Anson and Anson’s survey to other stakeholder groups. As with much research on the teaching of writing, we default to the group most accessible to us—other writing professionals. Replicating this survey with other stakeholders—graduate teaching assistants, undergraduate students at both lower and upper division levels— could help us understand whether or not a gap exists in understanding what constitutes good feedback from the various stakeholders.

Background: Current research in composition and writing studies is concerned with issues of writing program evaluation and how writing tasks and their sequences scaffold students toward learning outcomes. These issues are beginning to be addressed by writing analytics research, which can be useful for identifying recurring types of language in writing assignments and how those can inform task design and student outcomes. To address these issues, this study provides a three-step method of sequencing, comparison, and diagnosis to understand how specific writing tasks fit into a classroom sequence as well as compare to larger genres of writing outside of the immediate writing classroom environment. By doing so, we provide writing program administrators with tools for describing what skills students demonstrate in a sequence of writing tasks and diagnosing how these skills match with writing students will do in later contexts. Literature Review: Student writing that responds to classroom assignments can be understood as genres, insofar as they are constructed responses that exist in similar rhetorical situations and perform similar social actions. Previous work in corpus analysis has looked at these genres, which helps us as writing instructors understand what kind of constructed responses are required of students and to make those expectations explicit. Aull (2017) examined a corpus of first-year undergraduate writing assignments in two courses to create “sociocognitive profiles” of these assignments. We analyze student writing that responds to similar writing tasks, but use a different corpus method that allows us to understand the tasks in both local and global contexts. By doing so, we gain confidence and depth in our understanding of these tasks, analyze how they sequence together, and are able to compare argumentative writing across institutions and contexts. Research Questions: Two questions guided our study: What is the trajectory of skills targeted by the sequence of tasks in the two first-year writing courses, as evidenced by the rhetorical strategies employed by the writers in successive assignments? Focusing on the final argument assignments, how similar are they to argumentative writing in other contexts, in terms of rhetorical profiles? Methodology: We first conducted a local analysis, in which we used a dictionary-based corpus method to analyze the rhetorical strategies used by writers in the first-year writing courses to understand how they built on each other to form a sequence. Having understood what skills students are demonstrating in a course, we then conducted a global analysis which calculated a “distance” between the first-year argument writing and a corpus of argument writing drawn from other contexts. Recognizing that there was a non-trivial distance, we then identified and evaluated the sources of the distance so that the writing tasks could be assessed or modified. Results: The local analysis revealed eight key rhetorical strategies that student writing exhibits between the two first-year writing courses. With this understanding, we then placed the argument writing in global contexts to find that the assignments in both courses differ somewhat from argument writing in other contexts. Upon analyzing this difference, we found that the first-year writing primarily differs in its usage of academic language, the personal register, assertive language, and reasoning. We suggest that these differences stem primarily from the rhetorical situation and learning objectives associated with first-year writing, as well as the sequencing of the courses. Discussion: The three-step method presented provides a means for writing program administrators to describe and analyze writing that students produce in their writing programs. We intend these steps to be understood as an iterative process, whereby writing programs can use these results to evaluate what rhetorical skills their students are exhibiting and to benchmark those against the program’s goals and/or other similar writing programs. Conclusions: By presenting these analyses together, we ultimately provide a cohesive method by which to analyze a writing program and benchmark students’ use of rhetorical strategies in relation to other argumentative contexts. We believe this method to be useful not only to individual writing programs, but to assessment literature broadly. In future research, we anticipate learning how this process will practically feed back into pedagogy, as well as understanding what placing writing tasks into a global context can tell us about genre theory.

Aim:  The use of validated measures of writing motivation is imperative to improving our understanding and development of interventions to improve student writing utilizing motivation as a mechanism.  One of the most important malleable factors involved in improving student writing is motivation, particularly for secondary school students.  This research note systematically examines the measures of writing motivation for students in grades 4–12 used by researchers over the last ten years and summarizes their psychometric and measurement properties to the extent provided in the underlying literature. This collection of measures and their properties and features is designed to make researchers more aware of the various options and to point out the need for additional measures. Problem Formation:  Writing is crucial to college and career readiness, but adolescents are inadequately prepared to be proficient writers.  Grades 4–12, once students have generally learned the basics of writing, are when students begin to develop more fluent and sophisticated writing abilities.  They turn from learning to write to writing to learn, and writing is increasingly done across content areas and in multiple genres.  Unfortunately, writing is a difficult skill to master, and students in middle and high school suffer from declining motivation.  The ability to measure changes in writing motivation at this developmental stage will allow researchers to more effectively design and assess writing interventions.  What are the current, validated measures of writing motivation available for researchers working with adolescents?  Motivation research has grown significantly in the last ten years, and a variety of motivation constructs (e.g., self-efficacy, expectancy-value) and related measures are used across the field. In addition to the variety of motivation constructs used in research today, researchers require domain- or context-specific measures of motivation (e.g., science motivation) to enable an accurate understanding of the role of motivation in achievement. Despite increased developments in both motivation and writing research over the past few decades, the intersection of these two fields remains relatively unexplored (Boscolo & Hidi, 2007; Troia, Harbaugh, Shankland, Wolbers, & Lawrence, 2013).Information Collection:  A thorough literature search was done to find measures of writing motivation used for this age group within the last 10 years.  Psychometric properties, to the extent available in the underlying articles, of each measure are described.Conclusions:  Ultimately, seven discrete measures of adolescent writing motivation were found, but only limited psychometric details were available for many of the measures.  No “gold standard” measure was found; indeed, the measures utilized varied motivational constructs and rarely reported more than the Cronbach’s alpha of the underlying instrument. Researchers need to carefully parse through the related motivation literature to understand the most likely constructs to be implicated in their intervention. They need to consider factors specifically related to their study, such as how stable the construct being targeted is developmentally, whether the term and type of intervention will be sufficient to make an impact on the students’ motivation as suggested by the underlying motivational literature, and what the target of the intervention is. Appropriate motivational constructs to be measured will vary depending on the intervention and its anticipated theory of change.Directions for Further Research: Several underlying motivation constructs have been used in the measures described in this review, particularly self-efficacy. However, a number of important motivation constructs, such as interest and self-determination theory, were not captured by the measures found.  This review of currently available measures will give researchers options when wanting to include validated measures of writing motivation in their studies and suggests that additional, validated measures are needed to adequately cover the relevant motivational constructs.

Background: Over a decade ago, the Stanford Study of Writing (SSW) collected more than 15,000 writing samples from undergraduate students, but to this point the corpus has not been analyzed using computational methods. Through the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, this study attempts to reveal underlying structures in the SSW, while at the same time developing a set of interpretable features for computationally understanding student writing. These features fall into three categories: topic-based features that reveal what students are writing about; stance-based features that reveal how students are framing their arguments; and structure-based features that reveal sentence complexity. Using these features, we are able to characterize the development of the SSW participants across four years of undergraduate study, specifically gaining insight into the different trajectories of humanities, social science, and STEM students. While the results are specific to Stanford University’s undergraduate program, they demonstrate that these three categories of features can give insight into how groups of students develop as writers.Literature Review: The Stanford Study of Writing (Lunsford et al., 2008; SSW, 2018) involved the collection of more than 15,000 writing samples from 189 students in the Stanford class of 2005. The literature surrounding the original study is largely qualitative (Fishman, Lunsford, McGregor, & Otuteye, 2005; Lunsford, 2013; Lunsford, Fishman, & Liew, 2013), so this study makes a first attempt at a quantitative analysis of the SSW. When considering the ethics of a computational approach, we find it important not to stray into the territory of writing evaluation, as purely evaluative systems have been shown to have limited instructional use in the classroom (Chen & Cheng, 2008; Weaver, 2006). Therefore, we find it important to take a descriptive, rather than evaluative approach. All of the features that we extract are both interpretable and grounded in prior research. Topic modeling has been used on undergraduate writing to improve the prediction of neuroticism and depression in college students (Resnik, Garron, & Resnik, 2013), stance markers have been used to show the development of undergraduate writers (Aull & Lancaster, 2014), and parse trees have been used to measure the syntactic complexity of student writing (Lu, 2010).Research Questions: What computational features are useful for analyzing the development of student writers? Based on these features, what insights can we gain into undergraduate writing at Stanford and similar institutions?Methodology: To extract topic features, we use LDA topic modeling (Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003) with Gibbs Sampling (Griffiths, 2002). To extract stance features, we replicate the stance markers approach from a past study (Aull & Lancaster, 2014). To describe sentence structure, we use parse trees generated using  Shift-Reduce dependency parsing (Sagae & Tsujii, 2008). For each parse tree, we use the tree depth and the average dependency length as heuristics for the syntactic complexity of the sentence.Results: Topic modeling was useful for sorting papers into academic disciplines, as well as for distinguishing between argumentative and personal writing. Stance markers helped us characterize the intersection between the majors that students hold and the topics that they are writing about at a given time. Parse tree complexity demonstrated differences between writing in different disciplines. In addition, we found that students of different disciplines have different syntactic features even during their first year at Stanford.Discussion: Topic modeling has given us a picture of interdisciplinary study at Stanford by showing how often students in the SSW wrote about topics outside their majors. Furthermore, studying interdisciplinary Stanford students allowed us to examine the intersection of a student’s major and current topic of writing when analyzing the other two sets of features. Stance markers in the SSW show that both field of study and topic of writing influence the ways in which students employ metadiscourse. In addition, when looking at stance across years, we see that Seniors regress towards their First-Year habits. The complexity results raise the question of whether different disciplines have different “ideal” levels of writing complexity.Conclusions: The present study yields insight into undergraduate writing at Stanford in particular. Notably, we find that students develop most as writers during their first two years and that students of different majors develop as writers in different ways. We consider our three categories of features to be useful because they were able to give us these insights into the dataset. We hope that, moving forward, educators will be able to use this kind of analysis to understand how their students are developing as writers.

Background: It is important for developers of automated scoring systems to ensure that their systems are as fair and valid as possible. This commitment means evaluating the performance of these systems in light of construct-irrelevant response strategies. The enhancement of systems to detect and deal with these kinds of strategies is often an iterative process, whereby as new strategies come to light they need to be evaluated and effective mechanisms built into the automated scoring systems to handle them. In this paper, we focus on the Babel system, which automatically generates semantically incohesive essays. We expect that these essays may unfairly receive high scores from automated scoring engines despite essentially being nonsense. Literature Review: We discuss literature related to gaming of automated scoring systems. One reason that Babel essays are so easy to identify as nonsense by human readers is that they lack any semantic cohesion. Therefore, we also discuss some literature related to cohesion and detecting semantic cohesion. Research Questions: This study addressed three research questions:Can we automatically detect essays generated by the Babel system?Can we integrate the detection of Babel-generated essays into an operational automated essay scoring system while making sure not to flag valid student responses?Does a general approach for detecting semantically incohesive essays also detect Babel-generated essays?Research Methodology: This article describes the creation of two corpora necessary to address the research questions: (1) a corpus of Babel-generated essays and (2) a corresponding corpus of good-faith essays. We built a classifier to distinguish Babel-generated essays from good-faith essays and investigated whether the classifier can be integrated into an automated scoring engine without adverse effects. We also developed a measure of lexical-semantic cohesion and examined its distribution in Babel and in good-faith essays.Results: We found that the classifier built on Babel-generated essays and good-faith essays and using features from the automated scoring engine can distinguish the Babel-generated essays from the good-faith ones with 100% accuracy. We also found that if we integrated this classifier into the automated scoring engine it flagged very few responses that were submitted as part of operational submissions (76 of 434,656). The responses that were flagged had previously been assigned a score of Null (non-scorable) or a score of 1 by human experts. The measure of lexical-semantic cohesion shows promise in being able to distinguish Babel-generated essays from good-faith essays.Conclusions: Our results show that it is possible to detect the kind of gaming strategy illustrated by the Babel system and add it to an automated scoring engine without adverse effects on essays seen during real high-stakes tests. We also show that a measure of lexical-semantic cohesion can separate Babel-generated essays from good-faith essays to a certain degree, depending on task. This points to future work that would generalize the capability to detect semantic incoherence in essays. Directions for Further Research: Babel-generated essays can be identified and flagged by an automated scoring system without any adverse effects on a large set of good-faith essays. However, this is just one type of gaming strategy. It is important for developers of automated scoring systems to continue to be diligent about expanding the construct coverage of their systems in order to prevent weaknesses that can be exploited by tools such as Babel. It is also important to focus on the underlying linguistic reasons that lead to nonsense sentences. Successful identification of such nonsense would lead to improved automated scoring and feedback.

Background: The researchers conducted a corpus analysis of 548 research-based argument essays, totalling 1,465,091 words, written by first-year students at The City College of New York (CCNY). The purpose of this study was to better understand the ways in which CCNY students were constructing arguments in research essays in order to better support our instruction of the research essay. Curricular guidelines for the research assignment are general. Instructors are directed to require a research-based, persuasive argument that includes conflicting points of view. Model assignment sheets are provided to instructors, but they are free to write their own. Assignment sheets are not collected or approved. In the fall semester in which this corpus was collected, over 70 part-time instructors taught approximately 120 sections of the first- or second-semester composition course.Literature Review: The study of The City College of New York Corpus (CCNYC) partially replicates and relies on the analysis of three corpora of academic writing conducted by Zak Lancaster (2016a) in his examination of Gerald Graff’s and Cathy Birkenstein’s textbook They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (2014). The current study also compares the CCNYC findings to studies of stance and voice markers frequency conducted by Ken Hyland (2012) and Ellen Barton (1993) and suggests the classroom use of corpus analysis as described by Raith Abid and Shakila Manan (2015), and Maggie Charles (2007).Research Questions: The study was guided by a narrowly-focused interest in learning whether or not the CCNYC would demonstrate the range and distribution of rhetorical moves that Lancaster found in his study of academic writing (2016a). The analysis of the corpus consists of frequency counts; we did not conduct other statistical analyses. Since we had little prior experience with corpus analysis, we wondered what would be revealed about students’ writing practices by a partial replication of Lancaster’s study. We did not reproduce Lancaster’s analysis but relied on his publised results. This study served as an assessment tool, providing a microscopic view of a limited number of rhetorical moves across a large corpus of student essays. As a result of our study, we hoped to be able to create assignments for research essays that responded directly to the patterns that we saw in our students’ essays.Methodology: Modeled on Lancaster’s study and the templates of rhetorical moves offered by Graff and Birkenstein, concordances of terms used to introduce objections, offer concessions, and make counterarguments were drawn from the CCNYC and then analyzed to confirm that the rhetorical form was in fact functioning as one of the above rhetorical moves within the context of the essay in which it was found.Results: Our study demonstrates that CCNY students use fewer linguistic resources than their peers at other institutions, a finding that helps shape faculty development seminars. The corpus analysis reveals that while CCNY students introduce objections to their arguments at about the same rates as in other corpora, they are less likely to concede to those objections. In addition, when students made counterarguments, they used only a limited range of the linguistic resources available to them.Conclusions: The low rate of engagement with opposing points of view and the limited use of linguistic resources for counterarguments all suggest the potential value of focused, corpus-based instruction.

Background: Employing natural language processing and latent semantic analysis, the current work was completed as a constituent part of a larger research project for designing and launching artificial intelligence in the form of deep artificial neural networks. The models were evaluated on a proprietary corpus retrieved from a data warehouse, where it was extracted from MyReviewers, a sophisticated web application purposed for peer review in written communication, which was actively used in several higher education institutions. The corpus of laboratory reports in STEM annotated by instructors and students was used to train the models. Under the Common Rule, research ethics were ensured by protecting the privacy of subjects and maintaining the confidentiality of data, which mandated corpus de-identification.Literature Review: De-identification and pseudonymization of textual data remains an actively studied research question for several decades. Its importance is stipulated by numerous laws and regulations in the United States and internationally with HIPAA Privacy Rule and FERPA.Research Question: Text de-identification requires a significant amount of manual post-processing for eliminating faculty and student names.  This work investigated automated and semi-automated methods for de-identifying student and faculty entities while preserving author names in cited sources and reference lists. It was hypothesized that a natural language processing toolkit and an artificial neural network model with named entity recognition capabilities would facilitate text processing and reduce the amount of manual labor required for post-processing after matching essays to a list of users’ names. The suggested techniques were applied with supplied pre-trained models without additional tagging and training. The goal of the study was to evaluate three approaches and find the most efficient one among those using a users’ list, a named entity recognition toolkit, and an artificial neural network.Research Methodology: The current work studied de-identification of STEM laboratory reports and evaluated the performance of the three techniques: brute forth search with a user lists, named entity recognition with the OpenNLP machine learning toolkit, and NeuroNER, an artificial neural network for named entity recognition built on the TensorFlow platform. The complexity of the given task was determined by the dilemma, where names belonging to students, instructors, or teaching assistants must be removed, while the rest of the names (e.g., authors of referenced papers) must be preserved.Results: The evaluation of the three selected methods demonstrated that automating de-identification of STEM lab reports is not possible in the setting, when named entity recognition methods are employed with pre-trained models. The highest results were achieved by the users’ list technique with 0.79 precision, 0.75 recall, and 0.77 F1 measure, which significantly outweighed OpenNLP with 0.06 precision, 0.14 recall, and 0.09 F1, and NeuroNER with 0.14 precision, 0.56 recall, and 0.23 F1.Discussion: Low performance of OpenNLP and NeuroNER toolkits was explained by the complexity of the task and unattainability of customized models due to imposed time constraints. An approach for masking possible de-identification errors is suggested.Conclusion: Unlike multiple cases described in the related work, de-identification of laboratory reports in STEM remained a non-trivial labor-intensive task. Applied out of the box, a machine learning toolkit and an artificial neural network technique did not enhance performance of the brute forth approach based on user list matching.Directions for Future Research: Customized tagging and training on the STEM corpus were presumed to advance outcomes of machine learning and predominantly artificial intelligence methods. Application of other natural language toolkits may lead to deducing a more effective solution.

“ Weapons of Math Destruction expands our methods and pedagogies for critically engaging with digital platforms and algorithms. The book enables, and urges us, to engage new sites, civic institutions, and new issues, the effects of algorithms on institutions, those served by the institutions, and our democracy which is enabled by those institutions.”

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No two writing programs or writing centers are alike even within the United States. Add those distinctions already present in U.S. educational spaces to the historic, educational, linguistic, and cultural contexts of writing programs and writing centers situated

Not only is the book authored by three of the field's most recognized and consequential scholars, but the belief-and the desire to share the belief-that writing is meaningful lies at the heart of writing center identity. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the book only occasionally mentions writing centers; however, this should not suggest its relevance to writing center studies is limited. On the contrary, the authors show that experiencing a writing project as meaningful is "a shared phenomenon, one deeply enmeshed in our experiences of schooling in this country and in our experiences with writing and writing instruction" (p. 22). The Meaningful Writing Project speaks to anyone invested in student writing. For writing centers, it

The following is a side-by-side review of two recent additions to the growing “Keywords” genre: Keywords for Disability Studies and Keywords in Writing Studies. Often considered a niche issue, or, in the classroom, solely the concern of specialists, what Keywords for Disability Studies does is reveal the tacit norms behind (dis)ability that inflect all bodies and minds with meaning. Keywords texts offer a number of entry points into their respective fields, and, because of their formal structure, challenge readers and teachers to devise their own pathways through the text. Reading Keywords for Disability Studies alongside Keywords in Writing Studies reveals opportunities for all composition scholars and teachers of writing to both apply an awareness of (dis)ability norms in the field and the classroom and map productive intersections between the two fields of study.

This review of Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017) and Eunjung Kim’s Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (2017) shows how both Clare and Kim critique the politics of cure in the U.S. and Korea. Specifically, these texts reveal the (at times) violent ways that cure has been forced on disabled bodies, and unpack longstanding debates within the political, cultural, and medical sectors about eliminating disability at all costs, and refusing cure. Although both works are oriented towards the field of disability studies, this review highlights the intersectional aspects of both texts and the concrete, practical ways that rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers can benefit from this discourse.

This essay offers a review of Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education and Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future with the intent of reminding composition instructors of the importance of intersectionality and accessibility. Each text encourages us to challenge traditional perceptions of success and failure thereby also interrogating imbalanced power dynamics between instructors and students particularly in regards to writing assessment and other pedagogical priorities. Finding ways to acknowledge difference, and affirm it, is vital to our collective success especially in the writing classroom.