This essay contributes to scholarship on precarity and rhetoric by exploring how participatory epideictic rhetorics, data, and infrastructure contribute to precarity. We concentrate on how shared data practices (i.e., systems for archiving, storing, distributing, and communicating information) produce and sustain human/material vulnerabilities for users, developers, and systems with observational research of VirtualLearners, a business that created, aggregated, and sold data (i.e., videos, texts, and games) to educators. We argue that VirtualLearners’s glitching online ratings system and its associated data nurtured user precarity by encouraging barriers to education, the basis of economic and social mobility. In this essay, we expose VirtualLearners’s backstage computational techniques and tactics that transformed the rhetorical capacities made available to students and teachers. As part of this study, we introduce the concept of affective data technologies to explain how publics are encouraged to become invested in data practices that can make them complicit in their own precarity.

This study examines the effects of inductively versus deductively organized product descriptions on Chinese and Western readers. It uses a 2 × 3 experimental design with text structure (inductive versus deductive) and cultural background (Chinese living in China, Chinese living in the Netherlands, and Westerners) as independent variables and recall, reading time, and readers’ opinions as dependent variables. Participants read a product description that explained two refrigerator types and then recommended which one to purchase. The results showed that Chinese readers rated readability and persuasiveness higher when the text was structured inductively whereas Western readers rated these aspects equally high for the inductively and deductively structured text. The results suggest that culturally preferred organizing principles do not affect readers’ ability to read and understand texts but that these principles might affect their opinions about the texts.

Research has shown that collaboratively produced texts are better in quality compared with individually written texts. However, no study has considered the role of collaboration in authorial voice, which is an essential element in current writing curricula. This study analyzes the effects of collaborative task performance in the quality of L2 learners’ argumentative texts and in their authorial voice strength. A total of 306 upper-intermediate L2 learners were selected and divided into independent ( N = 130) and paired ( N = 176) groups. Each learner/pair was asked to write one argumentative text. The quality of writings was determined by a quantitative analysis that included three measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Participants’ authorial voice strength was assessed by two raters using an analytic voice rubric. Comparison of means revealed that pairs outperformed independent writers in all CAF measures. However, the results for the role of collaboration in authorial voice were mixed: While pairs were more successful than independent writers in manifesting their ideational voice, independent writers outperformed pairs with regard to affective and presence voice dimensions and holistic voice scores. The article concludes that, despite its positive implications for L2 writing, collaborative writing may pose challenges for learners’ authorial stance taking.

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This analysis uses a critical race framework from African American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping&hellip; Continue reading Bodily Instruments: Somatic Metaphor in Prison-based Research by Libby Catchings

&#8220;Pitting feeling rules against affective publics, and examining how student-athletes are placed at their center, raises future research questions about pressurized rhetorical bodies and social justice movements. How have student-athletes and professional-level athletes accorded with institutional feeling rules and engaged with the rhetorical-affective work of activists and oppositions?&#8221;

As I compose this book review, the 2020 presidential primary field is shrinking as fundraising targets are hit and missed and candidates who remain are promising to make medical care affordable for...

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

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Even though Lafayette, Louisiana is 150 miles to the west of New Orleans, the city was affected by Katrina, and its twin, Rita, in significant ways. While the eye of neither storm passed directly over Lafayette, we experienced a cosmology episode as the effects of back-to-back severe hurricanes made the world, if only for a&hellip; Continue reading When the Wind Blows: The Search for Normalcy During the Hurricanes of 2005 by Melissa Nicolas

This paper describes methods to study the impact of service-learning on the writing performance of students in first-year college composition. Linguistic and rhetorical features commonly identified as affecting judgments of writing quality are compared to holistic essay ratings to assess the impact of different teaching and learning contexts on writing performance. Link to PDF

ABSTRACT While claiming to be a much-needed corrective to the dual disappointments of structuralism and post-structuralism, one is starting to get the sense that affect may have simply inverted, rather than resolved, the binary of form/feeling. Yet emerging within and against the affective turn is a re-turn to structure as the condition of possibility for affectivity. From this re-turn, which I'll term affective formalism, is culled the transdisciplinary exemplars reviewed here: Ruth Leys's The Ascent of Affect, Gary Genosko's Critical Semiotics, Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects, with a nod to Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling. Far from caging affect, these new (and not so new) books suggest a return to form, once again, with feeling.

This article uses a contemporary literature class titled Alternatives to Realism that the author taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the basis to argue for the special value of experimental, speculative, and otherwise antirealistic literature for introductory-level undergraduate literature pedagogy. The author argues that, rather than choosing realistic narratives that students are likely to understand and relate to on first pass, professors should deliberately seek out works students are likely to initially find confusing or strange and then endeavor to help them understand those texts. The article suggests that the difficulty associated with such texts, rather than intimidating students, actually invites them to engage with the reading process more actively and enthusiastically. The article discusses the premise and overall structure of the class and the rationale behind it; delves into specific examples of discussions and assignments based on such texts as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow; and examines students’ own ultimate responses to the class as presented in their final exam reflection essays. Ultimately, the author argues that teaching (seemingly) difficult, idiosyncratic literary works helps students appreciate the unique intellectual work of reading, strengthens their self-confidence, and leads them to a keener appreciation of the humanities more broadly.

Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic resources for communicating attitude multimodally. The research participants were 68 students (ages 9–11 years) from two elementary schools. Students learned how to use attitudinal language—affect, judgment, and appreciation—and applied this knowledge to multimodal design. The findings advance a leading system of appraisal for discourse by adapting the system to the multimodal communication of attitude in digital comic making in schooling. The research is significant because it demonstrates the potentials for augmenting students’ linguistic and visual semiotic resources to convey multimodal attitudinal meanings in contemporary communication.

ABSTRACT This essay explores how a physiological notion of affect, one predicated on the transsubstantial circulation of micro-materiality, provides useful connectivity among old and new materialisms. First, it explores nascent theories of energetic matter in Marxism as potential sites for new materialist extensions. Second, it proposes affect as a theoretical shorthand for the circulating flows of matter central to the physiological production, orientation, and materialization of bodily capacities, including the ability to reinvent political economic habituation from the perspective of difference. Third, it illustrates the contributions of a Marxist new materialism through a brief discussion of contemporary race politics.

While the term neoliberalism is commonly used to explain libertarian and conservative economic perspectives, its rapidly expanding contexts influence every aspect of our cultural environment, even the contexts of higher education. This article explores how neoliberal ideology affects the contemporary teaching environment for women of color teaching ideological critique.

The two primary US political parties are increasingly polarizing along affective dimensions. To increase students’ engagement with controversial texts and conversations, the author theorizes a novel method of critical pedagogy: performed contradictoriness. By emphasizing seemingly contradictory identity markers, the instructor attempts to become opaque, thereby frustrating students’ attempts at interpretation.

Although corporate greenwashing is a widespread phenomenon, few studies have investigated its effects on consumers. In these studies, consumers were exposed to organizations that boldly lied about their green behaviors. Most greenwashing practices in real life, however, do not involve complete lies. This article describes a randomized 3 × 2 experimental study in the cruise industry investigating the effects of various degrees of greenwashing. Six experimental conditions were created based on behavioral-claim greenwashing (an organization telling the truth vs. its telling lies or half-lies) and motive greenwashing (an organization acting on its own initiative vs. its taking credit for following legal obligations). Dependent variables were three corporate reputation constructs: environmental performance, product and service quality, and financial performance. Compared to true green behavior, lies and half-lies had similar negative effects on reputation. Taking credit for following legal obligations had no main effect. Only in the case of true green behavior did undeservedly taking credit affect reputation negatively. Overall, the findings suggest that only true green behavior will have the desired positive effects on reputation.

In this article, we examine how children ages 8 to 10 characterized the audiences of digital videos they made in school. Children’s perceptions of their viewers reflected, and in many cases complicated, current theorizing about the vast potential audiences of digital texts. Our analysis of videos and interview data surfaces several findings pertaining to how children characterized their audiences. Children discussed their desire to inform viewers, their deliberate choices about language use vis-à-vis their viewers, ways they predicted and steered audience emotions, and the affective dimensions of sharing one’s video with different audiences. These findings suggest that educators and researchers ought to foreground issues of addressivity when theorizing the question of audience for children’s digital products. They also raise questions concerning authentic audience in an age of increasing concern about children’s safety and security in online worlds.

ABSTRACTThis article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement, suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning to and extending Foucault's middle and late work to forge a different model, the article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between materiality and power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political, and intellectual implications of this shift.

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Frankie Condon implores her audience to imagine new ways of performing anti-racist activism and pedagogies throughout her book: I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. For Condon, building an antiracist epistemology involves an individual’s ability to weave together the affective and spiritual dimensions of knowing alongside of multiple stories, which highlight&hellip; Continue reading Review: I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Kelly A. Concannon

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

This article examines the intersection between the feelings of anxiety and love. The author looks at how the affective labor she performs professionally has shifted as she has moved from a contingent faculty role to a faculty development role. This shift, while necessary, highlights the power imbalance within academia, as well as the devaluation of affective labor. She examines how her anxieties as a faculty developer differ from the anxieties that faculty are bringing with them in their interactions with her.

This mixed-methods study investigates writers’ task representation and the factors affecting it in test-like and non-test-like conditions. Five advanced-level L2 writers wrote two argumentative essays each, one in test-like conditions and the other in non-test-like conditions where the participants were allowed to use all the time and online materials they needed. The writing was done on computers, and we recorded the writing process and keystrokes using the Screen Capture Video and Inputlog programs. We audio recorded stimulated recall interviews after each writing session, with the writers reporting and commenting on their writing strategies and their reasons for following them. The findings of this study suggest that there are several factors that play a role in task representation, such as previous education, personal beliefs, and task conditions. Although these factors were present in all participants’ responses, the differences in the writers’ approaches to interpret and execute the writing were marked. The results highlight various pedagogical issues and options related to teaching writing in general and to the place of task representation on writing programs in particular.

Service learning presents students and teachers alike with emotionally fraught moments. Before these moments shape ideologies and worldviews, they give us sensations. Understanding these sensations is part of what theorists label the affective domain. Affect is a notion garnering much critical attention from compositionists writ large but little attention in the service learning literature. The&hellip; Continue reading The Affective Dimensions of Service Learning by William DeGenaro

This article explores the value of including creative assignments in the composition classroom. Specifically, it demonstrates how a multimodal assignment can help struggling students develop the confidence to succeed on creative assignments and on subsequent more traditional academic assignments.

Abstract Donald Trump’s campaign violated every rule of presidential campaigns, and few commentators thought that he had a chance to win the presidency. His success can be traced to the strong affective connection that he created with core supporters. Trump used a rhetoric of nationalist populism with a charismatic outsider persona, a rhetorical pattern that functioned as an affective genre, to create this connection. This pattern is evident in campaign rallies, his speech at the Republican National Convention, and his inaugural address. Trump’s successful use of a rhetoric of nationalist populism has important implications for the status of American democracy.

&#8220;What our experience showed us is that communicating care in context requires a relentless engagement with stakeholders in context and a sophisticated understanding of the way ethics, history, sociology, politics and science affect one’s ability to experience feeling cared for.&#8221;

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

ABSTRACTPhilosophy consists primarily in or of texts. The implications of this very basic fact for the subject—both as a writer and as a reader—and philosophy's conception of itself as a privileged form of argumentation and for establishing the truth have, however, been largely neglected. In order to address these issues, the article reconsiders Foucault's “double reading” of Descartes's Meditations as “demonstration” and “exercise” that both affects and transforms the meditating subject. I argue that such a double reading is not only proper to the Meditations but constitutive of all philosophical texts. This leads to a revised notion of truth that derives its argumentative consistency precisely from the entanglement of demonstration and exercise.

ABSTRACT Stasis is a precondition for debate that can be understood as a proposition determining controversy in advance or a retroactively determined basis for judgment. This essay examines the affective conditions of possibility for stasis, arguing that the propositional model risks concealing a broader economy of desire that might help to explain why unexpected audiences cathect to certain positions. The example of support for Donald Trump from QAnon conspiracy theorists illustrates these affective connections and the importance of reexamining affect as a condition of possibility for debate.

Resulting from stroke or brain injury, aphasia affects individuals’ ability to produce and comprehend language, but it also creates profound social changes, limiting individuals’ opportunities to communicate or to be seen as capable of communication. To address these challenges, the field of communicative sciences and disorders (CSD) has sought to ensure “communicative access” by reducing barriers to communication. This article, through an analysis of the communicative practices of participants in a memoir group for people with aphasia, develops a nuanced conception of communicative access as a process of negotiation across individuals and modes and not just as a process of reducing barriers. The study shows, specifically, that rather than the mere presence of multiple semiotic resources enabling communicative access, individuals enact access by flexibly shifting between modes to take advantage of various kinds of affordances that best suit their needs. This willingness to use modes in atypical or nonnormative ways importantly challenges the very idea of “normal” communication. The theory of communicative access developed in this article melds (a) a CSD understanding of communication as social and tied inextricably to identity with (b) a disability studies conception of access as an ongoing, negotiated process and with (c) a writing studies emphasis on literate, communicative activity as complexly layered, distributed, negotiated, and (multi)semiotic.

AbstractIn the rhetoric of contemporary federal education reform, public school teachers are often blamed for and championed as solutions to educational problems. Representations of teachers as heroic and blameworthy are an integral component of a neoliberal rationality apparent in education reform since the publication of the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk, as they allow political actors to promote individual solutions to systemic issues that affect student achievement. After briefly exploring the rhetoric of reform, this essay focuses on the ways teachers negotiate the discourses that implicate their profession. To do so, I analyze a corpus of 18 open letters written and published online by current and former public school teachers in protest of policy and/or specific political actors. I argue that authors of these open letters leverage their professional identities to protest and articulate alternatives to seemingly pervasive neoliberal logics inherent in contemporary education reform. In turn, I maintain that analyzing vernacular exchanges, such as teachers’ protest discourse, is imperative to understanding the material consequences of education policy as well as the full discursive space of policymaking.

This study explores how a spokesperson’s facial expressions and verbal response strategies affect participants’ evaluations of an organization’s crisis communication responses. Using a between-subjects experiment with Taiwanese participants, the study investigates the effects of congruence and incongruence between an organization’s emotional and verbal responses on participants’ perceptions of the acceptability of its crisis response. The findings suggest that an organization’s emotional response should be congruent with its verbal response strategy in order to enhance the audience’s acceptance of its crisis response and in turn protect its reputation.

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

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

In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives,observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

This article argues that rhetoricians of health and medicine can benefit from new methodological orientations that more fully account for conducting digital research within vulnerable online communities. More specifically, this article introduces a feminist digital research methodology, an intersectional methodology that helps rhetoricians of health and medicine contend with the overlapping rhetorical, technological, and ethical frameworks affecting how we understand and collect health information, particularly within vulnerable online communities. The author considers methodological shifts in Internet research ethics, rhetorics of health and medicine, and feminist rhetorics as well as definitions and conceptions of online communities and vulnerability. The author next draws from a 5-year case study of an online childbirth community to demonstrate how a feminist digital research methodology offers an alternative methodological orientation that helps researchers navigate ethical decision-making practices that arise from conducting health research within vulnerable online communities. Finally, the author outlines the broader implications of this methodology by suggesting three ways that scholars can use it within and beyond the field.

This study aims to explore the process of reading during writing. More specifically, it investigates whether a combination of keystroke logging data and eye tracking data yields a better understanding of cognitive processes underlying fluent and nonfluent text production. First, a technical procedure describes how writing process data from the keystroke logging program Inputlog are merged with reading process data from the Tobii TX300 eye tracker. Next, a theoretical schema on reading during writing is presented, which served as a basis for the observation context we created for our experiment. This schema was tested by observing 24 university students in professional communication (skilled writers) who typed short sentences that were manipulated to elicit fluent or nonfluent writing. The experimental sentences were organized into four different conditions, aiming at (a) fluent writing, (b) reflection about correct spelling of homophone verbs, (c) local revision, and (d) global revision. Results showed that it is possible to manipulate degrees of nonfluent writing in terms of time on task and percentage of nonfluent key transitions. However, reading behavior was affected only for the conditions that explicitly required revision. This suggests that nonfluent writing does not always affect the reading behavior, supporting the parallel and cascading processing hypothesis.

This article explores how assemblage and affect theories can enable research into the formation of a collective working-class identity, inclusive of written, print, publication, and organizational literacies through the origins of the Federation of Worker Writer and Community Publishers, an organization that expanded its collectivity as new heritages, ethnicities, and immigrant identities altered the organization’s membership and “class” identity.

Acknowledging students’ and instructors’ desires for grades as affective carriers of achievement, belonging, and identity can move us beyond ideals of socially just assessment, making space for decolonizing action and explorations of how the classroom community and the field grapple with the dissonance between being a writer and being a student.

This study examined adolescents’ perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students’ viewpoints when composing three multimodal products—a website, hypertext literary analysis, and podcast—in response to a well-known literary text. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, written reflections, and multimodal products. Findings revealed how adolescents concurrently composed for multiple purposes and audiences during the literature analysis unit. In particular, students viewed projects as a platform to emotionally affect and entertain a broader audience, as well as a conduit through which they could represent themselves as composers. Emphasis was placed on creating cohesive compositions—ranging from close modal matching to building meaning at a thematic level and creating a multisensory experience indicative of the novel’s narrative world. These findings contribute a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ various and interacting multimodal composing goals and have implications for leveraging modal affordances in the classroom.

Abstract Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style—a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument’s use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body—at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.

This study investigates the direct and/or indirect effects of some cognitive (working memory capacity) and affective (writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy) variables on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of second language (L2) learners’ writings. To achieve this goal, 232 upper-intermediate English learners performed an automated version of a working memory capacity task (A-OSPAN) and a timed narrative writing task in L2. Furthermore, participants were asked to complete two self-report questionnaires. The proposed path model adequately fitted the data, and results of path analyses indicated the following: All three measures of L2 writing were directly predicted by learners’ writing self-efficacy; writing self-efficacy affected CAF indirectly through writing anxiety; the direct paths from writing anxiety to all measures of L2 writing were negatively significant; higher working memory spans directly predicted higher L2 writing scores regarding complexity and fluency, but negatively affected learners’ accuracy scores. Based on these findings, the author discusses techniques for enhancing learners’ writing self-efficacy, reducing their anxiety, and helping them make efficient use of working memory resources.

This article argues that fake news is only one instantiation of a shift that literacy studies will need to reckon with to understand how people encounter texts on an everyday basis. It argues that looking at the information ecologies in which fake news circulates reveals a shift to the reliance on computational and automated writing systems to circulate texts and amplify their distribution. The article critically synthesizes existing literature and provides key examples of how algorithms and bots were deployed strategically to pollute the media ecology with fake news in the time immediately preceding the 2016 Presidential election in the United States. The argument ultimately raises a series of questions that literacy studies will need to confront given the influence of computation in contemporary information environments, including asking: how can people engage in responsible discourse in the face of rapidly evolving and exploitable technologies?

Writing educators have long sought to disrupt academic convention. However, we currently know little about students’ affective experiences when they are asked to compose differently. This article explores the results of a research study to illuminate the feelings and attitudes students experience when convention is disrupted and offers pedagogical suggestions based on the results.

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