User experience (UX) researchers in technical communication (TC) and beyond still need a clear picture of the methods used to measure and evaluate UX. This article charts current UX methods through a systematic literature review of recent publications (2016–2018) and a survey of 52 UX practitioners in academia and industry. Our results indicate that contemporary UX research favors mixed methods, and that usability testing is especially popular in both published research and our survey results. This article presents these findings as a snapshot of contemporary research methods for UX.

AbstractWhile the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation.

Introduction: Virtual teams, especially project teams, increasingly rely on computer-mediated communication for interaction when collaborating and completing their tasks. Team members represent various cultures, occupations, and industries. Virtual teams often use English as a business lingua franca in communication. This study investigates critical factors related to virtual project teams that influence computer-mediated communication. Research questions: 1. How is diversity in video meetings experienced by the members of multidisciplinary and multicultural project teams? 2. Do differences in team members' occupational or industrial backgrounds show in their opinions on video meetings? Literature review: The effectiveness of communication has been identified as playing a critical role in the success of virtual projects. Diversity, whether disciplinary or cultural, enriches teamwork by bringing different viewpoints to discussions. On the other hand, diversity can also set some challenges for communicating these viewpoints. Research methodology: Mixed methods were used to analyze data obtained from 104 responses to an online survey. Spearman's correlation coefficient and Kruskall-Wallis nonparametric tests were used for statistical analysis, and open comments were analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results and conclusion: The findings show that linguistic, cultural, and occupational diversity facilitates communication in virtual project team meetings. In addition, applying appropriate features of video meeting tools in different stages of project teamwork leads to better communication in virtual teams. A high level of English proficiency is not required, but clear communication rules are essential. In addition, some occupational or industry-specific differences in opinions on communication could be identified.

This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.

The role of empathy in student team collaborations in technical and professional communication has been understudied. In this mixed methods study, we assess how Scrum affects both student perceptions of empathy and student use of empathetic strategies. We found that students who used Scrum considered themselves to be no more empathetic than students who did not use Scrum. However, a discourse analysis revealed that students who used Scrum deployed significantly more empathetic strategies than students who did not use Scrum.

AbstractAlthough much has been written about the history of commonplacing, there is a lack of evidence-based research to show the extent to which this historical practice may still be valuable today as a pedagogy that educates citizens in critical reading for democracy. This article describes an institutional-review-board-approved, experimental study to answer this question. Three sections of the same first-year reading and writing course were compared: one section did not use commonplace books, a second section used commonplace books that included quotations only, and a third section used commonplace books with reflective writing. We expected to find that students who used commonplace books would perform better in end-of-study assessments than those who did not. Instead, we were surprised to find that many of the students who were not required to use commonplace books created their own note-taking methods that performed a similar function. In essence, they developed their own commonplace book culture and methodology using Google Docs and other social reading practices. Their performance was as strong as the students who used commonplace books.

Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.

This longitudinal study examines one central dimension of discursive essay writing, viz. text structure. It presents results from 40 upper secondary school students’ argumentative and expository texts, four essays in Swedish and four in English (N=320) written during the students’ three years upper-secondary schooling. In addition, three students’ writing progression in eight tasks is presented as cases. The study contributes to the knowledge about upper-secondary school students’ written discursive development in two languages, Swedish (L1) and English (L2). The research is informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the texts were analyzed for logical structure, defined as the cultural norms for clear organization of texts in more academic or formal contexts. The analysis comprised three levels: (1) the global level (text structure in steps and general organization), (2) the paragraph level (paragraphing supporting the global structure), and (3) the linguistic level (language related discursive markers). Based on the analyses of different levels, an overall assessment of logical structure was made. The results show that the progression in terms of text structure largely failed to occur and neither the choice of language or different text types (argumentative and expository texts) shaped students’ ability to structure their text.

Introduction: Engineering programs must take creative approaches to ensure that their students receive needed communication instruction in curricula constantly experiencing pressures of accreditation, state, and industry requirements: expectations for students' knowledge and skills increase although curricula are compressed. Situating the case: Technical communication and engineering education scholarship describe multiple models for integrating writing instruction into engineering curricula: 1. writing across the curriculum, 2. partnership models, 3. embedded models, and 4. support models. About the case: Technical and professional writing and engineering faculty collaborated to develop a hybrid model, which borrows from multiple existing models for integrating technical writing education throughout the engineering curriculum, both in and outside of courses, including collaborative workshops, specialized writing center support, and other interventions. Methods/approach: Survey research was conducted with students on the effectiveness of multiple writing interventions. Results/discussion: The hybrid model enables students to experience a variety of writing interventions; students perceived them as beneficial. Students found most effective writing interventions occurred in the context of their engineering coursework. Faculty and administrators found the approach beneficial because of its collaborative nature and because it balanced instructional time with external support methods. Conclusions: Local solutions to universal problems must take many variables into consideration: people and programmatic cultures, disciplinary and institutional contexts, and curricular, regulatory, and funding constraints. The authors' hybrid model for integrating technical writing into the engineering curriculum represents a flexible, sustainable approach adaptable to meet specific needs in specific environments at different institutions.

AbstractArgument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure.

ABSTRACT Recruitment advertisements published in technical and professional communication (TPC) conference programs and proceedings offer a snapshot of the messages that these programs use to market themselves and distinguish their value in the marketplace of graduate programs. Using an exploratory mixed methods approach informed by Bakhtin's theory of addressivity, we developed a two-phase study to assess recruitment advertisements from three perspectives: from the advertisement content itself, from the students being recruited, and from the TPC program coordinators or directors. Recommendations for improving TPC advertising and promotion are given.

With significantly higher rates of comorbidities and limited access to health care, some Appalachian rural communities face magnified health challenges due to COVID-19. This article looks at one example of how data visualizations might draw attention to health care realities in rural communities and yet render invisible the realities of the most vulnerable community members. The authors urge technical and professional communicators to contextualize data-driven accounts of public health crises in order to call attention to the needs of rural communities and support community members who are multiply marginalized and thus especially vulnerable.

A large number of U.S. university writing centers (WCs) hire undergraduates as peer tutors, and many of them are menstruators. Menstruators have received strong cultural messages, including that menstruation should be concealed. Menstruating tutors’ damaged self-recognition received from the world around them can lead to internalized self-identification and further impact their perceptions of their knowledge and consultations with student writers every day in WCs. The acceptance and accessibility of menstrual products in WCs would help boost work ethic among menstruating tutors and break down the taboo about menstruation. To explore what impact such acceptance and accessibility exert on menstruating tutors, we conducted a mixed methods case study on menstruating tutors’ perceptions about themselves, their professionalism and work ethic, as well as their experiences, with and without having free access to menstrual products at their WC. We collected data via a set of pre and post surveys and individual interviews of 15 participants at the WC. The quantitative data from pre and post surveys did not reveal statistical significance, while the qualitative data helped explain why there was no statistical significance. Nevertheless, integration of all the data from this pioneering project has contributed rich findings to the existing WC scholarship about space and access, mindfulness, and social justice at large. The findings have practical applications to day-to-day WC practice.

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students’ development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, Reflection ; White). One assumption about the value of reflection has been that skill in reflective writing also has a positive connection with lower-order writing skills, such as sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. However, evidence to confirm this assumption has been limited to small qualitative studies or deferred to future longitudinal research (Downs and Wardle). In the mixed methods assessment study presented here, we first investigated this assumption empirically by measuring the relationship between evaluative skills embedded in the genre of reflective writing and lower-order writing skills that follow sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. We found a high-positive correlation between reflection and writing assessment scores. We then used qualitative methods to describe key features of higher- and lower-scored reflective essays.

This article makes an argument for the value of both replicable research and replication research in writing center studies. In their discussion of replicability, the authors argue that writing about empirical research so that this research can be replicated will improve the quality of communication in writing center studies whether or not replication studies are subsequently undertaken. The authors further provide for researchers specific guidance on how to create replicable studies, focusing on best practices for describing data sets and sampling, sharing surveys and interview protocols, detailing coding efforts, establishing infrastructure to share data sets, and writing about statistics. Further, the authors explain how replication studies would add new kinds of knowledge to writing center studies. The authors specify that the kinds of replication studies they wish to see should be distinguished from both the positivistic approach to replication taken in other, more quantitative fields and from a looser, iterative approach to building on previous research that has been advocated for within writing studies.

Most tutors are trained in a core writing centers belief: Student writers who talk about their writing are student writers who will achieve better learning outcomes. Our comparative study—one of few in writing center research—examined the points in conferences in which student writers talked the most. We examined the very long turns (VLTs) of eight native English speaking (NES) student writers and eight non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers across 16 writing center conferences. We found that NESs contributed more VLTs than NNESs and that more NES conferences contained VLTs. We also found that stating goals for the conference occurred in half of the NES conferences, specifically, in the opening stage, while no NNES conferences had stated opening goals. In the three NNES conferences that contained VLTs, two contained a statement of a sentence-level goal, a description of potential content for the paper, and a period of time spent reading aloud from the paper. Of the VLTs preceded by questions, pumping questions (questions that prod student responses) occurred most frequently. We discuss the role that student-writer motivation and familiarity with the typical conference script played in the results and some implications of this comparative study for tutor training.

Evaluating Academic Literacies Course Types This poster represents a mixed methods study conducted at the University of the West Indies (UWI), which seeks to determine the merits of two types of Academic Literacies (AL) courses in promoting successful academic outcomes. Its focus is the first quantitative research phase in which the grade point averages after the first year of study of Social Sciences students successful either in the general purposes Foun1019 ‘Critical Reading and Writing in the Disciplines’ course or in the faculty-specific purposes Foun1013 ‘Critical Reading and Writing in the Social Sciences’ course are compared. The second, qualitative phase will be presented in future publications. This study is a response to an unimplemented recommendation of an external 2018 Quality Assurance Review (QAR) of the UWI, Mona campus, English Language Section, that students successful in the first semester of Foun1019 switch in the second semester to their faculty-specific AL courses. The QAR rationale for the recommended course switch is that the non-faculty-specific nature of the second semester of Foun1019 is academically disadvantageous to students who have shown promise in its first semester. This study is relevant to the debate over the use of general versus disciplinary AL approaches, one publicized by Jordan (1997) and revived by de Chazal (2012) who makes a pedagogical and practical case favouring a general purposes approach. Underlying the study is the premise at the heart of AL courses: that by preparing incoming students, supposed novice writers and readers at the tertiary level of study, these courses serve to maximise their academic performance. Indeed, this is the premise upon which the required pursuit by university students of AL courses is based. This Foun1019 general purposes course, introduced for students from all faculties who fail an English language proficiency entrance test (ELPT), places emphasis in the first semester on developmental reading and writing in English as well as on overcoming writer apprehension. Furthermore, a dual language identity – Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole – is conferred on students. This is because whereas English is Jamaica’s sole official language, Jamaican Creole – which has an English lexicon but distinctly un-English grammar, syntax and phonology – is the first language of most of the students. The work undertaken in the first  semester functions as a bridge for students, building their linguistic self-esteem and improving their English language proficiency in order to ease them into what is considered the bona fide AL focus of the second semester: ‘Writing from Sources’. This latter focus is shared with one-semester, faculty-specific purposes AL courses, populated by students who pass or are exempt from the ELPT. These courses seek to respond to the AL development needs of individual faculties’ constituent departments. To do this, they employ as much of a specific purposes AL approach as is possible given the wide range of parent disciplines involved. The Foun1013 course featured in this study, which is pursued by Faculty of Social Sciences students exclusively, falls into this faculty-specific category of UWI AL courses. The Foun1019 and Foun1013 Year 1 student groups being compared have both been certified at the end of their first year of study to possess a satisfactory level of English language proficiency on the basis of attaining passing grades at the end of Semester two in their final and major AL assignment: a 1200-word documented expository essay scored via a common holistic rubric. To ensure further comparability of the two groups, control of the potentially influential independent variables of Socioeconomic Status (SES), Gender, Intellectual Aptitude (as estimated via matriculation qualifications) and other selected variables is accounted for by the multiple regression analysis component of the overall study design. To address the unevenness of the size of the two study populations, that is, the relatively small number (51) of Year 1 Foun1019 Social Sciences students versus the high number (630) of their Foun1013 counterparts, the Tukey test of statistical significance for unequal group sizes will be applied. To assess the groups’ relative academic performance, the official UWI measurement standard, Grade Point Average (GPA), is used. This measurement shows the typical course result of a student for a semester or year, and ultimately determines the quality of degree awarded (for example, First Class Honours, Lower Second Class Honours, Pass). This measurement encompasses nine bands ranging from 0.00-1.29 to 4.00-4.30 points. The points in question represent the numerical value given to letter grades, e.g. C+ (55-59%) = 2.30 points, F2 (40-44%) = 1.30 points. Grade points are determined by multiplying the points earned by the credit weighting of the course, which is based on the duration of the course (whether one or two semesters). Students earn three credits for one-semester courses, and six credits for two-semester ones. 2.00 is the minimum grade point deemed acceptable (University of the West Indies, 2014).  The investigation reveals that the overall Year 1 student pass rates for Foun1013 and Foun1019 at the end of the second semester of the 2017/18 academic year were 60.2% (630/1047) and 62.2% (51/82) respectively. Preliminary findings on the GPAs of the passing groups are as follows: 1) Foun1013 students’ GPAs are more widely spread across the band ranges than those of Foun1019 students; 2) The modal band range of the two groups is 2.30-2.99: 42.6% (269/630) of Foun1013 students versus 54.9% (28/51) of Foun1019 students; 3) The GPAs of 41.9% (264/630) of Foun1013 students fall into the four highest band ranges (3.00-4.29) versus 25.5% (13/51) for Foun1019 students; 4) The GPAs of 10.6% (66/630) of the Foun1013 students fall into the 2:00-2:29 (just acceptable) band range versus 15.7% (8/51) for 1019 students; 5) The GPAs of 4.9% (31/630) of Foun1013 students fall into the three lowest band ranges (0.00 -1.99) versus 3.9% (2/51) for Foun1019 students. Thus, overall, the Year 1 Foun1013 specific purposes students outperformed their Foun1019 general counterparts with respect to their higher band ranges, but the modal range of scores for both groups (a low but acceptable one) was the same; in addition, the Foun1019 group had slightly better outcomes in terms of its lower proportion of students with poor GPAs (under 2.0). Therefore, this cross-tabulation of the two groups’ GPAs reveals that student success in the general purposes course is not more highly correlated with Year 1 academic failure than student success in the faculty-specific purposes course, but it may hold implications for the passing grades received. Corresponding results for Year 2, 3 and 4 students, along with these Year 1 results, will be subjected to the finer-grained statistical analysis needed to reach definitive conclusions, while the qualitative phase of the study will use course content analysis and questionnaire and interview data from students and academic staff to seek explanations for the conclusions drawn. References de Chazal, E. (2012). The general-specific debate in EAP: Which case is the most convincing for most contexts? Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research, 2(1), 135–148. http://pops.uclan.ac.uk/index.php/jsltr/article/view/90/37 Jordan, R. R. (1997). English for academic purposes: A guide and resource book for teachers. Cambridge University Press. University of the West Indies. (2014). Grade point average regulations (Internal document). UWI. https://www.uwi.edu/gradingpolicy/docs/regulations.pdf

Collaborating between Writing and STEM: Teaching Disciplinary Genres, Researching Disciplinary Interventions, and Engaging Science Audiences This poster describes a multi-pronged effort to build a writing curriculum in Physics and other STEM fields at the George Washington University, USA. These efforts include curricular collaboration, a research study conducted by the Physicists and Writing Scholars, and external funding initiatives. This project first began as a curricular collaboration through our Writing in the Disciplines (WID) curriculum, initiated by observations among Physics faculty that undergraduate students lack Physics specific writing skills. Writing faculty responded to this observation by introducing Physics faculty to the idea that writing can and must be taught, that the genres of Physics can be taught by Physics faculty, and that a focus on the writing process can improve student writing. Our curricular goal was to demonstrate to faculty who are unfamiliar with writing studies that writing is a means to learn in Physics (Anderson et al., 2017). The first phase of our effort was to persuade Physics faculty that writing contributes to learning in Physics; we describe a collaboration between Physics and Writing faculty that developed assignments and made curricular interventions. This collaboration built upon scholarship in writing studies that argues genre instruction develops capacities and skills for student writing (Swales, 1990; Winsor, 1996). While genre is not a new concept in Writing Studies, for many Physics faculty the idea that they can teach – and have students learn – how to write in disciplinary genres is novel. Collaboration around curricular revisions enabled Writing and Physics faculty to teach students that learning how to write in a new genre is a skill that can be practiced (Ericsson, 2006; Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009). We developed a process for students to follow when faced with types of writing common to Physics, but potentially new to them, such as the abstract (written), lab research notebook (written), article summary (oral), letter to colleague (written), cover letter and resumé (written), elevator pitch (oral), proposal (written and oral), presentation on issues of ethics and equity in STEM (oral), research presentation (oral), poster (written), poster presentation (oral), final research report (written), and Symposium presentation (oral). The collaboration thus created pedagogical exchange between faculty as well as scholarly synergy between the disciplines of Physics and Writing Studies. Physics faculty have observed that the curricular collaboration has had measurable results for students. Physics student participation in the campus research day has increased dramatically. We attribute this rise partly to the increased, explicit attention in classroom settings to how to engage with Physics genres of writing, especially abstracts and research posters. While the collaboration successfully brought together a small but solid group of Writing and Physics faculty, it also raised questions about how to persuade a broader range of Physics faculty, and other science faculty, that teaching disciplinary genres can improve student writing, and that writing is a means of learning. Given that faculty in STEM disciplines find empirical research persuasive, our next step was to undertake a collaborative research project to measure the impact of the teaching of writing in Physics. The new curricular focus on genre asked students to conceptualize themselves as scientific writers in relation to specific Physics or STEM audiences. The collaborative research therefore investigates if teaching Physics genres improves writing and enables students to conceptualize themselves as emerging scientists engaged in professional communication (Poe et al., 2010; Winsor, 1996). Our longitudinal analysis of student writing in Physics evaluates writing from three sequenced courses, the first before faculty-developed genre assignments, and then after genre assignments. We developed a rubric that evaluates general outcomes – audience, genre, structure, style – and a rubric that evaluates specialized learning outcomes – acknowledgement of past scholarship, working with models, incorporating scholarship, articulation of research questions, working with graphs, and articulation of methods. Preliminary research analysis shows that explicitly teaching Physics genres increases student’s abilities to write successfully in Physics, enabling students to understand how knowledge is communicated persuasively to audiences. Our goal with this research is to show STEM faculty through research by Physicists and Writing Studies scholars that teaching writing socializes students into the discipline of Physics, leading them to identify as professional scientists (Allie et al, 2010; Gere et al., 2019). This increase is exemplified by the large number of students volunteering to present a poster during the University wide research day, giving them experience presenting to an educated audience outside of Physics. Thus, a combination of strategies – curricular collaboration and intervention, collaborative research from within the discipline of Physics, and successful external funding – are what demonstrate to scientists that teaching genre and teaching writing are central to science education. Based on this experience, our contribution is that shared pedagogical and research collaborations, and funding, are what make the knowledge of Writing Studies persuasive to scientists. We have seen success with these efforts. At George Washington, other STEM faculty have observed successes in the Physics curriculum, and have joined efforts to bring writing more explicitly into their curriculum. This year, we began a Writing in STEM symposium that has grown to include faculty in Chemistry, Systems Engineering, Mathematics, Geography, Mechanical Engineering, and other fields. We have also seen an uptick in STEM courses in the WID curriculum. The Physics and Writing research collaboration has led to a National Science Foundation (NSF) submission on genre, and an NSF award for a study of writing and engineering judgement, being conducted by Writing faculty and Systems Engineering faculty. References Allie, S., Armien, M.N., Burgoyne, N, Case, J.M., Collier-Reed, B.I, Craig, T.S., Deacon, A, Fraser, D.M.,Geyer, Z, Jacobs, C., Jawitz, J., Kloot, B., Kotta, L., Langdon, G., le Roux, K., Marshall, D, Mogashana,D., Shaw,C., Sheridan, G., & Wolmarans, N. (2009). Learning as acquiring a discursive identity through participation in a community: improving student learning in engineering education. European Journal of Engineering Education, 34(4), 359-367. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043790902989457 Anderson, P., Anson, C. M., Fish, T., Gonyea, R. M., Marshall, M., Menefee-Libey, W Charles Paine, C., Palucki Blake, L. & Weaver, S. (2017). How writing contributes to learning: new findings from a national study and their local application. Peer Review, 19(1), 4. Ericsson, K. A. (2009). The Influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson, R. R. Hoffman, A. Kozbelt & A. M Williams (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp 685–705). Cambridge University Press. Gere, A. R., Limlamai, N., Wilson, E., Saylor, K., & Pugh, R. (2019). Writing and conceptual learning in science: an analysis of assignments. Written communication, 36(1), 99–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318804820 Kellogg, R., & Whiteford, A. (2009). Training advanced writing skills: the case for deliberate practice. Educational psychologist, 44(4), 250–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903213600 Poe, M., Lerner, N., & Craig, J. (2010). Learning to communicate in science and engineering: Case studies from MIT. MIT Press. Swales, J. (1990). Discourse analysis in professional contexts. Annual review of applied linguistics, 11, 103–114. Winsor, D. A.(1996) Writing like an engineer: A rhetorical education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Background: As all sorts of communications have substantially moved to the internet, volumes of literature on internet-mediated communication have emerged in professional and technical communication in different research paradigms, including studies on internet-mediated genres, which often have generic features beyond traditional conception and thus require updated understanding. This study systematically explores the emerging body of internet-mediated genre studies and identifies the specific genres that researchers have studied, the analytical components and research methods used, and conclusions reached to characterize the current state of the research. Research questions: 1. Which internet-mediated genres have been studied in existing literature (2005-2019)? 2. What affordances have been considered in existing studies on internet-mediated genres? 3. Which research methods have been used to study internet-mediated genres? Literature review: Major issues affecting prior studies of internet-mediated genres include inconsistent terminology used by researchers, the ways that affordances are considered, and the inadequacies of current genre analysis methods to explain features arising from those affordances. Methodology: Employing an integrative literature review, we conducted a systematic search resulting in 35 qualified studies published in journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index between 2005 and 2019. Each was systematically analyzed to identify the genre addressed, communicative goal, medium, affordances addressed, and research methods used. Results/discussion: Three main types of internet-mediated genres-including email, website, and social media, and several subtypes-were identified, each distinguished by their medium and communicative goal. The affordances were either treated monomodally, mentioned as contextual information, or integrated into the analytical framework. Researchers relied on a variety of methods to study internet-mediated genres, with mixed methods most commonly used. Conclusions and further research: The data show that both the genres of interest and methods used to study them vary with time, suggesting that this area of research continues to evolve. Future studies could probe into a larger variety of internet-mediated genres with more diverse analytical components and methods.

This article reports on a longitudinal study of the writing assignments students at our two-year college were given in courses outside of composition. While other studies have looked at writing assigned across the curriculum, this research typically focuses on four-year, rather than two-year, institutions. Our study of a small cohort of students suggests that at our institution there is a significant disconnect between the amount and types of writing students are assigned in composition and non-composition courses. Our findings add to the existing literature on college writing, while also informing our understanding of the goals and purposes of composition within our local context.

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.

Background: Successful team collaborations require psychological safety (PS)-a measure that addresses how individuals perceive their own behaviors in a team, allowing members to be comfortable being themselves. Technical communication curricula do not engage deeply with managing the socioemotional components of collaboration. Literature review: Scholarship addressing hundreds of teams with thousands of members concludes that psychological safety has a direct influence on task performance. Few studies track psychological safety across a team's lifecycle, and different professions exhibit a wide range of PS values. Extensive research indicates that collaboration can be improved by training. Research questions: 1. Will a targeted training intervention produce higher levels of psychological safety? 2. Does team duration affect teaming success as exemplified by psychological safety, satisfaction, and cohesion? Methods: Our multisite longitudinal study surveyed 215 students in 50+ short- and long-term teams to understand the effects of a specific training intervention (a PS learning module). Results and discussion: Training had no significant impact, but targeted training might still increase psychological safety. Short-term teams experienced significantly better psychological safety over long-term teams, and psychological safety improved the more time members spent in teams. Comparisons within longitudinal intervals were also significant, indicating that different team contexts influenced our results. Implications and future research: Results suggest that incorporating team-specific training may facilitate building a personal awareness of interdependence among team members. Moreover, research should account for contextual differences and use longitudinal team self-assessments. Future research should concentrate on identifying a range of viability for PS useful in benchmarking.

Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are potentially overlapping disciplines with open disciplinary questions. A comparative topical analysis of research topics can identify similarities and differences between them, addressing intellectual and physical concerns for each. Literature review: Recent topical analyses have been done for technical communication. Historical topical analyses have been done for business communication. Few professional communication topical analyses exist. Some studies were done 15 or more years ago, and one related comparative study exists. Research questions: 1. What research topics are unique to each of the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963-2017? 2. What topics are shared among the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963-2017? Research methodology: I used collocation analysis on the target phrases technical communication, business communication, and professional communication from a 4822-abstract corpus. I compared words collocated with target phrases to find words unique to a single term, those shared with two terms, or those shared with all three terms. Results/discussion: Findings identified science communication as a technical communication topic; other findings corroborated previous research. Business communication findings corroborated previous research and identified an emphasis on global communication. Findings show professional communication as a rhetorically flexible term that creates a space for emerging concepts and expands disciplinary boundaries. The three shared communication, pedagogy, international, and disciplinary concerns. Conclusions: The disciplines feature some overlap but maintain distinct research foci. Professional communication is a distinctive discipline that assists technical communication and business communication by incubation of emerging concepts.

Writing center studies has sought to move towards research methods that are replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) as a means to scholarly legitimacy. While a number of RAD research methods have been identified (surveys, qualitative analysis, observation, case studies, experimentation, discourse analysis, teacher research, action research, and ethnography), one important source of information has been largely overlooked: the scheduling metadata that writing centers routinely collect in the course of normal operations. The present research seeks to demonstrate the validity of metadata-driven research by interrogating an area of writing center scholarship that has been predominantly studied through theoretical or small group means: the impact of gender on writing consultations. It investigates whether the gender of the writing consultant significantly affects a student’s choice in scheduling appointments.

This study investigated how English as a Second Language (ESL) writers perceive their use of Grammarly , an online grammar checker, in relation to face-to-face tutoring at the writing center. Forty-three (N= 43) international ESL writers studying at universities in the United States participated in an anonymous online survey. Mixed methods were employed to examine participants’ perceptions of Grammarly and face-to-face tutoring at the writing center respectively as well as their perceptions of Grammarly in relation to face-to-face tutoring. Results rendered from descriptive analysis of the data revealed: 1) participants perceived both services with advantages and limitations; 2) participants used Grammarly more frequently than visiting the writing center, while they used face-to-face tutoring for a wider variety of purposes compared to Grammarly ; 3) participants reported a both/and approach toward these two writing resources and used them to meet different needs in different contexts. Implications were offered for ESL writers, instructors, writing center tutors, and Grammarly program developers.

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the sec­ond half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a dis­interested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical jour­nals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced under­standing of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those sys­tems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction.

Celeste Michelle Condit's Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11 is a complex and challenging contribution to the understudied area of public emotion that charts the course for an arduous but rewarding journey toward a greater synthesis between the study of human biological and material existence and the study of our symbolic world. Condit maintains that “shared public anger co-orients peoples and tends to direct their actions and resources along particular paths … shaped by numerous forces—including cultural traditions, ideologies, histories, and sedimented patterns of resource distributions—they are also substantively shaped by the distinctive set of characteristics that are constitutive of ‘being angry together’ as a pervasive social phenomenon” and that the “sharing of that anger” is a communicative process requiring that one “attend closely to the dynamics of the public discourses that constitute and circulate such shared emotion” (1–2). Condit develops a “script” for public anger: “(1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy), (2) acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made), (3) to us (the model protagonist), (4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!” (5–6). Her analysis of the discourses of bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag reveals that “the most resonant versions of this script … promote essentialism, binarism, rote thinking, excessive optimism, stereotyping, and attack orientations” (6).While it is often the case that one of the important tests of rhetorical theory is its ability to elucidate texts, what is perhaps most compelling about Condit's book is not its critical engagement with the texts, but rather its ambitious epistemological framework. Indeed what makes the book compelling (and occasionally results in somewhat infelicitous moments) is its unabashed ambition to adopt an epistemological framework that incorporates dispositions and findings from all three of the major research methodologies—natural science, social science, and humanities.Such a pan-methodological approach is necessary insofar as Condit's goal is not modest, as it is to “build a theory of emotion that integrates symbolic and physiological elements on firm academic ground” (150), requiring “reworking the onto-epistemological foundations from which most … operate” (15). Along these lines Condit relies upon an “onto-epistemological stance” (developed with Bruce Railback) termed “‘transilience’ (rather than E. O. Wilson's ‘consilience’) for recognizing the leaps that both signify gaps and simultaneously connect the movement across those gaps, among physical, biological, and symbolic modes of being” (17). Transilience takes seriously the biological and symbolic dimensions of human experience and hence requires that scholars show a willingness to move across the gaps separating academic disciplines and research methodologies.Condit's understanding of the “symbolic” elements is informed by her humanistic training in rhetorical studies, while her attempt to grasp “physiological” elements is informed by her more recent explorations and work in the natural sciences. Insofar as “biological beings seem to have a tendency to develop communication capacities” (26), she aims at a theory of emotions that is materially grounded in both biology and symbol systems. This biosymbolic approach aims to reconcile biological sciences and the humanities, but Condit is also interested in what has always been a central concern of social scientists in communication: the empirical effects of communicative messages: “The ultimate goal is to understand how the biological and the symbolic can produce a kind of human affect-range called public emotion that is susceptible to theoretically guided empirical observation and influence, albeit under different parameters of investigation than the model developed by classical physics” (20). Alongside the book's transilient fusion of humanistic and natural science into a biosymbolic perspective, it also employs social scientific methodologies in the form of frequent reviews of empirical research in order to assess the effects of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag. In the end her “view of humans as biosymbolic beings … has been undergirded by describing a transilient onto-epistemology that posits what we call the physical, the biological, and the symbolic as different but linked modes of being that result from the relatively distinctive forms in which matter has come to be arranged” (41).While Condit is centrally concerned with “public anger,” that is, how emotion circulates among collectivities in communities, the foundation of her approach is the millennia of philosophical reflections regarding the character of emotions as experienced by individuals: “Stretching back to Aristotle, many theorists have identified four components of emotion … (1) appraisal cues, (2) neurophysiology (sometimes divided into neural versus other physiological elements such as hormones or muscular activations to make a total of five), (3) subjective experience, and (4) action tendencies. Appraisal cues and action tendencies are most readily identifiable in collective emotion, and they should form the central pillars of analyses of the pathos of public rhetorics, but the other two components are involved … as well” (49). Beginning from this well-established philosophical typology, Condit overlays a wide range of insights drawn from the biological study of emotions, enabling resolution of many of the tensions between biological and neurological approaches to emotions that see them as universal species traits, and cultural and symbolic approaches that view emotions as emerging from particular cultural milieus.But since “collective emotion is not simply the aggregation of the emotion of individuals” (70), putting the “public” in public anger requires that the author explore territory that is much less well studied and understood. Public anger is complex, and “occurs when many people share the multidimensional complex featuring the action tendencies of cognitive narrowing, optimistic bias, an antagonistic approach, and four appraisals: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about events and their causes” (72). Public anger involves not only collective perceptions and understandings, but collective action. Based on the study of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag, Condit concludes that “to be angry together is to be predisposed to collective activity, specifically to attack, which may include intense, even violent, action. Circulation of these three sets of angry rhetorics activated their publics toward attack, but not in precisely the same ways” (216). While this particular set of cases seems to line up with “most humanistic engagements of social emotions” that “have described them as undesirable” (224), Condit also observes that public anger can have positive functions: “Studies by historians have pointed to a similar or overlapping range of functions for anger in larger human collectivities … the historians' accounts noted the way in which scripts for anger have served to regulate the contributions and accumulations of members of leadership hierarchies, both charging them to risk life and resources to protect their peoples and lands from other nobles and also limiting their own depredations upon their people” (73).The author is focused on biology and neurology, but communication and rhetoric remain at the center of shared public emotions: “With regard to specific elements of this method of analysis of public emotion, the focal evidence is the specific symbols circulated (in this case, almost exclusively words, though pictures, vocal sounds, and other nonverbal elements could be included)” (94). Indeed, it is through symbol systems that emotions are shared and made public: “It is empirically the case that symbol systems provide the imaginative and cooperative resources to create novel kinds of objects and life patterns, even as those objects and life patterns become instantiated in individual bodies by both the experience of those life patterns and by the symbols that are physiologically and fantastically part and parcel of those experiences” (32). Accordingly, the channels of discourse function as a sort of circulatory system within which public emotions move: “Public discourse that circulates emotion in order to co-orient individuals toward collective action tends to remake those individuals as members of that collectivity in ways that are shaped and constrained by the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Not only are symbols of primary focus for analysis, her framework assumes that “the sharing of public emotions constitutes a key nexus of collective action,” and she uses “the example of anger to illustrate how particular qualities of an emotion shape public discourses surrounding a global event, additional to the ideological preferences or positionality of a public leader and his or her supporters” (209).In the end Condit calls for the programmatic study of other public emotions: “The treatment of anger in this analysis should also provide a model for further academic analyses of emotion and political relations. One can easily imagine analyses of the role of hope, compassion or sorrow employing the method here pursued. The detailed assessment of the proclivities of such emotions at the discursive and biological levels would produce a template to describe the tendencies encouraged by specific complexes. An examination of diverse and key public rhetorics that shared the specific emotion would then allow an understanding of the range and possibilities of the operation of that emotion in particular contexts and for particular purposes” (236). Condit reiterates “that good theory requires familiarity with both rapidly expanding understandings of human biological proclivities and the foundational structures of language” (236).What is particularly new and challenging in this book is that Condit is aiming to genuinely bring together the sciences and the humanities. For decades humanities scholars in several disciplines have earnestly sought to bridge the gap between sciences and humanities, but usually on their own humanistic grounds. Philosophers of science have long bridged the gap by examining the philosophical assumptions animating science and the scientific method, usually within philosophical frames centered on epistemology. So too historians of science have brought science and history together by making science an object of historical study. Finally, scholarship on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, in which humanities scholars explore the central role of rhetoric and communication in the discovery and development of scientific knowledge, undoubtedly effects a sort of union of science and rhetoric, but does so solidly under the sign of rhetoric.What makes Condit's work unique is that it is not merely appropriating science as an object of study under the sign of the humanities. Condit's scholarship, informed by her graduate level experiences in genetics courses and lab work, aspires to something that could be described as a genuinely synthetic view of the biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This work aims at a perspective that is pan- or meta-methodological. Critics might express concern that it is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for a scholar to move beyond and transcend a methodological and disciplinary paradigm that has been instilled through decades of study, credentialing, and training within a particular kind of academic community. Indeed Condit recognizes these very barriers, and in other works on transilience has advocated the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different disciplines despite the institutional disciplinary and methodological barriers that divide them.It can be hoped that this book itself can be a place that scholars from many disciplines not only can find theories and concepts that can contribute to their own work, but also can begin to imagine themselves as potential participants in larger and profoundly more enlightening networks of knowledge discovery and creation. But such potential adventurers are to be warned that this journey is not without its infelicitous moments. This reviewer's experiences and stocks of disciplinary knowledge (informed by an undergraduate degree in biology and a PhD in communication and rhetorical studies) were an effective preparation for a positive and engaged response to the overall bio-symbolic approach. However, having only recently completely overcome my epistemological insecurity that a humanist scholar's particular interpretation of a text or message's meaning is meaningless unless empirically verified by a scientific experiment, my inward embattled humanist rhetorical scholar cringed at Condit's repeated concern to back up what would seem to be perfectly reasonable interpretive claims with empirical verification (see for instance 100, 135, 174–78). Such moments of discomfort, born of disciplinary and methodological biases, may be inevitable to most readers at different points in this book. These moments of discomfort or skepticism, one should recognize, are inevitable when one is reading a book that quite deliberately takes the readers out of their academically proscribed comfort zones. Moments of discomfort, however, are a small price to pay for a project of epistemological and disciplinary integration. Such an integration is undoubtedly necessary for the study of emotion—a phenomenon that has long been recognized to have neurological and cultural components. In terms of the much more recent explorations of “shared” and “public” emotion, the complexity of interactions between the emotions of particular organisms, the discourses by which they circulate, and the various political, cultural, and economic contexts within which these discourses circulate will undoubtedly require the insights of many disciplines and all the major research methodologies.One area that remains underdeveloped in Angry Public Rhetorics is a more systematic model of the “public” in public emotion. Thinking about the emotions as a phenomenon of public collectivities as opposed to just individuals requires more effective ways to theorize about how emotions are shared in publics and other communities. One natural way to think about this transition is to imagine communities as being like individual organisms. For instance, it is well established that one of the biological and evolutionary functions of fear is to allow individual organisms to better detect and respond to danger. So too it has been suggested that fear can serve a similar function for societies and polities—alerting us to threats that should engage our collective attention and deliberative political efforts. Condit seems to take this view, at least in the organic metaphors frequently used to describe publics and communities, speaking as she does of “the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Such organismic imagery is promising in many respects, for it suggests that the assemblages of human beings comprising polities, communities, and societies are akin to the complexes of cells, organs, and symbiots that work together within the body of an organism. If we take the organic metaphor seriously, discourse, communication, and rhetoric will remain central concepts that help us to understand how the “body” of a community is constituted and maintained in the face of the forces of entropy that threaten both bodies and human communities. However, such organic imagery might also distract from alternative conceptions of society, community, and polity that more completely capture the complexity and uniqueness of human communal life.Notwithstanding epistemological complexities or occasionally ambiguous organismic imagery, Condit's “biosymbolic” approach is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to rhetorical studies and the humanities generally because it is another reminder of the continued relevance of biological materiality. Humanistic scholars that treat categories like “the body” and “embodiment” as completely open signifiers that can be construed in any way by the power of culture and convention will be disappointed to bump up against a central material fact of human existence—we have bodies (real bodies, not just cultural representations thereof). Scholars that are already sensitive to the importance of materialist philosophies like Marxism will undoubtedly welcome another reminder that our cultural world is connected in fundamental ways to our material existence within human bodies and societies. In the end the study of language, rhetoric, and culture will be enriched, not eclipsed, by works like Condit's that take the realities of our biological existence seriously.

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.

This paper reports beliefs and preferences of second-language (L2) students regarding effective writing feedback strategies, especially conferences for oral and written feedback. Guiding the study were these questions: 1) Do L2 university students prefer to receive direct or indirect teacher feedback on written-language problems? 2) Do the students prefer to receive (a) written feedback (WF) only or (b) oral feedback (OF) in one-on-one conferences as well as WF? 3) In the case of 2(b), do the students prefer to receive OF during or after WF? The study employed mixed methods involving quantitative surveys of 30 Canadian university students from two English for academic purposes (EAP) writing classes and qualitative interviews with 11 of those surveyed. Results demonstrate that the students preferred direct feedback more on grammar, vocabulary, register, and clear expressions than on spelling, punctuation, and mechanics. They also preferred direct feedback more at the course beginning than at the end. More importantly, the students preferred coursework-based conferencing (Eckstein, 2013), particularly simultaneous oral-written feedback (SOWF), a conferencing format that allows students and teachers to negotiate and dialogue while teachers mark assignments. This paper details the reasons for student preferences and discusses the advantages and feasibility of a simultaneous oral-written feedback approach (SOWFA).

This paper extends our research into a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine, where Primary School children produce animated stories through writing computer code. We first discuss the theoretical basis of our engine design, drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, embodied cognition and perceived animacy. This design aims to help children draw on the appearances of characters, props and scenery to evoke linguistic constructs leading to the emergence of stories. The second part of this paper reports on an empirical study where we aim to answer two research questions. First can compositions so produced be seen as valid compositions? To answer this question we conducted a linguistic analysis of coded stories and those written in an English classroom, and also using teacher ratings of these stories. Results indicate that while there are no significant linguistic differences between coded and English stories, coded stories are impoverished and should be seen as a first-draft to be revised in the English classroom. The second question was to probe our observation that while coding, children spontaneously told stories. Here we draw upon theories of embodied cognition and of perceived animacy. Our analysis suggests that these theories, taken together, help to explain the spontaneous emergence of stories.

English majors generally are adept at literary criticism but tend to have less experience in conducting empirical research that draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods and engages human participants. To introduce those methods to students and to satisfy a university requirement for quantitative instruction applied to the discipline, I developed a course called Approaches to Research in English Studies. The students complete individual IRB-approved projects that result in a research report, a poster, and a lightning talk. Before undertaking the individual projects, the students engage in a whole-class research project that models the process, and this latter assignment is described here in this essay.

Writing is a skill which is actively taught in both first (L1) and foreign language (FL) classrooms, yet surprisingly few cross-curricular links are made. This paper, aimed at both practitioners and researchers, presents a framework for designing and implementing a strategy-based, cross-curricular approach to writing pedagogy in schools. It first considers the factors which should be taken into account when designing such an intervention in both L1 and FL classrooms. It then outlines the key steps in the implementation of such a programme of strategy-based instruction. To exemplify this, the paper reports on data throughout from an empirical study involving a classroom intervention of explicit strategy-based instruction which was delivered first in the German FL classroom, and later also in the English classroom of a Year 9 (age 13–14) class in a secondary school in England. The aim was to help students to develop their writing strategies and to encourage transfer between languages. Findings suggest that while a programme of strategy-based instruction can improve strategy use and attainment in writing within a particular language context, effects are most powerful when there is collaboration between L1 and FL teachers. Evidence therefore calls for a multilingual approach to writing pedagogy.  <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/80x15.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>.

At the comprehensive research university described in this study, some students taking a required, first-semester, composition course in the fall make great progress in their ability to draft and revise the curriculum’s major essays. Yet, they still fail the class. Many of these students are on their way to becoming practiced writers but require additional assistance to move beyond a definition of revision consisting solely of editing and proofreading strategies. To support such students, I created a voluntary, spring-semester, Composition I course foregrounding both lower- and higher-order revision practices in which students could continue to work on previous assignment drafts from fall. In a three-year, mixed methods, case study involving an experimental course-design model, students enrolling in a Composition I class focused on revision strategies demonstrated both positive revision-related drafting and course outcomes, according to findings. This article includes a description of the course’s framework and its assessment practices. The results of this study have implications for teaching revision in first-year composition.

Background: Virtual teams are more and more common since the internet and mobile revolutions. Organizations are facing new challenges due to the lack of interpersonal relationships between the members of these teams. This study examines common team processes in an e-environment, relying upon two virtual team types: temporary and ongoing teams. Literature review: The aim of the review is to provide an overview of the challenges of such teams and to understand the complexity of team processes in such an environment. Research questions: 1. Does the type of virtual team have an impact on the quality of common team processes? 2. Can criteria be identified to determine which type of virtual team is more appropriate for given tasks? Research methodology: A quantitative test was conducted to compare the mean gaps between temporary and ongoing teams in trust, communication, and five collaborative processes. Then, by employing qualitative thematic analysis, we constructed a conceptual model to understand the reasons for these mean gaps. Results: Primary findings indicate that all but one of the tested processes achieved higher levels in ongoing teams rather than in temporary ones. Also, the more the collaborative process entails complex activities involving social bonds, the greater the gaps between the two team types. Conclusion: At the initiation of a virtual team, it would be best to focus on projects limited to elementary activities. If more complex team activities are anticipated, virtual team members should work together for an extended period.

328 RHETORICA Haixia W. Lan. Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way. Routledge, 2017. 228 pp. ISBN 9781472487360 At a 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute seminar on comparative rhetoric, twenty-five scholars spent a week together reading scholarship on comparative rhetoric of the recent past and charting out possible paths for the future. In their culminating statement, "A Manifesto: The What and How of Comparative Rhetoric," which appeared in Rhetoric Review in 2015 (34.3), they outlined best practices in the subfield, underscoring both the imperative to speak for and with the other and the need to cultivate self-reflexivity and accountability for such engagement. They further called on comparative rhetoric scholars to search for "simultaneity, heterogeneity, and interdependence" both within and between different rhetorical traditions and practices. Haixia Lan's Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way provides an example of what such best practices actually can look like and of how best to center comparative rhetorical studies on simultaneity, heterogeneity, and interdependence. Lan's monograph, consisting of five chapters together with an introduc­ tion and an epilogue, offers an in-depth comparative study of Aristotle (384322 BCE) and Confucius (551—479 BCE), two pivotal figures hailing from Greek and Chinese ancient cultures, respectively. While plenty of studies have focused on Aristotle and Confucius in the past, they tend to be informed by a philosophical and literary framework. Meanwhile, comparative rhetoric scholars have also studied Aristotle and Confucius, but none, in my view, has offered such a comprehensive study of these two thinkers as Lan has done, for which she must be commended. The introduction provides a succinct overview, laying out both its object of study (focusing on the similarities and differences in Aristotle and Confucius's rhetorical thinking) and its method of study (deploying a rela­ tional and contextualized approach that traverses disciplinary boundaries). Such a study, for Lan, not only presents comparative rhetoricians with a better opportunity to understand these two thinkers' singular contributions to the development of rhetoric but also enhances the prospect of a more felicitous exchange between the two cultures they represent and continue to influence and, better still, between East and West in the global contact zones of the twenty-first century. No less important, Lan's study also counters sticky bina­ ries that pit, for example, Aristotle's purported discourse of abstraction and linearity against Confucius's alleged discourse of pragmatism and circularity. It further problematizes past studies that focus exclusively on either differen­ ces or similarities but not both or that are long in overgeneralizations and short on contextualized or recontextualized engagements and discussions. Each of the five subsequent chapters provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of one central aspect of Aristotle and Confucius's rhetorical thinking. They together contribute to a portrait of two individuals being separated by time and space but joined by an unfailing insistence on hylomorphic thinking that Truth or tianming (the cosmic order) is enmattered in, and can be Reviews 329 actualized through, rhetorical practices; on engaging self, other, and the cos­ mos with an inclusive vision; and on conceptualizing ultimate realities with analogy, be it form (by Aristotle) or the way (by Confucius). For example, in Chapter One, Lan takes up rhetorical invention or the dynamic and mutually entailing relationship between language-in-use and knowledge-making. She characterizes Aristotle's views on episteme as knowledge of certainty, techne as knowledge of probability, and rhetoric as techne that intersects with episteme. In other words, Aristotle's rhetoric dwells in this in-between space where certainty and unpredictability join hands and dialectic and sophistical reasoning mingle with each other. Chapter Two, “Interpreting the Analects," takes its readers to Confucius, to the Analects, a collection of conversations between the Master and his students compiled by the latter after his death, and to the rhetorical dimension of his ways of knowing and speaking, the latter of which mani­ fests itself in Confucius's complex understanding of rhetorical invention, of the role language, audience, and context play in the making of probable or local knowledge. For Lan, developing an historical and interdisciplin­ ary understanding of rhetorical invention...

Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley, has become an international star in biological anthropology and evolutionary neuroscience. His empirical research appears to provide intriguing precursors to, and confirmations of, Kenneth Burke’s dramatism/logology. However, Deacon’s data and theory call into question Burke’s usually unnuanced distinction between symbolic “action” and nonsymbolic “motion .” This essay explores the four intersections between Deacon’s evolutionary theory and Burke’s dramatism that inform the apparent “Deacon”-struction of Burke’s action/motion claim.

Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley, has become an international star in biological anthropology and evolutionary neuroscience. His empirical research appears to provide intriguing precursors to, and confirmations of, Kenneth Burke’s dramatism/logology. However, Deacon’s data and theory call into question Burke’s usually unnuanced distinction between symbolic “action” and nonsymbolic “motion .” This essay explores the four intersections between Deacon’s evolutionary theory and Burke’s dramatism that inform the apparent “Deacon”-struction of Burke’s action/motion claim.

This article presents an examination of research methods used in empirical research over a 5-year period in technical and professional communication. This examination reveals that the most common methods used are surveys, interviews, usability tests, observations, and focus groups. In addition, the field does incorporate research categories of case studies, experiments, and ethnographers. This examination, however, reveals serious shortcomings that need to be addressed for the field to have a sustainable research profile.

The current study examined the impact of adapting an evidence-based instructional approach to develop ninth-grade students’ argumentative writing and self-regulated strategy use. Following the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model, strategies to plan and write argumentative texts were implemented in two Portuguese classrooms. The model relies heavily on the use of mnemonic strategies to support instruction. Thus, incremental effects of using dual-coding mnemonics (i.e., visual and verbal mnemonics) were explored when implementing SRSD instruction. For the first group (n = 23), SRSD instruction included verbal and visual mnemonics; for the second group (n = 25), SRSD instruction included verbal mnemonics alone. Groups were compared with a control group (n= 25) receiving standard writing instruction.The following findings were significant: a) SRSD instruction increased writing quality, organising, and spontaneous planning; b) dual-coding mnemonics enhanced writing quality, development of ideas, organising, language clarity, and spontaneous planning; c) national exams completed 15 weeks after instruction reinforced the effectiveness of the adapted SRSD strategies. The process of culturally adapting and implementing SRSD instruction to teach argumentative writing will be discussed, including the potential incremental effects of adding visual mnemonics to the SRSD instructional routine.

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.

The research article is a staple genre in the economy of scientific research, and although research articles have received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, little attention has been given to the important development of Registered Reports. Registered Reports are an emerging, hybrid genre that proceeds through a two-stage model of peer review. This article charts the emergence of Registered Reports and explores how this new form intervenes in the evolution of the research article genre by replacing the central topoi of novelty with methodological rigor. Specifically, I investigate this discursive and publishing phenomenon by describing current conversations about challenges in replicating research studies, the rhetorical exigence those conversations create, and how Registered Reports respond to this exigence. Then, to better understand this emerging form, I present an empirical study of the genre itself by closely examining four articles published under the Registered Report model from the journal Royal Society Open Science and then investigating the genre hybridity by examining 32 protocols (Stage 1 Registered Reports) and 77 completed (Stage 2 Registered Reports) from a range of journals in the life and psychological sciences. Findings from this study suggest Registered Reports mark a notable intervention in the research article genre for life and psychological sciences, centering the reporting of science in serious methodological debates.

In the University of Minnesota’s Student Writing Support program, we gather, record, and share student and course information in order to support consultants in their work with writers; to assess and improve our own practice; and to make compelling, data-driven arguments for the center’s continued existence. Recognizing moments when these data-collection practices worked against the relationships we wanted to build with student writers, we began to critique these practices, with the goal of creating more intentional criteria and methods for soliciting client information. In Fall 2013, we developed and introduced an online Student Profile tool where clients could indicate their preferred name, provide a guide to pronouncing their name, include their gender pronouns, list any language(s) they speak and/or write, and indicate anything else they would like our consultants to know about them as writers/learners. We have become particularly interested in what students choose to share about themselves in that last open-ended prompt: When we give students opportunities to disclose aspects of their identity, what do we learn about them and about how they construct their identities in the context of a writing consultation? In this article we share our analysis of client data we collected in 2016–17, which reveals students’ awareness of their identities as writers, students, and learners as well as the complexities of these identities in a writing center context. Our findings also speak to larger conversations about the ways student identities are constructed and created within higher education.