The article discusses the impact of text-generative AI in business communication pedagogy. The onset of open AI, such as ChatGPT, has the potential to transform the way faculty and students approach oral and written professional business communication. Through focus group discussions and netnography, the study employs content analysis to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of integrating AI in the teaching-learning process of business communication in a postgraduate management program. The article strives to reimagine the pedagogical tools and techniques regarding pre-reading assistance, classroom materials, assignments, evaluation, and other learning aids of business communication courses in response to the developments in text-generative AI.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the need for criticality toward writing assessments that privilege standard language ideologies and correctness-based approaches. However, teachers continue to experience discrepancies between their intentions and actions, struggling to address both content and form in facilitative, constructive commentary. This study uses the activity theory framework of pedagogical tools, composed of conceptual and practical tools, to analyze through interviews and commented-on papers how two college composition graduate instructors responded to student writing. This study finds that while one teacher held and enacted consistent and congruent pedagogical tools grounded in sociocultural theories of writing development, the other experienced entrenched conflict between competing beliefs about evaluative and process-oriented purposes for teaching writing. These contrastive experiences illustrate how instructors’ development of pedagogical tools is mediated by interactions between their epistemological orientations and language ideologies, reinforcing the need to surface tacit beliefs about Standardized English and academic writing. This study concludes with recommendations for productive intervention in novice composition teachers’ development of response practices.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines Cicero's De Senectute, or On Old Age, as a work of "gentle" rhetoric.

The ability to produce fluent and coherent written text impacts learning and attainments. Valid and reliable assessments of writing are needed to monitor progression, develop goals for writing and identify struggling writers. In order to inform practice and research a systematic review was conducted to investigate which writing productivity measures captured writing development and identified struggling writers in elementary school. Sixty-seven empirical studies were identified for inclusion, appraised, and their data extracted under the themes of writing genre, duration of writing task, use of priming of topic knowledge prior to the writing assessment, use of planning time, writing modality, gender, age of participants and learning difficulties. Total Number of Words and Correct Word Sequences were the most common means of measuring productivity. Productivity varied significantly between genres and durations of writing tasks and was higher in girls than boys. Students with learning difficulties scored significantly lower in writing productivity when compared to typically developing peers. Insufficient research was available to draw conclusions regarding the effects of priming of topic knowledge, planning and modality on writing productivity. Study limitations, links to the assessment of writing and recommended further research are discussed.

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

This study has explored the syntactic complexity features of English learners at the B1 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (CoE, 2001) level from both Pakistan and Finland. The learners in question were taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) using different pedagogical methods. This study took into account various factors including the learners' proficiency level, age, and grade, as well as variations in their native language. To assess the impact of the learners' native language and pedagogical methods on syntactic complexity features, twelfth grade EFL students from Upper-Secondary schools in both nations were given identical instructions and time limits to complete an English academic essay on the same topic. The study utilized L2 syntactic complexity analyzer (L2SCA) to extract fourteen syntactic complexity features, and Mann-Whitney U Tests were used to analyze the differences in the syntactic complexity features between the two groups. The study has revealed significant differences between Finnish and Pakistani EFL learners due to variations in their native language and the effects of pedagogical methods on syntactic complexity features. The implications of this study extend to language testing and assessment, the CEFR framework, and pedagogy in both Finland and Pakistan.

An array of pictorial supports (e.g., emojis, geometrical figures, animals) is often used in studies assessing young students’ writing motivation with Likert scales. However, although these images may influence the students’ responses, sufficient rationales for these choices are often absent from the studies. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to investigate two different types of pictorial support (circles vs. faces) in Likert scales assessing first and third graders’ writing interest, self-concept, and spelling interest and self-efficacy. The samples consist of 2197 first graders (mean age 6.8 years) and 1740 third graders (mean age 8.4 years). Results show statistically significant differences among the scales indicating that when face-scales are used, first-graders skip motivation items more often, and students in both grades avoid the minimum values of the scale more often. Gender differences are also found indicating that when face-scales are used, boys in third grade avoid maximum values more often, and girls in both grades avoid the minimum values more often. These findings suggest that the use of circle-scales compared to face-scales seem more appropriate in scales measuring young students’ writing and spelling interest and self-beliefs.

Research into the contribution of multimodality to language learning is gaining momentum. While most studies pave the way for new understandings of language teaching and learning, there is an increasing demand for comprehensive assessment practices, particularly within higher education contexts. A few studies have emphasized the importance of reflecting on and establishing criteria for the assessment of multimodal literacy. This is necessary to understand students’ contributions in detail and to provide them with effective support in developing their multimodal skills. This study discusses the assessment of multimodal writing in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) contexts. It presents the design of an analytical tool for assessing multimodal texts and provided an example of its application. This tool covers assessment categories such as language use, content expression, interpersonal meaning, multimodality, and creativity and originality. As an example, we focus on the multimodal writing of a video game narrative, a genre that requires the integration of multiple modes of communication to convey meaning more effectively. Finally, this study offers pedagogical insights into the assessment of multimodal literacy in ESP.

Task representation denotes students’ interpretation in which what a learning or assessment task required them to do. An argumentative integrated writing task which involves the use of reading materials as claims or evidences for composing an essay, makes the role of task representation more critical than others, as writers may be confused with whether their task is to focus on synthesizing the reading materials that they comprehend, or expressing their own views. With the aim of exploring the characteristics of task representation and its association with integrated writing, this study invited 474 secondary four students from Hong Kong to participate in think aloud writing protocol followed by stimulated recall interview (36 participants), and complete an integrated writing task and a questionnaire (438 participants). Three factors of the task representation were identified as source use, rhetorical purpose and text format, and significant positive correlations were found between the three factors and integrated writing performance. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.

Zachary C. Beare is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His work, which studies how identity and emotion mediate rhetorical activity, appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, the Journal of Cultural Research, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, and in edited collections.Miriam Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is professor of English. She is the author of The Theatre of Christopher Durang (2020) and coeditor of How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays (2020). She has written articles about humor for Studies in American Humor, Text & Presentation, and Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.Chris W. Gallagher is professor of English and vice provost for curriculum initiatives at Northeastern University. He has published widely on the teaching and assessment of writing and on educational innovation in K–12 and higher education. He is author or coauthor of five books, most recently College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World (2019).Bev Hogue serves as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, where she teaches courses in American literature and writing. She recently edited Teaching Comedy (2023), a collection of essays published by the Modern Language Association.Erika Luckert is a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Erika's recent work includes articles in JAEPL, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Writing on the Edge, as well as poems in Room Magazine, South Carolina Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.Nancy Mack is a professor emeritus of English at Wright State University and author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She has published articles and chapters about teaching memoir, emotional labor, and working-class and first-generation students. She has won state and university teaching awards. Her community service projects include partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Dayton Public Television, and the Ohio Department of Education.Jessica Masterson is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work examines youth literacies and democratic possibilities in K–12 school settings. Her work appears in Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Democracy and Education.Peter Wayne Moe is an associate professor of English and the director of the University Writing Program at Whitworth University. He teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and a course on the sentence. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan, a Seattle Times favorite book of 2021.Shari J. Stenberg is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her most recent book is Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century (with Charlotte Hogg). Her work appears in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and in edited collections.Luke Thominet is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, as well as in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

As we enter our fourth academic year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we already see evidence of institutional and cultural forgetting, or at least looking away from, the way this virus has changed our institutional (not to mention personal) lives. For most institutions, there has been a mandated return to normal. Gone are masks, more online accommodations, and reentry testing. And fading, too, are the conversations about the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on learning and on the mental health of our students, faculty, and staff.It is clear, by now, that there will be no return to “normal.” It is also clear that normal is often a revised history, or a history of omission, that represents a mythical bygone time that served few and denied many. Bettina Love (2020), a scholar of education theory and practice, reminds us how schools were failing “not only children of color but all children” long before COVID-19, citing the “norm” of high stakes testing, disproportionate expulsion of Black and Brown students, scarcity of teachers of color, school shootings, inadequate funding—the list goes on.Conversations in higher ed have also pointed to the labor disparities present in the “before times” that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced. In a Chronicle opinion piece, Emma Pettit (2020) observes that the global pandemic is only deepening pre-COVID-19 labor inequities for women-identified faculty, and especially women of color. And a study during the pandemic shows increased emotional labor required by BIPOC cisgender men, BIPOC cisgender women, white cisgender women, and gender non-conforming faculty, who work overtime to both help students navigate the challenging terrain of learning during COVID-19 as well as to manage their own emotional response to sometimes untenable working conditions (White Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter 2022).As we embark on another pandemic-impacted semester, we feel, and carry with us, the weight of prolonged emotional labor. We tend to the emotional and material burdens our students experience, answer for and carry out policies we don't agree with, and scramble to adapt to the ever-changing educational landscape. All the while, even on our worst days, we strive to convey to the students, preservice teachers, and the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) we teach our commitment to the power and possibility of pedagogical work. On our best days, we see this moment as an opportunity. The pandemic has changed us, and it has laid bare what needs to change in our institutions.We are not interested in a return to normal. Instead, we are committed to a process of learning from COVID-19’s shock to our institutional systems. So we turn to three moments in our respective professional lives that expose and survey the tensions and complexities we dwell within, using this upheaval to spur questions and imaginings toward a new way forward.As a junior writing program administrator (WPA) my primary responsibility is the education, mentorship, and support of GTAs assigned to teach in our first-year writing program. At any given time, I supervise approximately fifty different GTAs, who come to us from a range of concentrations in the MA, MFA, and PhD programs. Each fall, I teach a graduate-level practicum that GTAs take concurrently with their first semester as instructors of record. Historically, the course has served as a place to workshop issues that emerge when teaching for the first time (e.g., strategies for engaging a quiet class, approaches to making commenting and grading more sustainable, responding to problematic student comments, incorporating more multimodal work into the classroom, etc.). In the fall of 2021, though, in the first semester of my institution's return to fully face-to-face instruction, these issues took a backseat, and almost every class focused on the ongoing pandemic, rising cases, sick students, contact tracing, and my institution's changing guidelines for how we should act and respond to this moment.My practicum classroom began to feel eerily similar to the White House briefing rooms I spent the last two years watching on my TV, laptop, and smartphone. I'd walk into the room smiling under my mask and feigning enthusiasm for being there. Sometimes I'd be carrying binders or printed copies of policy memos to read from. I'd grip the podium in front of this group of people who were simultaneously my students and my teaching colleagues, and as soon as I opened it up to the floor, I'd be peppered by questions about the latest emails sent out by upper administration. I tried to appear calm and confident, even enthusiastic at times, and performing this emotional labor was increasingly difficult a year and a half into the pandemic. My answers all felt hollow and rehearsed; they were deeply unsatisfying. “The university would like to remind you that you cannot inform your students if someone in your class tests positive.” “The university assures us that they are working to address the problems you all have observed with contact tracing.” “The university is discouraging moving classes temporarily online.” “The university is asking instructors to do all they can to support students during this time.”Even as I said those words, I recognized my deliberate use of metonymy to obfuscate responsibility for decision making. “The university” functioned as a convenient and effective way to strategically divert responsibility away from the chancellor and provost who were making most of these decisions (under pressure, of course, from our conservative state legislature and the university system board of governors they have appointed). “The university” is a collective. It makes it sound like a group decision. That language feels almost democratic. It also operationalizes the ethos associated with “the university”; these are learned people, after all. Surely they must be making the most well-informed decisions, right? And, of course, I was also using “the university” to distance myself from responsibility, to avoid the recognition of my guilt and my own complicity in echoing, implementing, and policing adherence to these policies, which is, of course, partly my job (or at least how those above me would conceive of my job). Indeed, the role of a WPA as a frontline or middle manager tasked with implementing the will of higher administrators and executives has been theorized before (DeGenaro 2018; Heard 2012; McLeod 2007; Mountfort 2002), and much of this scholarship reflects on an identity crisis experienced by WPAs, a tension between how they see themselves (as politically radical system disrupters) and how others are now seeing them (as system maintainers and institutional apologists). Mountfort specifically discusses how WPAs experience less freedom to represent their private points of view because they are called on to speak publicly for larger collective views.About halfway through the fall 2021 semester, as I explained once again that the official university guidance was that instructors should not move a class online simply because the instructor has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, I heard one of the GTAs say quietly and out of frustration, “This is bullshit.” And, of course, it was bullshit. It was not a policy born out of the most recent public health guidance nor out of a desire to protect the welfare of students and teachers. It was not a policy concerned with pedagogical effectiveness. It was about optics. The university was focused on maintaining the appearance of normalcy and control. The GTAs knew this, and I knew this.This was, of course, not the first time I had announced policy decisions I knew or felt to be bullshit, but what has made the bullshit different during the COVID-19 pandemic is the stakes. We are now talking about people's health, potentially their lives. These are not just issues of ideological tension and debate anymore. They are foundational matters of safety. And as the research has made clear, these are decisions that will disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, women, those with disabilities, and so many other groups lacking privilege and access at this moment. This is why so many people are experiencing what Smith and Freyd (2014) describe as “institutional betrayal.” And that feeling of betrayal was evident in my practicum course. GTAs articulated feeling disposable and unsafe, like the institution had abandoned its investment in science and research for profit and optics, like all that they had been promised during the early days of the pandemic had been retracted. And I have been a part of that betrayal, and the emotional work of processing that is something I feel I will spend the rest of my career struggling with. I also saw my GTAs struggling with this same sense of complicity because, of course, they found themselves repeating university policies to their students. We've all been interpolated into this; it goes all the way down.Two years later, working with a new group of teachers, I continue trying to figure out what my role is, should be, or might be. This will be yet another cohort that feels betrayed by and disillusioned with the institution, though for slightly different reasons. New crises are continually emerging in higher education, wiping old ones from our memory. And while this cohort continues to be frustrated by the legacies of the institutional response to COVID-19, they have been even more angered by the institutional failure to adequately address the student mental health crises impacting our campus and campuses all across the country. In this new crisis, I find myself once again parroting institutional talking points that are, well, bullshit. “Counseling Services is here to support you during this time.” “The university has partnered with an app-based mental health counseling provider to increase access to mental health support.” “The university has not publicly acknowledged the recent suicides this term because of privacy concerns.” With each of these official communiqués, I feel these teachers losing faith in the institution and me. Is it my job to help repair that crumbling trust? Should I be working to build their trust in me? Maybe these are the questions we should be exploring with our GTAs. What does it mean to work in an institution that has betrayed us? One that continues to betray us? How do we reckon with the memory and experience of that betrayal? How should our work and our responses change in the future? How have COVID-19 and the crises that have followed in its wake helped us see the radical work there is to be done?In the second year of the pandemic, I received a small teaching grant aimed at incorporating multimodality into weekly reflective assessments in one of my courses. I was later asked by the granting office to provide a brief presentation about my work to my faculty colleagues during an optional summer professional development series. As an assistant professor of color in a research-intensive institution, I was both apprehensive to “teach” my more senior colleagues, but also a bit enlivened. So, rather than solely discussing my incorporation of multimodal options into my formative assessment structure, I decided to dive a bit deeper and engage the inequitable roots of many taken-for-granted academic practices, spurred on by Joel Feldman's (2018) book, Grading for Equity. In his quest to remove as much bias as possible from the grading process, Feldman notes how practices like assessing penalties for late work, assigning zeroes for missing assignments, and even marking off points for incorrect answers on formative assessments all contribute to the “education debt” owed to minoritized students (Ladson-Billings 2006). Feldman writes primarily for an audience of K-12 educators, and as a teacher educator myself, I was careful to note in my presentation that incorporating Feldman's strategies was part of my own parallel practice, a term coined by Lowenstein (2009) to describe the work of modeling for preservice teachers the same affective, curricular, and pedagogical approaches that we want them to incorporate in their future classrooms.As I shared these points, and specific ways I incorporate both multimodality and Feldman's equity-driven course policies into my teaching, I noticed a colleague of mine, a cis white woman, in the audience visibly fidgeting, her sighs occasionally punctuating my spoken sentences. When I concluded my brief talk and opened the floor to questions, hers was the first hand in the air. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “in addition to everything else, we're now supposed to have multimodal assessments, and no late penalties, and no zeroes, and not take off points for wrong answers? I have a baby at home, and a husband! How am I supposed to find time to do all of this, plus my research, and be a parent?” I understood her question to be mostly rhetorical, but, a bit embarrassed, I did my best to diffuse her frustration and provide actionable steps. I noted that I use only one catch-all for my formative assessments and that the of late penalties made my grading more as to come in that were for me to with. I once again Feldman's that assigning on those with the to solely on school at our the of students is my best these points to and the room I my and off by the this talk had I began to of my in of the larger of the pandemic, and all of the labor and it has to our collective was a in my and me to Feldman's as well as a of I did away with policies, both because I to up to class if felt even slightly and also because I knew mental health days were more and more for my students. I began to classes with the help of an which with and for each class in I and office every out from the of the pandemic least so I have these policies and have even found myself on making copies of course for students who the time or the to copies for and with students as they in my office so many of the long of the pandemic have them in difficult and with students a for our after yet another at a And while this has all a bit difficult to when I to a future in which COVID-19 to be a I am of the that I and many others are in the so many of us have to our students is in addition to with our own and we have felt to deeply the and of our students, and to to our pedagogical approaches As though I feel a of my during my I cannot help but and with her At what do our in the of to the of these practices, and our own called work, emotional labor of these been coined and by or labor and these all describe a of work associated with mostly in which the emotional is to by those in (2018) notes that this labor is in that it for the of the of in so and in the of and that must be by those with minoritized gender This is, in the of and that even after our work has for women and gender of color, our us with and us as more than of affect by a of the university or at it does feel as though much on the work I on of my students to it What is the to days I the of the work I do as a teacher more often I long for a way out of this How can I less of myself and be an present How might in our present and the between our work and our began fall 2021 at my institution in a a or mask The had just to high as the new through the even the campus a mask the instructor or one of the students was at high or to be classes be to My with a of from teachers in my How do I my students if they are at high they want to out is the on teachers and One into the new semester, the a mask which the university to being the was a it the of our of a mask was followed by another student a at a days of student and One of the students in my to and course said her our university in the and the had the same problems as do she with only masks, I saw of my students spent late in the were not because the of their own They just They were also is the chancellor to a We asked What does it mean to and to respond well, to on our that first I the students to me an me why they the class, their for the semester, and if there was I should that would help me support their new to the university said they felt being in after a senior year of classes in their felt new to the university as they and in for the first of them said they from I to each making a to that too, with and to that we in a time of and They were not this have come less to me early in my it felt felt them in their to a we don't have to away our mental health our our in the of an academic or And I I to for students what I myself, especially in the of about a return to normal and to be work through the students as well as be They began to with each each through and when they see And they few students, who were to our class, because of mental health I sent so many to on students that began to in my and did students at all during the we It was The teachers in my program to me with shared They were losing students to mental health students were more They how to how to They were so I now at the of the fall semester, the of COVID-19 but are mostly We have all more but for and are to even as more of us are that those us well, in the first In a recent Chronicle and to the of to will and will not that and our will not the of a will not the inequities this pandemic has laid and the of that has served as its We a way to and a case that after more than two years of “the and all it required of us, we don't more of We to respond with a they “The pandemic is not a nor should we it as We are through an that we our to higher education on every a more and system in its They an of for a from time in our classes to to students about what does and their learning to to on how we are the of the pandemic and what will us in the They are that the is not something to be to our already it about what can be to for on our our of higher education, and for my own we have found it to time to as the during the pandemic to in the or to for a office about a classroom or it to a sense of our collective work with students. When we come we the faculty in my and I also to what it to and to teaching, at this moment. We concluded that it is for us, as a to the emotional labor required to teach at a time when we see on gender and In the of to and we decided that as a we will We will about teaching We will if only for each the emotional labor required of as a I I will work to that work to the We get of the system we are but we are not can by responding from our own of in our and in our than continue to and through the and this pandemic has required of the that is us for something other than a return to “normal.” us to What does it mean to respond well to our students and to each What does it mean to and emotional What of can we do away our not with clear answers but with more questions, and our to a larger What do we for now, if not a return to in the early days of the pandemic, Love (2020) not only a return to but also that for those who have the privilege and a global crisis is time to to Indeed, this pandemic was in so many it only to use of this time to and respond in ways that are, too, time to to on the tensions we have and to and difficult As our on this has us, these questions are asked and on from across institutions, and is that we might engage in more and work to support that emotional labor and research that new responses to For and for COVID-19 has us of our than to to to and our colleagues, to on that to move in and

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality may not only comprise linguistic aspects but also the cognitive-functional power of a text. The presented study aims at exploring the functionality of students’ reporting texts in relation to general text-quality measures, using a corpus of accident reports written by German fifth- and ninth-graders (n = 277) prompted by a pictorial stimulus of a bike accident scenario. An online tool was developed in which 277 university students graphically reenacted the situation from one respective text according to the existence, position, and color of the involved elements. Thereafter, the match of the resulting spatial reconstructions with the original situation was assessed by two raters. While most subscales showed sufficiently high interrater reliabilities, the aggregated functionality score (α = .74) had medium-high correlations with other text-quality ratings and was comparably dependent on grade, education level, and linguistic family background. However, the correlational pattern, regression analysis, and factor analysis showed that the functionality score also contributed unique portions of variance to the assessment of writing skill that were not represented by rating measures. Moreover, the direct indication of whether a text allows for the reader’s adequate cognitive representation is evident. Altogether, the approach of indicating text functionality through practical understanding offers a sound, though empirically laborious, alternative for text-quality measurement. Results are discussed with regard to the didactical strategy according to which students can improve their writing when they observe whether others can make use of their texts.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

AbstractArguments may sometimes be advanced with a non-standard function. One such function, it is suggested, is the expression of identity, a practice which may play a significant role in political representation. This paper sets out to examine a number of short addresses given at the High-Level segment of the Cop26 conference, which are considered to contain instances of such argumentation. Their content is analysed and evaluated by means of the Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation (CAPNA), and an attempt is made to highlight the purposes of the delegates in addressing the conference. At a more fundamental level, the goal of this work is to assess the possibility of identifying arguments as being meant largely as statements of identity or representation, and the suitability of the CAPNA or other norm-based systems for evaluating such discourse. The speakers studied include representatives from OPEC, the Trade Unions, and the leaders of Vietnam and Liechtenstein. Ultimately, the study concludes that while further work is necessary both on understanding the relationship between argument and identity in the political arena, and on the application of argument norms to representational discourse, evaluations of this kind are meaningful and informative.

AbstractThe core function of argumentation in a democratic setting must be to constitute a modality for citizens to engage differences of opinion constructively – for the present but also in future exchanges. To enable this function requires acceptance of the basic conditions of public debate: that consensus is often an illusory goal which should be replaced by better mastery of living with dissent and compromise. Furthermore, it calls for an understanding of the complexity of real-life public debate which is an intermixture of claims of fact, definition, value, and policy, each of which calls for an awareness of the greater ‘debate environment’ of which particular deliberative exchanges are part. We introduce a rhetorical meta-norm as an evaluation criterion for public debate. In continuation of previous scholarship concerned with how to create room for differences of opinion and how to foster a sustainable debate culture, we work from a civically oriented conception of rhetoric. This conception is less instrumental and more concerned with the role of communication in public life and the maintenance of the democratic state. A rhetorical meta-norm of public argumentation is useful when evaluating public argumentation – not as the only norm, but integrated with specific norms from rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and formal logic. We contextualise our claims through an example of authentic contemporary public argumentation: a debate over a biogas generator in rural Denmark.

We share our experiences working with large-language model generative AI for a full semester in a professional writing course, integrating it into all projects. We discuss how we adapted our teaching, learning, and writing to using (or purposefully not using) AI. Issues we discuss include balancing integration of AI to avoid potential overreliance, the importance of centering authorial agency and decision-making, negotiating grading and evaluation, the benefits and drawbacks of AI throughout the writing process, and the relationships we build or could build with AI. We close with recommendations for faculty and students.

Yonas Mesfun Asfaha is an associate professor at Asmara College of Education in Eritrea, and recently he accepted the role of acting dean of the College of Education. He is a well-known literacy scholar specializing in African literacies as well as multilingual language policy as it relates to education. Lydiah Kiramba is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska and is originally from Kenya. Her areas of expertise include multilingual and ESL education, language and literacy teaching and assessment, and bi/multiliteracy development. Lydiah Kiramba talked with Yonas Asfaha via Zoom during the spring/summer months of 2023 about epistemologies and ontologies that have significantly influenced his work.

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

The study reported in the paper starts with a hypothesis that errors observable in writing performances can account for much of the variability of the ratings awarded to them. The assertion is that this may be the case even when prescribed rating criteria explicitly direct rater focus towards successfully performed aspects of a writing performance rather than towards errors. The hypothesis is tested on a sample of texts rated independently of the study, using a five-point analytic rating scale involving ‘Can do’-like descriptors. The correlation between errors and ratings is ascertained using ordinal logistic regression, with Pseudo R2 of 0.51 discerned overall. Thus, with roughly 50% of score variability explainable by error occurrences, the stated hypothesis is considered confirmed. The study goes on to discuss the consequences of the findings and their potential employ in assessment of writing beyond the local assessment context.

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

We use a continuous improvement model to evaluate an information design assignment by analyzing 120 student drafts and finals alongside instructor feedback. Using data from across sections ( N = 118), we illustrate a process focused on improving student learning that other technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty can follow, while also offering insights into ways programs can assist a contingent labor force with improving pedagogical practice. This study provides insights into assignment design through data-driven evidence and reflective work that is necessary to help continuously improve a service course and to assist students in meeting learning outcomes.

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

From the recognized beginning of the “laboratory” movement in composition instruction, teachers have sought to employ new and more practical methods useful in developing student writing. Such trends continue today as new generations of students enter the academy and new challenges emerge. From such conditions, we might see how components within a system of activity work together to meet objectives and develop outcomes within the shared dialectic of an activity system. With this idea in mind, this article reviews writing center-related scholarship from the late 1880s through the early 1940s to trace emerging contradictions in laboratory teaching’s praxis. Through the evaluation of laboratory teaching’s textual artifacts using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), I present a narrative about the development of the earliest writing center praxes: The Formative Period. With this article, I look to narrate an epochal beginning for writing center activity and present the development of guiding principles we find in our writing center work today. Through the process of revealing historical impulses, this article offers a view of writing center praxes in their elemental stage: The Formative Period, early 1890s-early 1940s. Ultimately, this article will show how the writing center is an activity that, over time, has mediated old system contradictions and developed new methods born of self-reflection, debate, evaluation, and progressive mediation, which continues to evolve. As communities like writing centers re-create themselves—through pushing and pulling, conflict and resolution, tension and release—they birth new realities, which all begins with the Formative Period.

As institutions cope with the difficult task of managing scarce resources to support student learning, college writing centers, like other student services, need to be able to articulate and, at times, quantify the benefits they offer the populations they serve. This study examined outcomes associated with visiting the writing center at one American community college in a southern town. Using binary logistic regression, the researchers compared the effects of writing center visitation on the probability of passing and/or earning an A for students enrolled in introductory English and psychology courses, while accounting for other student-level covariates including prior GPA, SES, and minority status. Results indicated that writing center visitors were significantly more likely to pass their English courses and were more likely to earn As in both subjects. Further, the level of visitation was a significant predictor of student outcomes, particularly in English courses, with students who visited the most frequently experiencing a significantly increased likelihood of both passing and earning As. Overall, these results suggested that writing center visitation was meaningfully associated with students’ success in these courses at this institution, after accounting for additional individual-level variables commonly identified as predictors of educational outcomes.

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

Replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) research has become standard in writing center studies. Choice of research question is determined by local conditions and exigencies, often influenced by institutional assessment policy and national mandates. The methodology of choice in most writing center research is qualitative inquiry, though quasi-experimental quantitative studies, with their inherently difficult protocols and ethical problems, persist in their effort to address the question fundamental to writing center labor: Does writing center tutoring improve student writing? In a quasi-experiment applying propensity score matching to a sample of student users of the Rockowitz Writing Center at Hunter College of the City University of New York, this study comprehensively surveys the scholarship and interrogates the local context, argues for the authority of grades and GPAs as outcome measures, and offers results that, considered in aggregate with center lore and quantitative writing center research, infer causality: Yes, we do help students improve their academic writing.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research problem:</b> A considerable amount of scholarship has amassed over the last 20 years regarding the teaching of user experience (UX) design, but there has been no systematic attempt to review this literature. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1.What is the definition of UX pedagogy according to technical communication and adjacent fields? 2. What is the state of specific UX pedagogical approaches in technical communication and adjacent fields? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Our corpus contained 76 sources directly pertaining to the teaching of UX. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> The theoretical framework of this study marries rhetorical theory and critical thinking. The former provides technical communication literature reviews with keen discourse analysis and the latter offers objectivity to the evaluation. To use this framework, we sought sources using journals related to technical communication and large databases from adjacent fields, including the ACM digital library and IEEE Xplore. We completed our search using Google Scholar to ensure broad coverage. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusions:</b> Our review of sources revealed a variety of trends and a remarkably diverse conversation on UX, including various definitions of UX pedagogy, and a large variety of theoretical orientations, educational models, instructional approaches, industry influences, methods, and ethical concerns. From this diverse corpus, we hazard a unifying definition centered on teaching the UX process through hands-on approaches such as engaged learning. We close our article with recommendations for continuing to refine UX pedagogy in the future.

Introduction: As a field, we have tended to look at user-experience design (UXD) as a data-driven design process, anchored by usability studies, and anchored in fulfilling user needs and expectations. How then might technical and professional communication (TPC) curricula respond to evolving trends in user-experience (UX) scholarship and pedagogy? About the case: Addressing this question, we share our programmatic journey, a teaching case that represents more than a decade of reflection and evolution, culminating in the launch of a redesigned major and a UXD minor in a stand-alone department at a regional, primarily undergraduate teaching-focused university. Situating the case: Our programmatic identity began to shift toward a designer mindset that embraced three core frames for professional action–information design, problem solving, and civic engagement—and three complementary design tenets—empathy, advocacy, and bricolage. Methods/approach: To better understand this shift, we recognized the need for a multimethod approach of data gathering. Beginning with an annual assessment of our introductory and capstone courses, we collected data through examination of key course artifacts, through department self-studies, which includes surveys, interviews, and focus groups with relevant stakeholders, and through an external review. Results/discussion: Our self-study data indicated that our students would benefit from stronger audience awareness and design competencies. From these data, we discuss curricular revisions, which include creating a UXD minor. Conclusions: We conclude this article by considering the following three questions: 1. What strategies might other programs consider if they want to design empathy-driven UX pedagogy that is responsive to prevailing scholarly and pedagogical trends? 2. Why might programs cultivate student-researchers as UX bricoleurs? 3. What might other programs expect from student-researcher UX bricoleurs?

AbstractIn this article I defend what I call a ‘particularist approach to arguments by analogy.’ Particularism is opposed to generalism, which is the thesis that arguments by analogy require a universal principle that covers cases compared and guarantees the conclusion. Particularism rejects this claim and holds that arguments by analogy operate on particular cases. I elaborate on two ideas that support this position. On the one hand, I contend that an analogy can be seen as a parallelism of argumentative relationships, drawing on the distinction between similarity and analogy (Gentner 1983) and on the meta-argumentative account of arguments by analogy (Woods and Hudak 1989). On the other hand, I argue that universal principles are not necessary neither for the analysis nor the evaluation of arguments by analogy (Govier 1989) and that, rather than being a requirement, they can be seen as by-products of good analogies.

AbstractWe propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call practically normative assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the rationally or universally normative assessment that might be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be subject to rational critique, and the scheme avoids the is/ought fallacy. We ground our theoretical discussion and observations in an empirical study of US district court opinions resolving legal questions about copyright fair use and the lawyers’ briefs that led to them, instantiating our definition of argument scheme in the “argument for classification by precedent.” Our definition addresses some criticisms the argument-scheme construct has received. For example, using our data, we show that a minimally well formed instance of this type of argument does not shift any conventional burden from the proponent of the argument to its skeptics. We also argue that these argument schemes need not be seen as dialogical.

AbstractThis article presents an analysis and evaluation of what I call the “I’m not stupid” argument. This argument has ancient roots, which lie in Aristotle’s famous description of the weak man’s and strong man’s arguments. An “I’m not stupid” argument is typically used in a context of accusation and defense, by a defendant who argues that they did not commit the act of which they have been accused. The analysis of this type of argument takes the shape of an argumentative pattern, which displays a full-fledged representation of its argumentation structure. It is based on a collection of ten contemporary instances of the “I’m not stupid” argument. Although ten instances constitute a small collection, the wide variation in the argumentative elements that they express explicitly or leave implicit made it possible to identify five new key premises in comparison with previous analyses of the weak man’s and strong man’s arguments (Walton, Tindale and Gordon 2014 in Argumentation 28:85–119, 2014; Walton 2019 in Argumentation 33:45–74, 2019). These new premises show that the crucial point of an evaluation of this argument is the arguer's supposedly rational character in making a gain-loss calculation. They also show that we need empirical data to strengthen our analyses of argument schemes and argumentation structures.

This study explored potential biases in professional writing evaluation. An experiment was conducted in which individuals with hiring authority or influence at their workplace evaluated an email with multiple grammatical/typographical mistakes requesting that the reader make time to speak with the author. Participants were randomly assigned into one of five conditions, each with a separate profile photo accompanying the email. Data analysis indicates that ethnicity of the author influenced how competent the author was perceived to be and the reader’s attitude about meeting with the author.

With the objective of improving writing assessment of language instruction, we examine the lexical and syntactic features in two corpora of high and low scoring French texts of the Test du Certificat de Compétence en Langue Seconde (Second Language Certification Test; TCCLS) at the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). We first situate the test in its local context, demonstrating how our research objectives are born from specific needs to improve student outcomes. We then describe our creation of two corpora of high and low performing test takers, followed by lexical bundle (LB) analyses (Phase 1) and further linguistic complexity analyses with a French-language tool (Phase 2). Results indicate that high level writers used more LBs and borrowed more text from the prompt than low level writers. In addition, specific elements of linguistic complexity were identified, suggesting high level writers produced texts that were lexically richer and more syntactically advanced. We discuss the importance of these findings in improving our writing instruction, as well as the challenges of adapting tools and approaches traditionally associated with English to French.

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers—narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned automated writing evaluation models in three conditions: (1) register-related factors alone, (2) linguistic features alone, and (3) the combination of these two. A total of 1006 essays ( n = 327, 342, and 337 for informative, narrative, and opinion, respectively) written by 92 fourth- and fifth-graders were examined. A series of hierarchical linear regression analyses controlling for the effects of demographics were conducted to select the most useful features to capture text quality, scored by humans, in the three registers. These features were in turn entered into automated writing evaluation predictive models with tuning of the parameters in a tenfold cross-validation procedure. The average validity coefficients (i.e., quadratic-weighed kappa, Pearson correlation r, standardized mean score difference, score deviation analysis) were computed. The results demonstrate that (1) diverse feature sets are utilized to predict quality in the three registers, and (2) the combination of register-related factors and linguistic features increases the accuracy and validity of all human and automated scoring models, especially for the registers of informative and opinion writing. The findings from this study suggest that students’ register knowledge and register-specific motivation add additional predictive information when evaluating writing quality across registers beyond that afforded by linguistic features of the paper itself, whether using human scoring or automated evaluation. These findings have practical implications for educational practitioners and scholars in that they can help strengthen consideration of register-specific writing skills and cognitive and motivational forces that are essential components of effective writing instruction and assessment.

Guided by argumentation schema theory, we conducted five psychological studies in the United States and China on arguments about vaccination. Study 1 replicated research about arguments on several topics, finding that agreement judgments are weighted toward claims, whereas quality judgments are weighted toward reasons. However, consistent with recent research, when this paradigm was extended to arguments about vaccination (Study 2), claims received more weight than reasons in judgments about agreement and quality. Studies 3 and 4 were conducted in the United States and China on how people process counterarguments against anti-vaccination assertions. Rebuttals did not influence agreement but played a role in argument quality judgments. Both political position (in the United States) and medical education (in China) predicted differences in argument evaluation. Bad reasons lowered agreement (Study 5), especially among participants studying health care. Political polarization apparently heightens the impact of claim side in the argumentation schema, likely to the detriment of public discourse.

We are haunted—politically, professionally, and personally—by the rhetorical constraints of contrition and forgiveness. The Rhetoric of Official Apologies, a coedited book by internationally prominent rhetorical scholars Lisa S. Villadsen and Jason A. Edwards, offers a timely intervention. The volume focuses on an “official apology” as a globally-recognized and prevalent rhetorical genre, which they define narrowly as “a statement of regret presented by a representative of a state or a government (e.g., a leading political figure such as a prime minister) to a particular group of citizens or an entire population (or subgroup thereof) of a different country for wrongs committed against them by or in the name of the state or government” (2). They focus beyond crisis communication playbooks of containing damage to one's reputation and into the riskier, more vulnerable realm of a government seeking to recognize and reconcile intergenerational legacies of harm. More than political gestures, though they are that, Villadsen and Edwards underscore the significance of “doing it in public” (3), emphasizing the ceremonial settings and public address of the genre.The book considers what characteristics we might identify when the genre is performed in meaningful ways instead of as empty symbolic acts. The editors insist, as rhetoricians should, that words matter and can help re-constitute meaning about our ugliest, most traumatic, and violent moments in history. Instead of pivoting on guilt, Villadsen and Edwards argue that the genre turns on responsibility, “that is, publicly acknowledging that the acts of the past were wrong, expressing sorrow and remorse over the wrongdoing, and committing to nonrepetition and to new measures for improvement” (6). They conclude that a key to a too-often-overlooked purpose of official apologies is: “a redefinition of or recommitment to the societal norms holding the community together, in other words, the function of rearticulating the meaning of citizenship” (222). Publics, therefore, are critical to assessing whether an official apology matters because moving past immediate harms, these reflections can indicate who maintains or might begin to identify with a sense of belonging in the “us” of what Benedict Anderson called the “imagined community” of a nation.The Rhetoric of Official Apologies further narrows the genre to how and why national governments are moved to address past injustices, grappling with the messy work of negotiating morality, harms, and reconciliations. The book includes an introduction and an afterword written by the coeditors, as well as nine chapters without any organizing subthemes. Historical events include slavery, genocide, and colonization. While more than half the book focuses on the United States, chapters also include atrocities in Scotland, Rwanda, Canada, Iraq, Australia, and Indigenous nations. Chapters also include failed or non-apologies, such as Bradley Serber's analysis of U.S. President Clinton's apology for nonintervention in the Rwandan genocide, John Hatch's study of U.S. Congress's apologies for slavery, and Jeremy Cox and Tiara Good's assessment of U.S. President Obama's apology to Native Peoples. In the last chapter, Kundai Chirindo and Jasper Edwards extend rhetorical research on reconciliation to the context of Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islanders, insisting that self-determination is an overlooked feature, to date, that is necessary in addressing the legitimacy of how power over destiny is negotiated between two sovereign nations. This chapter powerfully troubles the idea of “citizenship” as a central term of official apologies by asking how we might imagine reconciliation in the broader framework of human rights or the more daring realm of redistributing power through self-determination.As this book was published during the height of the COVID pandemic, many, like me, may have missed its release. Given its exorbitant price, interested readers might request their libraries order copies. The term “official apology” is immensely useful for rhetoricians studying how state officials navigate blame, self-reflection, and repair. I hope this volume helps make space for studying other genres of apology, including those by corporations, NGOs, and educational institutions (including journals, professional organizations, and departments). Given the focus, for example, the book doesn't engage theorization of transformative justice and abolitionist rhetorics, which focus more on systemic roots and prevention of harm beyond state power. Nevertheless, The Rhetoric of Official Apologies establishes the significance of the genre to public affairs and the work left to develop more robust vocabularies for genres of contrition and forgiveness.

Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.