Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This “In Focus” project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In each case you will see how “rhetoric” must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se.“Rhetoric” in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do have persuasive goals, or audiences, for example. Though complicated in this discussion with Noë, “rhetoric” has precise meaning it's the job of this introduction to clarify, because it goes to our basic situation and it does so in a way that's unfamiliar.In Varieties of Presence (2012),1 Noë makes the argument for a rhetoric of experience explicit. Starting with the example of traditional art like song or a painting, Noë explains how mere perceptual exposure is not yet aesthetic experience. Only “through looking, handling, describing, conversing, noticing, comparing, keeping track, [do] we achieve contact with the work/world” (125). But this kind of contact with the world is not neutral; following Kant it falls in the domain of “ought”: our response reflects our sense of how one ought to respond to a work of art for instance. Hence rhetoric as persuasion: “aesthetic experience happens only where there is the possibility of substantive disagreement, and so also the need for justification, explanation and persuasion” (126). Is such persuasive rhetoric relevant only to traditional art forms per se? No—and this is Noë's bold move: he is really working on perceptual experience “tout court,” with art recapitulating the basic fact about perceptual consciousness and serving as a model or “guide to our basic situation.” “Perception is not a matter of sensation; it is never a matter of mere feeling,” Noë summarizes. Instead perceiving is “an activity of securing access to the world by cultivating the right critical stance,” or even more directly: human experience has a “rhetorical structure” (128). How do we miss this according to Noë? “The big mistake,” explains Noë, “is the overlooking of the aesthetic, or critical, character and context of all experience. There is no such thing as how things look independently of this larger context of thought, feeling and interest [classical rhetoric would similarly list the goals of rhetoric: docere, movere, delectare]. This is plain and obvious when we think of the experience of art. It is no less true in daily life” (129).Though resonant with the work of Struever and then with her major reference point Collingwood, or with John Dewey as Noë points out himself, this is a major reorientation of philosophy and rhetoric. It puts philosophy right next to other human activities that include the arts like dance, music, and painting. And it does so not as the addendum after basic human activities have wound down. On this mistaken model, philosophy and the arts including linguistic arrive only belatedly, after the real work is finished on the ground. Instead, according to Noë, these artistic and thoughtful activities are exactly what make us human in the first place, as they are the inherent possibilities that shape human activity from the outset: no language without the probing possibilities, like irony, that bind up language in a world flexibly, no music without the capacity for musical reflection that offers up the audible world one way not another, no dancing or for that matter movement without the possibility of the arts that put on display dancing and movement, indeed giving us the very world where things including us get moved around. Movement at its most immediate, to pick up this last example, is always already choreographed though not mechanically so—as Noë explains in his reply it is precisely the choreography that at the same time “sets us free,” opening up the distance whether more habitual or more explicitly mindful that makes the activity human in the first place. Rhetoric, then, names the inflection points—of movement, of language, of philosophy and the arts—that make the human situation what it is, with the scholarly activity we call “rhetoric” offering a kind of field guide to the environments in which we are.But, finally, are these environments just ours? They can't be. They are shared fundamentally, though not in ways that Noë explores in this project, despite the fact that he is trained, we should recall, as a philosopher of biology.Gesturing thus to an opportunity beyond this project, I conclude with biologist Joan Roughgarden, who helps us see how environments are shared across species, even down to the rhetorical structures that give particular environments their shape. Instead of selecting sexually for ideal types, argues Roughgarden in her groundbreaking work Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, a species needs “a balanced portfolio” of genes to survive over the long term (2004, 5), and sex, which entails a very wide (but not indefinite; 177) range of behaviors—reproductive and otherwise—is the social activity that continually rebalances a species' overall genetic portfolio in the context of dynamic environments. Instead of offering only background noise, indeterminacy of the sign (as we might call it from the semiotic or rhetorical perspective, where X is somewhere between attractive or repellent, pro- or antisocial, praise or blameworthy, and so on) is compatible with biodiversity precisely insofar as it constitutes the social. Antisocial eugenics and cloning are Roughgarden's counterexamples; just like the computer scientist knows that focusing only on the code while ignoring the execution environment is a mistake, cloning biologists who focus on the nucleus of the cell while ignoring the cytoplasm make the same mistake insofar as they have ceased to work ecologically (311).Then back to Noë at last, it is worth thinking at some point about the ways in which his activities that “put on display” are a subset of a more general biological capacity to triangulate, in environments that are always dynamic and often threateningly so. Now with the help of Struever, Noland, Rickert, and Noë, we can at least start thinking differently about the rhetorical opportunities our current environment offers.

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ABSTRACT This article examines pedagogical results from an IRB-approved study that used the Omeka platform in two sections of technical writing classes. The research question explored how a digital humanities (DH) project can be an opportunity for students to learn concepts and take ownership of publicly facing content. The method used is qualitative, and findings indicated that students embraced an open-source and collaborative project. Results also demonstrated how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors might find DH tools well suited to TPC competencies.

In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause a crisis in the first place. Drawing from literature on crisis communication and the experiences users described in the Zoom CEO’s blog post, the author concludes that while Zoom did indeed have technical issues that contributed to its privacy crisis, users also experienced its technology in unexpected ways, and the company underestimated the privacy expectations of its new users. Zoom’s privacy crisis ultimately provides a useful discussion of why it is increasingly important for companies to incorporate privacy by design and to be frank about their privacy practices with a public who has a growing interest in, and dissatisfaction with, corporate privacy practices.

Through an analysis of over 40 writing center blogs, this webtext offers an overview of the current status of blog use in writing centers, and a guide to best practices that incorporates survey responses from the writing center professionals who maintain exemplary blogs.

This webtext presents video recordings of writing conferences with two students in a lower-division online research writing course, analyzed in light of online writing instruction and writing center scholarship on synchronous conferencing—specifically considering the extent to which students in the conference practice or acquire digital literacy skills, benefit from the immediacy of the interaction, and experience an asymmetrical power dynamic.

This study explores the use of digital technologies in the writing of an academic assignment. Fine-grained studies on student writing processes are scarce in previous research. In relation to the increasing demands on students’ writing, as well as the debate on students’ poor writing (Malmström, 2017), these issues are important to address. In this study, screen captures of five students’ essay processes are analyzed. The results show that students handle text at different levels: they make use of one or more word processors, arrange texts spatially on screens and use resources to operate directly in texts. Above all these actions seem to meet the need to move and navigate within one’s own text, an aspect that could be especially important in relation to the academic genre and for handling texts as artifacts in activity (Castelló & Iñesta, 2012; Prior, 2006). The results of the study point to the importance of making digital writing practices visible, especially those that could create possibilities to intertwine digital texts, thereby enhancing potentials for academic writing and meaning-making.

This paper outlines the educational benefits of creating digital stories for a variety of academic purposes as well as the professional need for students to develop and showcase digital proficiency. Digital stories fall under the category of multimodal composition and new media studies, and they encourage students to expand their digital literacy skills while reconceptualizing ways in which traditional writing projects can appeal to a broader audience. The article also addresses some of the classroom challenges teachers may face when trying to implement the practice and some practical resources that might assist teachers to integrate digital stories into their classrooms.

Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR). To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support.  We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors. Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020). References Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR].  Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge. Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019 Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge. National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague.

Background: Visualizations are used to communicate data about important political, social, environmental, and health topics to a wide range of audiences; however, perceptions of graphs as objective conduits of factual data make them an easy means for spreading misinformation. Research questions: 1. Are people deceived by common deceptive tactics or exaggerated titles used in data visualizations about non-controversial topics? 2. Does a person's previous data visualization coursework mitigate the extent to which they are deceived by deceptive tactics used in data visualizations? 3. What parts of data visualizations (title, shape, data labels) do people use to answer questions about the information being presented in data visualizations? Literature review: Although scholarship from psychology, human-computer interaction, and computer science has examined how data visualizations are processed by readers, scholars have not adequately researched how susceptible people are to a range of deceptive tactics used in data visualizations, especially when paired with textual content. Methodology: Participants (n = 329) were randomly assigned to view one of four treatments for four different graph types (bar, line, pie, and bubble) and then asked to answer a question about each graph. Participants were asked to rank the ease with which they read each graph and comment on what they used to respond to the question about each graph. Results/Discussion: Results show that deceptive tactics caused participants to misinterpret information in the deceptive versus control visualizations across all graph types. Neither graph titles nor previous coursework impacted responses for any of the graphs. Qualitative responses illuminate people's perceptions of graph readability and what information they use to read different types of graphs. Conclusions: Recommendations are made to improve data visualization instruction, including critically examining software defaults and the ease with which people give agency over to software when preparing data visualizations. Avenues of future research are discussed.

Discussions about communication and education have become focused on social justice in recent years, and with good reason. Social justice is at the forefront of many aspects of our daily lives in news, education, and even entertainment. As digital rhetoricians and educators, we have found ourselves looking for ways to work at the intersections of our field and social justice to improve both learning experiences and networked communication in non-academic contexts. This work is both timely and needed, as the hierarchies and inequities experienced in "real life" often translate to, and are amplified by, networked and digital forms of engagement. Fortunately, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues offers an insightful and practical discussion about ethical frameworks that contribute to our understanding of digital social justice. Colton and Holmes persuasively argue for the value of Aristotle's virtue ethics, especially the idea of hexis , as a model for empowering students, educators, and others to enact digital social justice. As they explain, Aristotle identified virtues "such as patience, courage, temperance, and liberality" that contribute to ethical behavior and "are developed not solely through reason or by learning rules but through practice of the emotional and social skills that enable us within a community to work toward...human flourishing and general well-being" (p. 32). An essential part of Aristotle's framework is hexis , a person's disposition that has been crafted through habit and repeated practice (p. 11). Colton and Holmes effectively demonstrate how a virtue ethics framework can empower individuals to take ownership of the ethical implications of digital practices. Throughout the book, Colton and Holmes address familiar topics in digital rhetoric ranging from captioning (pp. 3--5, 49--73), remixing (pp. 74--94), and issues inherent in online activism (pp. 95--126).

Medical device manufacturers and other high-technology companies increasingly incorporate algorithmic data surveillance in next-generation medical wearables. These devices, including hearing aids, leverage patient data created through human-computer interaction to not only power devices but also increase corporate profits. Although data protection laws establish privacy requirements for personal information collection and use, these companies continue to use patients’ personal information with little notice or education, significantly curtailing the agency of wearers. We explore the complex ecology of the Starkey Halo smart hearing aid, focusing on the opacity of its algorithmic functionality and examining patient education materials for disclosures of data surveillance. We contextualize these findings within privacy law in the United States and European Union that are relevant to algorithmic surveillance and recommend specific steps to enhance wearer agency through informed decision-making.

This study examines the extent to which TOEIC Writing test scores relate to an external criterion: evaluations by linguistic laypersons of the functional adequacy of writing in the international workplace. Test-taker responses to two representative tasks from the TOEIC Writing test (e-mail requests, opinion surveys) were adapted for workplace role-play scenarios that laypersons read and evaluated in an online survey. After reading each role-play scenario, laypersons evaluated the text produced by their imagined interlocutor using functional adequacy scale items (comprehensibility, content adequacy, effectiveness, support and coherence). Overall functional adequacy evaluations were obtained by averaging the ratings for each of the two tasks. Layperson ratings of functional adequacy were strongly correlated with TOEIC Writing test scores (r = 0.76). Results suggested that test-takers’ writing performance is likely to be perceived as functionally adequate for test scores at which important decisions are typically made. Study results are discussed in terms of their implications for claims about the generalizability of TOEIC Writing test score interpretations with respect to those made in the international workplace, as well as the potential benefits, challenges, and limitations involved in this approach to validation.

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a broad range of digital contexts, including online discussion forums and computer code.

Background: The cognitive load involved in research article (RA) reading can be overwhelming for L2 novice readers. RA section headings can be used as signals to help novices focus on essential information related to their learning goals to reduce extraneous cognitive processing. There is a need to examine RA macrostructures to inform RA reading instruction. Literature review: RAs do not always follow the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion (IMRD) model. Previous research has examined the macrostructure of articles in disciplines such as computer science, applied linguistics, and pure mathematics, but few have investigated the macrostructure of economics RAs. Research questions: 1. Are there any sections frequently used in economics articles apart from the conventional sections? 2. If yes, what are the views of expert economics RA readers on the communicative functions and propositional content of the newly identified sections of economics RAs? Research methods: Eighty RAs were collected from five economics journals using stratified random sampling. Following Yang and Allison's macrostructure analysis method, we conducted an analysis of the overall structure of the RAs based on section headings and the function and content of each section. Results: Compared with the IMRD model, we found six new section types: Background, Theoretical Model, Econometric Model, Robustness, Mechanisms, and Application. Interviews were conducted to explore expert RA readers' genre knowledge on the newly identified sections. Conclusion: The findings can be useful for RA reading and writing instruction and future research on part-genres of economics articles.

Abstract The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.

In a move that is becoming more common within digital humanities and comics scholarship, Jason Helms sets out to illustrate his argument through formal means, and thus has produced a work that is b...

To date, research into dynamic descriptions of text has focused mainly on the spoken mode; and while writing process research has examined language structures, it has largely ignored the functionality (meaning) inherent in them. Therefore, drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and keystroke logging software, this article takes a further step toward an interdisciplinary dialogue by outlining a new schematic for coding and analyzing revisions. More specifically, we show how revision activity can be tracked within functional components, across functional components, and across clauses in terms of forward and backward movements. By exploring three digitally constructed texts, which were produced and observed unobtrusively in a natural setting, we have attempted to illustrate how one writer’s revising process can be operationalized in terms of (a) chronological movement (sequence) and (b) spatial movement (location). Findings showed how activity was relatively consistent across datasets with regard to session management, revision frequency, and distribution of revision types. Moreover, results also showed how most revision activity occurred at, or ahead of, the point of inscription, particularly with regard to revising the end of clauses. However, findings also indicated that revising the start of clauses was equally important when considering the size of functional components.

This article examines the impact of the sociodemographic profile (including age, gender, and educational track) of Flemish adolescents (aged 13–20) on lexical aspects of their informal online discourse. The focus on lexical and more “traditional,” print-based aspects of literacy is meant to complement previous research on sociolinguistic variation with respect to the use of prototypical features of social media writing. Drawing on a corpus of 434,537 social media posts written by 1,384 teenagers, a variety of lexical features and related parameters is examined, including lexical richness, top favorite words, and word length. The analyses reveal a strong common ground among the adolescents with respect to some features but divergent writing practices by different groups of teenagers with regard to other parameters. Furthermore, this study analyzes both standardized versions of social media messages and the original utterances (including nonstandard markers of online writing). Strikingly, different results emerge with respect to adolescents’ exploitation of more traditional versus digital literacy skills in relation to their sociodemographic profile, especially with respect to sentiment expression (verbal versus typographic/pictorial). The study suggests that the inclusion of nonverbal communicative strategies, for instance in language teaching, might be a pedagogical asset, since these strategies are eagerly adopted by teenagers who show proof of less developed traditional writing skills.

ABSTRACTDuring the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing physical viruses infecting our bodies, virtual viruses infecting our computers, and symbolic viruses infecting our thinking. This essay takes up each of these interruptions in a collective attempt to better understand how we are rhetorically and where we might go politically from here.

Teaching the craft of written science communication is an arduous task that requires familiarity with disciplinary writing conventions. With the burgeoning of technological advancements, practitioners preparing novice research writers can begin to augment teaching and learning with activities in digital writing environments attuned to the conventions of scientific writing in the disciplines. The Research Writing Tutor (RWT) is one such technology. Grounded in an integrative theoretical framework, it was designed to help students acquire knowledge about the research article genre and develop research writing competence. One of its modules was designed to facilitate revision by providing different forms of automated feedback and scaffolding that are genre-based and discipline-specific. This study explores whether and how the features of the RWT may impact revision while using this module of the tool. Drawing from cognitive writing modeling, this study investigates the behaviors of a multidisciplinary group of 11 graduate-student writers by exploring how they interacted with the RWT's features and how this interaction may create conditions for enhanced revision processes and text modifications. Findings demonstrate promising potential for the use of this automated feedback tool in fostering writers' metacognitive processing during revision. This research adds to theory on cognitive writing models by acknowledging the evolving role of digital environments in writing practices and offering insights into future development of automated tools for genre-based writing instruction.

The interest in computer-assisted interventions to promote literacy has increased over the years. In this study, we developed the Portuguese version of the GraphoGame Fluent and tested its effects on reading, spelling, and phonological awareness. Second graders struggling to read were randomly assigned to two groups: GraphoGame Fluent group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted remedial reading intervention, or GraphoGame Math group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted numeracy intervention. An additional, non-playing group, composed by second graders without reading difficulties, was formed (business-as-usual group, n = 15). Results showed clear benefits of GraphoGame on spelling and phonological awareness. After the intervention and one month later, the GraphoGame Fluent group displayed spelling and phonological awareness skills similar to the business-as-usual group, and above the GraphoGame Math group. Overall, these findings indicate that Portuguese struggling readers benefit from computer-assisted interventions that combine letter-sound correspondences with more complex orthographic patterns.

C-SAW (Computer-Supported Argumentative Writer) is an online authoring software embodying design principles derived from theories on written argumentation, self-regulation and conceptual change as well as feedback from practitioners and users, in line with a design-based research approach. Designed to scaffold writing processes, C-SAW is intended as additional support in instructional designs using argumentative writing for learning. This article presents the results of a mixed-method study comparing undergraduate students writing with C-SAW or a text editor. Outcome measures included the number of arguments and the degree of their completion, knowledge of argument components, topic knowledge and changes in epistemic beliefs. Participants writing with C-SAW elaborated arguments to a greater degree, but there were otherwise no significant differences between conditions for other measured outcomes. Furthermore, results were influenced by informal reasoning skills that outweighed the effects of condition. These results are discussed with respect to the difficulties of studying the effects of digital tools on writing and learning in controlled first-use contexts and the importance of developing instructional designs with explicit learning outcomes that are aligned to the instructional principles embedded in digital tools.

This study explores how agency is distributed in an interaction among a child, a speech-language pathologist, and an electronic communication device. Using video-recorded data of the interaction, I consider how micro features of the participants’ communication such as gaze and gesture as well as material objects such as the device collectively shape possibilities for agency. This interdependent, posthuman approach shifts our understanding and practice of agency from gaining independence to improving collect action.

In Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues, Jared Colton and Steve Holmes wrestle with a core question facing digital rhetoricians: how might any example of digital communication technology or practi...

One way toward a more embodied digital rhetoric is through interrogating constructions of digital disembodiment. To make that case, this article examines one of the most famous esoteric or “weird” programming languages, which are not designed for any “real world” purpose, but as art, parody, or experiment. This language, named “brainfuck,” is notorious for its difficulty and uses challenges of mastery to assert a “true” (white, straight, masculine) programmer identity. As brainfuck reveals, a contemporary struggle to connect the effects of technologies with the people who create them can be sustained because their creators perform being machine-like themselves.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

Some computer code bootcamps offer racially marginalized adults training in computer programming to assist in their social mobility. Many African American adults have little to no prior experience with programming. Literacy life history interviews show that the procedural literacy adult students practiced out of school scaffolded their learning coding literacy.

In this assignment, students create a podcast episode in which they make an argument on a topic in current events. Through this process, students develop traditional rhetorical skills such as awareness of audience, formulation of a thesis, and inclusion of compelling evidence, in a new context that allows them room for creativity and for approaching these techniques from a different angle. Accustomed to composing analysis essays and research papers on a computer screen, students who create an argument in the aural medium must consider the best way to grab and hold the listener's attention so that the listener's mind does not wander, and to convey information clearly and concisely so that the listener never needs to rewind. Additionally, students become familiar with audio editing software and other aspects of digital composition, and they explore a medium that may feel like a refuge in today's screen-saturated world.

This article examines how digital rhetoric in a big data age affects human and more-than-human life (lands, waters, energies, and so forth) in places beyond immediate rhetorical encounters. By putting particular pressure on what the author calls digital damage, the article draws out the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of Facebook’s New Mexico data center. Coupling Donna Haraway’s methodological tactic of “staying with the trouble” with cultural rhetorics perspectives on story, accountability, and relationality, the essay shows how digital damage can be expressed through a series of interruptive stories. Ultimately, the article intervenes in debates on the Anthropocene, arguing that attending to digital damage through story is one way to register the sensitivities, urgencies, and accountabilities needed to respond to worlds of entangled damage.

In this essay, we examine the complete published speeches of Arne Duncan from his seven years (2009–2015) as Barack Obama’s secretary of education, to understand how his language both defined problems and promoted solutions for our nation’s schools. By looking at Duncan’s rhetoric through close readings and computer-aided textual analyses, we find that his discourse contained paradoxes, particularly through a notion of schooling as a means of achieving both social justice and economic growth, by framing education as both a private and public good, and through assertions about the need for government both to centralize authority over schooling and promote a global educational marketplace. In essence, Duncan used a both/and approach to these purposes, adding to our understandings of the character and functions of educational rhetoric and showing how critical it is for scholars to recognize that such tensions exist in language about what education policy should do. Ultimately, we conclude that Duncan’s rhetoric obscures historic tensions in the purpose of education and highlights the way that policy rhetoric may saddle public education with responsibilities beyond its capacities.

This webtext is a digital gallery of six (re)imagined interfaces, designed to de-familiarize and call attention to the material and aesthetic components of web design. By (re)imagining six everyday interfaces that commonly mediate online activity, the gallery offers space for viewers to question and explore issues of navigation, orientation, metaphor, language, embodiment, and infrastructure that undergird human-computer interaction.

A synthesis of converging and contrasting perspectives on ways of knowing and doing in digital rhetoric pedagogy among 25 teacher-scholars that provides a rough sketch of the state of digital rhetoric pedagogy as it is understood and practiced in the second decade of the 21st century and as it is told by a range of voices, including leading voices, in the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and identifies and highlights areas of productive tension among interviewees’ responses.

By addressing how writing centers can work to help computer science students be ready for professional challenges related to writing in computer science fields, this study of computer science professionals and students illustrates how findings were applied to train a team of writing tutors. Drawing upon self-reports about writing in computer science jobs and writing in computer science classes, the authors identify both professionals' workplace writing challenges and students' perceptions of these challenges. Implications for writing center practitioners and researchers are discussed, including how writing centers can collaborate with computer science faculty to acquire resources, access the discourse of computer science assignments, and implement a similar training program in their centers.

This article proposes a model for collaboration between composition instructors and instructional librarians to promote visual literacy instruction in first-year writing courses. While the creation of visual content is essential to digital composing technologies, it often remains underutilized as a tool for writing development in first-year curricula. Drawing from complementary threshold concepts outlined in composition scholarship and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy , we demonstrate how librarians and writing instructors can engage in collaborative instruction to bridge gaps between theory and practice and leverage existing institutional expertise to support multimodal instruction in first-year writing.

Writing centers provide a crucial site for multilingual writers to experience generative and productive conversation about their writing projects and for their language and cultural experiences to be appreciated as sources for meaning-making. For this to be possible, tutors must understand the phenomenon and problems of standard language ideology (SLI) and should have opportunities to develop practices that reflect translingual perspectives on language and communication. This study examines peer tutors’ participation on a private staff blog to demonstrate how opportunities to reflect on translingual practices and experiences can shift tutors’ knowledge and attitudes about SLI and create conditions for more equitable, cosmopolitan experiences for multilingual writers.

This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional (Crenshaw; Martinez) and interdependent (Jung; Wheeler) approaches that put language diversity and disability in conversation (Cioè-Peña). Each of us shares two pedagogical examples that consider language diversity/difference and embodied diversity/difference as unified concepts. Our pedagogical examples include projects related to multimodal and digital rhetoric, multilingual/multimodal community engagement, reflecting on communication differences, and analyzing multimodal/multilingual communication in practice. Through what we call intersectional, interdependent approaches to accessibility in writing classrooms, students and teachers can honor the multitude of valuable communication practices that students engage in within and beyond the English writing classroom.

This study examines how African American adults attending a code bootcamp continue to learn coding literacy despite life challenges associated with racial oppression. Eleven out of twelve study participants drew maps of their support and discussed in one-on-one interviews how the people, objects, and animals in their drawings assisted their approaching learning computer programming. Applying ego network analysis, these interviews and drawings suggest that participants use various clusters of support in their network to provide the personal resources coders need to code and what is hard to come by in situations of racial injustice. These resources may have helped participants manage the risks of losing access to coding literacy. Instead of a universal approach to accessing technology, different kinds of networks and resources can lead to continuous access. This study furthers research on racially marginalized adults’ digital literacies and demonstrates how ego network analysis maybe useful for qualitative research on theories of ecological writing.

Employers provide their interpretation of the meaning of communication skills in this qualitative study of 22 managers. Employers understand written communication to be types of documents, a way to write, and a mode of communication. Oral communication skills mean a style of interacting, presenting, and conducting meetings. Visual communication skills were understood to be data visualization or nonverbal communication. Electronic communication was interpreted as email. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by highlighting areas where meaning converges for employers and instructors. Faculty members in communication disciplines can incorporate these findings into their course design and learning outcome discussions.

Derek N. Mueller's Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (2017) presents a compelling argument for adding distant reading and thin description to the Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS) research methods portfolio. Not only can these methods help professionals address information overload, but the methods also support disciplinary wayfinding and network awareness for veteran and initiate practitioners and scholars alike. Network Sense 's explicit goal is to help current and new members in RCWS avoid information overload and better understand their discipline and where it is going. Mueller's presentation and evidence builds upon lived academic experience of ever-expanding growth in research, conferences, publications, and professional activities in RCWS. Similarly, his detailing the dearth of non-local, reliable, and consistently gathered data articulates the experience and lived frustration of many scholars. Finally, his presentation and analysis regarding the increasing number of scholars cited at the end of the long tail as opposed to having more repeatedly cited authors explains the felt experience of sharing or disciplinary niching or potential diffusion. Winning the 2018 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, as well as the 2019 Research Impact Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, underscores this book's value to its fields.