The recent call for replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) research of writing center effectiveness motivated this study. In writing centers, the primary objective is to improve writers through one-to-one conversations. Improvement in writers, defined here in terms of rhetorical awareness, has proven difficult to measure. In this article, the authors describe how they developed a scale to measure rhetorical awareness, specifically purpose, genre, and audience awareness. Using both discourse and content analyses, they applied the scale to student responses on reflection forms collected over two semesters at an HBCU to see if rhetorical awareness might be observable and measurable. Although the responses of students who visited the center more than once within six months did not show changes in their rhetorical awareness, as the authors had hoped, the results seem to reveal more about the social context than individual students, suggesting that current-traditional pedagogy persists. Aggregating data with this methodology may open new lines of inquiry for researchers of writing and allow them to track trends in discourse on writing.

This essay explores the idea that calling bullshit exemplifies Mercier and Sperber”s social intuitionist theory. It discusses a range of empirical research related to bullshit, including belief in the worldviews of Individualist vs. Communitarian and Hierarchical vs. Egalitarian with regard to accepting and rejecting ideas. Calling bullshit fits well with using the heuristics of like/not like and cognitive mechanisms of debunking misinformation.

Background: Qualitative technical communication research often produces datasets that are too large to manage effectively with hand-coded approaches. Text-mining methods, used carefully, may uncover patterns and provide results for larger datasets that are more easily reproduced and scaled. Research questions: 1. To what degree can hand collection results be replicated by automated data collection? 2. To what degree can hand-coded results be replicated by machine coding? 3. What are the affordances and limitations of each method? Literature review:We introduce the stages of data collection and analysis that researchers typically discuss in the literature, and show how researchers in technical communication and other fields have discussed the affordances and limitations of hand collection and coding versus automated methods throughout each stage. Research methodology: We utilize an existing dataset that was hand-collected and hand-coded. We discuss the collection and coding processes, and demonstrate how they might be replicated with web scraping and machine coding. Results/discussion: We found that web scraping demonstrated an obvious advantage of automated data collection: speed. Machine coding was able to provide comparable outputs to hand coding for certain types of data; for more nuanced and verbally complex data, machine coding was less useful and less reliable. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of considering the context of a particular project when weighing the affordances and limitations of hand collecting and coding over automated approaches. Ultimately, a mixed-methods approach that relies on a combination of hand coding and automated coding should prove to be the most productive for current and future kinds of technical communication work, in which close attention to the nuances of language is critical, but in which processing large amounts of data would yield significant benefits as well.

Introduction: Group projects are a common pedagogical tool for technical and professional communication courses. These projects provide students with valuable learning experiences that they would not otherwise receive working individually. However, student group projects come with some unique challenges, such as unequal distribution of work, unequal levels of learning, and perceptions of fairness. Situating the case: While many instructor-led resources and strategies exist for facilitating group projects, fewer student-empowering strategies exist. Data provide one potential way to empower students to take ownership of their team experience and make more informed decisions throughout the teamwork process. About the case: This teaching case was born out of a response to the many teamwork problems that are outlined in the literature and that the author has observed as an instructor. This teaching case describes the implementation and outcomes of a data-driven framework for decision making called collect, analyze, triangulate, and act (CAT) that the author developed. After they learned about the CATA framework, the students completed a series of data-driven exercises during the team formation, team functioning, and team evaluation stages of the team project. Perceptions of CATA's effectiveness were collected after the project ended. Methods: A mixed-methods approach, which included a survey and a series of interviews, was used to gain insights into how both team members and team leaders perceived the CATA framework. Results: Survey results indicated that students found the CATA framework helpful in many team contexts. Students expressed particularly strong opinions about how CATA aided in the fairness and accuracy of peer evaluations, was helpful for self-reflection, and was useful for making informed arguments to convince team members of a decision. Interviews with team leaders revealed that appealing to data using the CATA framework was helpful in managing the team but had limited capacity to aid in managing conflict. Conclusions: Students realized many benefits from the CATA framework, and some team leaders even felt empowered in certain instances by appealing to data. However, instructors should still consider scaffolding data literacy and teamwork skills for students to be fully prepared for successful teamwork.

The quest to understand the nuances of professional communication using computational tools have continued since, and many researchers in our field have embraced the new interdisciplinary approach now known as data science. Our quick metadata search on the journals and conference proceedings in technical and professional communication (TPC) revealed an increasing number of articles associated with terms commonly used in data science (e.g., big data, content analysis, text mining, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, network analysis) originating from numerous disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, statistics, business analytics). Yet, the field of TPC is just beginning to embrace the power of data-driven approaches. This special issue extends Orr’s work by taking a snapshot of current work in data-driven approaches to the study of TPC.

There is abundant research evidence on the effectiveness of explicit writing instruction and peer-assisted writing. However, most of the research articles investigating these evidence-based writing practices fail to include clear and detailed descriptions of the interventions. Consequently, researchers and educational practitioners have no perception of the crucial ingredients underlying these interventions, hindering replication, dissemination, and implementation of evidence-based writing practices. In the present study, we provide in-depth insight into two instructional writing programs via an analytic description of both programs. More particularly, EI+PA students received explicit writing instruction and practiced their writing collaboratively, while EI+IND students received the same explicit writing instruction; however, they practiced by writing individually. Both interventions were analytically described by means of a reporting system. Following this procedure, the writing lesson programs were more particularly described by defining design principles, instructional teaching activities, and student learning activities.

In a Higher Education environment where evidence-based practice and accountability are highly valued, most writing practitioners will be familiar with direct requests or less tangible pressures to demonstrate that their teaching has a positive impact on students’ writing skills. Although such evaluations are not devoid of risk and the need for them is contested, it can be argued that it is better to engage with them, as this can avoid the danger of overly simplistic forms of measurements being imposed. The current paper engages with this question by proposing the conceptual basis for a new measurement tool. Based on Amabile’s Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), developed to assess creativity, the tool develops the idea of consensual assessment of writing as a methodology that can provide robust data through systematic measurement. At the same time, I argue consensual assessment reflects the evaluation of writing in real life situations more closely than many of the methodologies for writing assessment used in other contexts, primarily large scale tests. As such, it would allow writing practitioners to go beyond ethnographic methods, or self- reporting, in order to obtain greater insight into the ways in which their teaching helps change students’ actual writing, without sacrificing the complexity of writing as social interaction, which is fundamental to an academic literacies approach.

As linguistic diversity increases on American campuses, writing center staffs are also becoming more diverse— although there has been little empirical research about non-native English speaking (NNS) tutors. Concerns about the native speaker fallacy, although prevalent in TESOL literature, are less documented in writing center studies. The primary purpose of this study is to determine what, if any, differences exist between the tutoring methods of native English-speaking (NES) and non-native English speaking (NNS) tutors and whether some of these differences might be ascribed to linguistic bias. In this study, eight writing center tutors, four NES and four NNS, were observed during sessions with one NES and one NNS writer each. Sixteen naturalistic sessions were transcribed and triangulated with interviews and exit surveys with all participants. Tutor language t-units from these sessions were coded into four broad categories and seven sub-categories. The results indicate that while NES and NNS tutors generally use similar types of language while tutoring, the NES tutors are more directive with NNS writers, reflecting traditional writing center training. NNS tutors are more directive overall, but are especially directive with NES writers. Results also indicate that, despite popular wisdom to the contrary, NNS tutors are less emotionally responsive while working with NNS writers than with native English speakers. The tutors and writers in this study did not indicate the native speaker fallacy as greatly impacting their sessions. Keywords : Non-native speakers of English, peer tutoring, writing, native speaker fallacy

This article examines the role of emotions in writing center consultations, specifically the use of Carl Rogers’ (1951) empathic listening and responding strategies as a way to acknowledge and engage students’ emotions during writing support. Using survey research and analysis of observations, the training consultants in Rogerian strategies was determined to be an effective approach. Key words : Rogers, empathic listening, empathic responding, empathy, survey research, observation, training Even with data about emotional impacts in college, such as the 2016 annual report from The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (Pennsylvania State University) listing anxiety as the most commonly reported issue (61%), there is a tendency in higher education to downplay emotions and the correlations of attending (or not) to affective dimensions and student success (Beard, Clegg, & Smith, 2007; Morin-Major et al., 2016). This emphasis on the cognitive aspects of writing can make higher education seem like an “emotion-free zone” (Mortiboys, 2011), but this is not always in students’ best interests. Since writing centers are embedded in the larger institutional culture, the emphasis on cognitive concerns impacts our work. Writing center scholarship has examples of addressing emotive concerns and includes discussions about therapeutic approaches. In tutor training manuals, many of the suggestions regarding working with emotional students set up a cautious position for the tutor (Lape, 2008). For many years, our scholarship has leaned toward cognitive discussions (Agostinelli, Poch, Santoro, 2000), and even recent reviews of writing center literature still reveal a concentration on cognitive skills and the negative impact of emotions (Lawson, 2015). Seeing students as emotional beings, acknowledging that academia cannot be an “emotion-free zone,” is important. The question for writing centers is to what extent should we address the affective elements inherent in writing center work. Certainly, consultants are not counselors. If they attempt to act as such, they make themselves and the students with which they interact vulnerable in ways that may not be healthy. Additionally, writing centers cannot provide the tools, training, and certifications to prepare peer-writing consultants to address all the emotional needs of all students. But there are still tools within psychology that can be used to acknowledge the cognitive and emotive elements of students in writing centers in ways that are supportive of them as people first and writers second. In this article, we explore the ways in which addressing emotions in writing center work has been discussed and then look specifically at how using Carl Rogers’ (1951) empathic listening and responding approach can support the inclusion of emotions in writing consultations as a way to lead into our study examining and applying empathic listening at our writing center.

This essay expands Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model to bring more attention to the persuasive effects of using the self as a model. To illuminate this technique, I analyze the personal narratives of popular health coaches, who are championing a holistic health movement toward what I refer to as “do-it-yourself healthcare.” This case involves arguments regarding the efficacy of methods in evidence-based medicine and “alternative” or holistic health, as popular health coaches predicate their ability to heal themselves and others on abandoning traditional medicine. In brief, the purpose of this article is twofold: first, to characterize the rhetoric of the movement toward alternative or holistic health, and, second, to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model and address the implications of this expansion.

Empirical research on composing processes is virtually absent in our field. What do contemporary writers actuallydowhen they compose? I argue that we need a return to research on composing processes, as writers are every day weaving together the social and cognitive through writing. One writer’s composing process think-aloud suggests how some writers today weave together cognitive and cultural processes of meaning making in ways unimagined at the time of the last composing process research.

Rethinking UX requires mapping trends in empirical research to find out how the field has developed. This study addresses that need by analyzing over 400 academic empirical studies published between 2000--2016. Our research questions are, "How have the artifacts, analysis, and methods of UX research changed since the year 2000?" and "Do scholars use research questions and hypotheses to ground their research in UX?" Our research found that services, websites, and imagined objects/prototypes were among the most frequently studied artifacts, while usability studies, surveys, and interviews were the most commonly used methods. We found a significant increase in quantitative and mixed methods studies since 2010. This study showed that only 1 out of every 5 publications employed research questions to guide inquiry. We hope that these findings help UX as a field more accurately and broadly conceive of its identity with clear standards for evaluating existing research and rethinking future research opportunities as a discipline.

In this study we investigated which instructional method is suitable for university students to learn how to write an academic text. We have compared observational learning with learning by doing, and we have explored the effects of writing preference (planning versus revising) on academic writing performance. In an experiment 145 undergraduate students were assigned to either an observational learning or learning-by-doing condition. In observational learning participants learned by observing a weak and strong models’ writing processes. In learning by doing they learned by performing writing tasks. Prior to the sessions participants were labeled as either planners or revisers based on a writing style questionnaire. The effects of the sessions were analyzed with a 2x2 between-subjects design with instructional method (observational learning, learning by doing) and writing preference (plan, revise) as factors. To measure academic writing performance the participants wrote an introduction to an empirical research paper.We found no main effects for instructional method and writing preference. Simple effect analyses did reveal that revisers benefitted somewhat more from observational learning than planners. Planners performed equally well in observational learning and learning by doing. However, planners who learned by doing did seem to outperform revisers who learned by doing. Our study suggests that observational learning presents interesting opportunities for academic writing courses. However, more research on the interplay between writing strategy and instructional method is called for.

This article offers an empirical study of literature in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and the medical humanities (MH). Article traces the topics, funding mechanisms, research methods, theoretical frameworks, evidence types, audience, discourse arrangement patterns, and action orientation that constitute the scholarship in the sample to offer a landscape of the current state of RHM and the MH. Findings can be leveraged to assess the potential for alignment between these fields for future research.

We are pleased to share with you our latest issue of the Journal of Response to Writing. Although not intentionally planned, this issue’s three feature articles all explore the affective dimensions of response, considering both learners’ and instructors’ views on aspects of response practice. The authors point out that just as important as examining what happens when responding is knowing how the people involved experience response. We are pleased to welcome back JRW’s founding editor, Dana Ferris, whose article “‘They Say I Have a Lot to Learn’: How Teacher Feedback Influences Advanced University Students’ Views of Writing” presents the findings from a large-scale longitudinal study investigating how upper division undergraduate students remember the feedback they received from previous teachers. Ferris surveyed 8,500 students across five years to find out how their affective perceptions of teacher feedback corresponded to their views on writing. With both qualitative and quantitative data, Ferris argues that students who report having received more negative feedback also have less positive feelings about writing in general. Multilingual writers in particular remember more critical feedback and find less enjoyment in writing overall. Ferris suggests that these findings should be a reminder to teachers to pay attention to how they respond to students’ texts, as instructor comments can have a lasting impact on learners’ feelings about writing for academic purposes.

In this project, I investigated student perceptions of dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF), a specific method of providing accuracy feedback, in developmental writing classes for multilingual students. Via a quasi-experimental design using treatment and control sections of a developmental writing program’s three levels, I collected and contrasted survey data from a total of 145 students. I then interviewed three students (one international and two generation 1.5) representing a range of perceptions of DWCF. Participants generally appreciated and valued DWCF, especially as a complement to a grammar textbook, and students of classes that used DWCF reported higher scores on most survey items, such as quality of grammar feedback and general class instruction. I also present students’ pedagogical suggestions for better integration of DWCF in writing classes.

This research note focuses on how corpus analysis tools can help researchers make sense of the data writing centers collect. Writing centers function, in many ways, like large data repositories; however, this data is under-analyzed. One example of data collected by writing centers is session notes, often collected after each consultation. The four institutions featured in this noteâ€"Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A&M University, and The Ohio State Universityâ€"have analyzed a subset of their session notes, over 44,000 session notes comprising around 2,000,000 words. By analyzing the session notes using tools such as Voyant, a web-based application for performing text analysis, writing center researchers can begin to explore critically their large data repositories to understand and establish evidence-based practice, as well as to shape external messaging about writing center laborâ€"separate from and in addition to impact on student writersâ€"to institutional administrators, state legislators, and other stakeholders.

Drawing on three cases from a larger (N=169) longitudinal study of student writing development, this article shows how STEM students “rewrote” disciplines to suit their writerly purposes as they moved through their undergraduate years. Students made it clear that the institutional dimensions of disciplines, visible in administrative units or departments that control resources and records, remained visible in their mental landscapes, but they had a much more flexible view of the epistemological dimensions of disciplines. Rather than entering a field as novices aiming to emulate the writing of its experts, they drew on the intellectual resources of multiple disciplines in order to carry out their own projects. The goals and choices of these students suggest that the term new disciplinarity has implications for the ways WID is conceptualized. As theorized by Markovitch and Shinn (2011, 2012), new disciplinarity posits elasticity as a central feature of disciplines, calls the spaces between disciplines borderlands, and affirms the dynamic nature of projects and borderlands with the term temporality. As such, new disciplinarity offers terms and a theoretical framework that conceptualize the intellectual negotiations of students.

The marketing success of green products has spawned the phenomenon of greenwashing, but studies on the effects of greenwashing on consumers are still limited. Using a 4 × 2 randomized experimental design, this study examines such effects by determining whether consumers respond differently to greenwashing, silent brown, vocal green, and silent green organizations selling hedonic products (perfume) or utilitarian products (detergent). The results show that consumers recognized the green claims in the greenwashing condition, which led to an environmental performance impression in between green and brown organizations but also to more negative judgments about the integrity of communication. Regarding purchase interest, greenwashing organizations performed similarly as silent brown organizations, with significantly lower scores than those of vocal green and silent green organizations. No significant effects of product type and no interaction effects were found. Overall, greenwashing has only limited benefits (perceived environmental performance), poses a major threat (perceived integrity), and has no true competitive advantage (purchase interest).

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.

Distant reading and related data-driven methodologies illuminate previously unrecognized trends in how the discipline of English has incorporated, resisted, and naturalized new media technologies.

This meta-analysis of writing center scholarship surveys the last twenty years of empirical work from The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Writing centers are traditionally predicated on treating writers as both beneficiaries of tutoring and active collaborators in its success. Our pedagogy is tutee-centered in its practice and the benefits it produces, and although we pride ourselves in acting as team players in tutoring sessions, does the same quality emerge in existing research? This paper finds writing center scholarship is rife with studies where the writer-as-beneficiary takes precedence over the often-absent writer-as-collaborator. Put another way, we often attend to writers as recipients of tutoring, but we rarely address their perspectives as active participants in testing our pedagogical assumptions. This paper demonstrates historical trends in scholarship and recent moves to center writers in rigorous, participatory roles in evidence-based inquiry. By engaging with tendencies in data collection in writing center research, this project addresses an unconsidered gap between existing principles and the role of tutees in our evolving research practices. This project offers a custom taxonomy for tutee-based studies, and a thematically organized table of findings.

International and multilingual student enrollments are growing around the world. Because 73% of international students in the United States come from countries where English is not an official language, the number of L2 students is likewise growing. Writing centers are on the frontlines in academically supporting L2 students, but tutor anxiety in sessions with L2 students is apparent. Empirical research on L2 student satisfaction with writing centers is only slowly emerging. Our quantitative study compares satisfaction of English-L2 students to those of English-L1 students through a common exit survey of student perceptions of writing center visits; perceptions are essential as they connect to achievement and learning outcomes. Overall, we find both groups are equally satisfied with their writing center visits, equally likely to return to the writing center, and have equally intellectually engaging sessions. Adding greater resonance, this study was conducted at three different types of institutions in the United States—a small liberal arts college; a medium, private, doctoral university; and a large, public land-grant university. Our study directly points to tutor-training strategies, including sharing empirical studies about satisfaction, increasing a focus on intellectual engagement for students and tutors, and incorporating global English strategies into sessions.

Students' misunderstanding of faculty expectations for paraphrase has been empirically demonstrated, and many writing centers conduct workshops to help students adopt better strategies for work with sources. However, little empirical research supports the effectiveness of such efforts. For this study, researchers examined students' attempts to paraphrase before and after a 45-minute workshop presented by an undergraduate peer tutor in several sections of an introductory political science course. Our findings demonstrate that the workshop did help students improve both their understanding of what is expected of them and their attempts to paraphrase. The average score for language increased from 3.11 in the pretest to 3.86 on a 5-point scale in the posttest (n=107, p.001). However, as many students improved at avoiding patchwriting, the quality of their representation of an idea from a source appeared to decline; ideas scores dropped after the workshop from 3.36 to 3.03 (n=107, p.01). The drop

Enrollments of international students are at very high levels in the U.S., a development that has altered the demographics of first-year composition classes in recent years. Nonetheless, writing instructors and administrators often know little about these students’ backgrounds, which can make it difficult to design pedagogies that are responsive to their specific needs. Drawing on data from a qualitative, longitudinal study with a cohort of undergraduate international students, this article addresses three interrelated issues: 1) pre-college writing experiences of international students in both their first languages and English; 2) key points of challenge and discovery for international students as they enter the culture of U.S. academic writing; and 3) possible pedagogic interventions designed to better support international students. Situating findings in relation to recent scholarship on students’ transitions from high school to college, the article explores ways in which the experiences of international students are both similar to and different than those of their U.S.-educated peers.

Research problem: Studies by the American Institute of Medicine and the European Health Literacy Survey describe considerable levels of either inadequate or problematic health literacy. This health literacy problem is intensified when frontline healthcare practitioners must rely on printed education materials to compensate for the lack of time to instruct patients about their health management. Applying plain-language guidelines to health promotion materials may increase their effectiveness, particularly for patients with low health literacy. Research questions: 1. In what ways have plain-language guidelines been applied in health information materials for patients with varying degrees of health literacy, according to recent studies? 2. Have studies found that materials that apply plain-language guidelines are effective in health information promotion? Methodology: This article presents the findings from an integrative literature review of research into the use of plain language to promote health literacy. The systematic review identified scholarly, evidence-based studies that included reference to the use of plain-language guidelines. This article describes the detailed selection process and characterizes the corpus of articles along four dimensions: objectives, methodology, plain-language guidelines used, and findings. Results and conclusions: The review identified 13 articles that explored the use of plain-language guidelines in health literacy promotion. Analysis of these articles demonstrates that plain-language guidelines could play a strategic role in educating patients. Use of plain language could help healthcare practitioners to communicate critical and sometimes very complex health information effectively.

Research problem: Interest in plain-language communication has been growing in many sectors of business and government, but knowledge about its development is scattered and in need of synthesis. Research questions: 1. How did plain language in the US evolve to gain acceptance by industry, government, and the public? 2. In what ways have advocates changed their vision of plain language? Literature review: My review identified a corpus of more than 100 publications relevant to the history of plain language from 1940 to 2015. Methodology: I evaluated the literature on plain language to identify milestones, events, and trends between 1940 and 2015. I focused on the evolution of plain language and on ways that practitioners altered their perspective of the field. Results: Between 1940 and 1970, plain language focused mainly on readability. During the 1970s, some practitioners began to employ usability testing. By the mid-1980s, there was a widespread sense that plain-language advocates had shifted priorities from readability to usability. Between 1980 and 2000, advocates broadened their vision-beyond word- and sentence-level concerns to include discourse-level issues, information design, and accessibility. Between 2000 and 2015, advocates continued to worry over their old questions (“Can people understand and use the content?”), but also asked, “Will people believe the content? Do they trust the message?” By 2015, plain language had gained significant momentum in business, government, medicine, and education. Conclusions: Plain language evolved over the past 75 years from a sentence-based activity focused on readability of paper documents to a whole-text-based activity, emphasizing evidence-based principles of writing and visual design for paper, multimedia, and electronic artifacts. Plain-language practitioners expanded their concerns from how people understand the content-the usability and accessibility of the content-to whether people trust the content. In addition to a narrative about the field's evolution, I offer a Timeline of Plain Language from 1940-2015, which chronicles the field's highlights. Together, the narrative and timeline offer a fairly comprehensive view of the current state of plain language and allow those with an interest to dig deeper.

This article presents findings from a longitudinal study of student reading experiences at a community college and concludes that, as their experiences accumulated, these students learned how to succeed in their coursework without actually reading assigned texts.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

This article sheds light on moments when educators affirm and when writers assert their epistemic rights— the rights to knowledge, experience, and earned expertise. Affirmations and assertions of epistemic rights can work to counter epistemic injustice, or harm done to people in their capacities as knowers. Though an understanding of rhetoric as "epistemic" or "epistemological" is not new (e.g., Berlin; Dowst; Scott; Villanueva), I argue that we need to bring attention to the related terms and conceptual frameworks of epistemic rights and epistemic injustice. Together, these terms help to explain the wrongs (micro-inequities leading to macro-injustices) that manifest when writers are stripped of language, experience, or expertise and their attendant agency, confidence, and even personhood. This study highlights both the social stakes involved and the interactional work needed for putting one's words into the world. Hence, this project contributes empirical research in addition to an understanding of epistemic rights that can counter epistemic injustice.

Report on a longitudinal study of transfer, investigating dispositions in two participants’ internships. Prior knowledge helped one student overcome negative attitudes toward school. With less experience and disruptive dispositions, the second student was less successful. Thick descriptions of their experiences are followed by implications for supporting transfer in internships and for future research.

As the healthcare system in the United States becomes more complex, so does the information needed for administrators and clinicians to keep apprised of new regulatory and systemic changes. In this article, I use a review and analysis of an online resource project to identify effective practices to educate and support healthcare safety net organizations, or those clinics that serve low-income populations. The project team consisted primarily of healthcare researchers who used a systematic review of the scholarly literature to develop online systems for transmitting information about healthcare payment and service delivery reform to those serving low income populations. As the technical communicator working on this project, the author advocated incorporating concepts of user research and user-centered design to the project team. This research included a survey of provider-users. The analysis of this project revealed that, in the health and medical community, evidence-based medicine and the genre of systematic literature review may be privileged such that provider-user needs for information seeking are not taken into account when designing online communication based on these reviews. Communication designers may need to work with and adapt the work of translation science and knowledge-to-action to develop more user-centered online content for provider education.

The ubiquity of social media for professional and personal purposes has proven both an asset to scholars in writing studies (broadly conceived) and, in some cases, a cause for concern. Recent news events suggest that institutional decision-making surrounding social media is reactionary, severe, and steeped in discussions of "risky behaviors." These events (and others) result in anxiety surrounding social media use among individuals and organizations. In this article, we respond to these concerns with an empirical, mixed methods pilot study that investigates the ways new and emergent scholars might mitigate potential problems associated with social media use. The article presents preliminary findings that destabilize rule-based approaches and introduce uncertainties and vulnerabilities that accompany social media use.

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

With growing interest in the relationship between translation and language learning, a number of studies have begun to examine the pedagogical value of translation and explore the best ways to utilize it in L2 classrooms. Some may doubt the need to include translation in L2 classrooms when language pedagogy is a far more wellestablished discipline. An answer to this concern requires empirical research on the role of translation in the L2 classroom. To this end, this study compares how L2 learners react to particular translation tasks and writing tasks. The findings suggest that translation tasks can yield better results than direct L2 writing tasks in encouraging and facilitating students to improve their lexis and grammar. The results also suggest that both translation and writing tasks have greater potential to prompt lexical than grammatical improvement. These findings offer new insights into alternative writing instruction and contribute to an increasing body of research on the pedagogical value of translation in L2 classrooms.

It has been suggested that oral languaging (e.g., collaborative dialogue, private speech) plays a crucial role in learning a second language (L2). Many studies have shown a positive relation between oral languaging during problem solving tasks and subsequent performance on various post-test measures. The paucity of empirical research on written languaging (e.g., written reflection) prompted this study. The effect of the quality of written languaging by 24 Japanese learners of English was assessed by subsequent text revisions. Both written languaging at the level of noticing only and written languaging at the level of noticing with reasons were associated with accuracy improvement. These findings appear to support Swain’s (2006, 2010) claim that providing learners with the opportunity to language about or reflect on their developing linguistic knowledge in the course of L2 learning mediates L2 learning and development. The pedagogical implications of the study may suggest that L2 teachers should ask their students to reflect, in diaries, journals, and portfolios, on the linguistic problems they have encountered during their classroom activities.

Mathematics standards in the United States describe communication as an essential part of mathematics. One outlet for communication is writing. To understand the mathematics writing of students, we conducted a synthesis to evaluate empirical research about mathematics writing. We identified 29 studies that included a mathematics-writing assessment, intervention, or survey for students in 1st through 12th grade. All studies were published between 1991 and 2015. The majority of assessments required students to write explanations to mathematical problems, and fewer than half scored student responses according to a rubric. Approximately half of the interventions involved the use of mathematics journals as an outlet for mathematics writing. Few intervention studies provided explicit direction on how to write in mathematics, and a small number of investigations provided statistical evidence of intervention efficacy. From the surveys, the majority of students expressed enjoyment when writing in mathematics settings but teachers reported using mathematics writing rarely. Across studies, findings indicate mathematics writing is used for a variety of purposes, but the quality of the studies is variable and more empirical research is needed.

Objective: We report on a comparative study of the language used by middle school students in their answers to a constructed response test of science inquiry knowledge. Background: Text analyses using statistical models have been conducted across a number of disciplines to identify topics in a journal, to extract topics in Twitter messages, and to investigate political preferences. In education, relatively few studies have analyzed the text of students’ written answers to investigate topics underlying the answers. Methodology: Two types of linguistic analysis were compared to investigate their utility in understanding students’ learning of scientific investigation practices. A statistical method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used to extract topics from the texts of student responses. In the LDA model, topics are viewed as multinomial distributions over the vocabulary of documents. These topics were examined for content and used to characterize student responses on the constructed response items. The change from pre-test to post-test in proportions of use of each of the topics was related to students’ learning. Next, a qualitative method, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis, was used to analyze the text of student responses on the same test of science inquiry knowledge. Student assessments were analyzed for two linguistic features that are important for convincing scientific communication: technical vocabulary usage and high lexical density. In this way, we investigated whether human judgement regarding the changes observed from texts based on the SFL framework agreed with the inference regarding the changes observed from the texts through LDA. Research questions: Two research questions were investigated in this study: (1) What do the LDA and SFL analyses tell us about students’ answers? (2) What are the similarities and differences of the two analyses? Data: The data for this study were taken from an NSF-funded host study on teaching science inquiry skills to middle school students who were a mix of both native English speakers and English-language learners. The primary objective was to enable participants to learn to take ownership of scientific language through the use of language-rich science investigation practices. The LDA analysis used a sample of 252 students’ pre-and post-assessments. The SFL analysis used a second sample of 90 students’ pre- and post-assessments. Results: In the LDA analysis, three topics were detected in student responses: “preponderance of everyday language (Topic 1),” “preponderance of general academic language (Topic 2),” and “preponderance of discipline-specific language (Topic 3).” Students’ use of topics changed from pre-test to post-test. Students on the post-test tended to have higher proportions of Topic 3 than students on the pre-test. In the SFL analysis, students tended to use more technical vocabulary and have higher lexical density in their written responses on the post-test than on the pre-test. Discussion: Results from the LDA and SFL analyses suggest that students responded using more discipline-specific language on the post-test than on the pre-test. In addition, the results of the two linguistic features from the SFL analysis, technical vocabulary usage and lexical density, were compared with the results from the LDA analysis. • Conclusion: Results of the LDA and SFL analyses were consistent with each other and clearly showed that students improved in their ability to use the discipline-specific and academic terminology of the language of scientific communication.

White papers are commonly produced by for-profit organizations to market high-tech products and services and are often created by technical writers. But writers of this genre have little evidence-based research to guide them. To fill this void, the authors tested a rhetorical move structure with a sample of 20 top-rated marketing white papers and found that, despite the lack of industry standards for white papers, those written for marketing purposes display similar rhetorical moves: introducing the business problem, occupying the business solution niche, prompting action, establishing credibility, and providing disclaimers or legal considerations. Based on the results of this study, the authors advance guidelines for writers of this genre and suggest areas for future research.

This article examines writing center administrators (WCAs) in relationship to conditions that influence their institutional status and scholarly identity. Drawing upon survey and interview data, we elaborate on four themes that shape WCAs' experiences: 1. education and training; 2. position and institutional oversight; 3. financial resources; and 4. sponsorship. While these factors do not impact all WCAs in the same ways, we believe they influence WCAs' empirical research production and their relationships with department-based colleagues in interesting albeit context-dependent ways when viewed across the experiences of the current study's participants and those queried in earlier studies. After examining the implications of these factors -factors that suggest a separate and unequal WCA experience -we first propose the need for more comprehensive study of current professionals in our field to determine the degree to which the themes that emerged from our sample resonate

Much of the scholarship on writing centers narrates the stories of writers and their texts as told by tutors, administrators, and researchers. In an effort to bring writers' voices to the forefront, this empirical study examines the types of questions and concerns writers have about their writing as submitted through the Purdue Writing Lab's OWL Mail, an online, asynchronous question-and-answer email platform. Through the employment of what Richard H. Haswell ( The implications of these results and the ways they may inform tutor preparation in response to writers' email inquiries are discussed. Suggestions for future research are also provided.

Researching writing-related dispositions is of critical concern for understanding writing transfer and writing development. However, as a field we need better tools and methods for identifying, tracking, and analyzing dispositions. This article describes a failed attempt to code for five key dispositions (attribution, self-efficacy, persistence, value, and self-regulation) in a longitudinal, mixed methods, multi-institutional study that otherwise successfully coded for other writing transfer factors. We present a “study of a study” that examines our coders’ attempts to identify and code dispositions and describes broader understandings from those findings. Our findings suggest that each disposition presents a distinct challenge for coding and that dispositions, as a group, involve not only conceptual complexity but also cultural, psychological, and temporal complexity. For example, academic literacy learning and dispositions intersect with systems of socio-economic, political, and cultural inequity and exploitation; this entwining presents substantial problems for coders. Methodological considerations for understanding the complexity of codes, effectively and accurately coding for dispositions, considering the four complexities, and understanding the interplay between the individual and the social are explored. We describe how concepts from literacy studies scholarship may help shape writing transfer scholarship concerning dispositions and transfer research more broadly.

This profile presents New Jersey City University’s Writing Assessment Program from its creation in 2002 to its elimination in 2017. The program arose as an attempt to raise the writing skills of the diverse, first-generation teacher certification candidates in the College of Education. Despite political missteps, the program gained greater administrative support in 2009, and in this second stage, the program capitalized on greater institutional support to use data-driven analysis to inform policy. In 2014, however, New Jersey moved to require the Praxis CORE, and the Writing Assessment Program became obsolete. This profile discusses the many ways in which a locally developed, student-centered, and instruction-driven assessment program can raise student skills and the losses involved in a shift from local to national assessment.

As multimodal writing continues to shift and expand in the era of Big Data, writing studies must confront the new challenges and possibilities emerging from data mining, data visualization, and data-driven arguments. Often collected under the broad banner of data literacy , students’ experiences of data visualization and data-driven arguments are far more diverse than the phrase data literacy suggests. Whether it is the quantitative rhetoric of “likes” in entertainment media, the mapping of social sentiment on cable news, the use of statistical predictions in political elections, or the pervasiveness of the algorithmic phrase “this is trending,” data-driven arguments and their accompanying visualizations are now a prevalent form of multimodal writing. Students need to understand how to read data-driven arguments, and, of equal importance, produce such arguments themselves. In Writing through Big Data, a newly developed writing course, students confront Big Data’s political and ethical concerns head-on (surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic filtering) by collecting social network data and producing their own data-driven arguments.

Research problem: Entrepreneurial passion has been shown to play an important role in venture success and, therefore, in investors' funding decisions. However, it is unknown whether the passion entrepreneurs personally feel or experience can be accurately assessed by investors during a venture pitch. Research questions: (1) To what extent does entrepreneurs' personal passion align with investors' perceived passion? (2) To what cues do investors attend when assessing entrepreneurs' passion? Literature review: Integrating theory and research in entrepreneurship communication and entrepreneurial passion within the context of venture pitching, we explain that during venture pitches, investors make judgments about entrepreneurs' passion that have consequences for their investment decisions. However, they can attend to only those cues that entrepreneurs outwardly display. As a result, they may not be assessing the passion entrepreneurs personally feel or experience. Methodology: We used a sequential explanatory mixed methods research design. For our data collection, we surveyed 40 student entrepreneurs, videorecorded their venture pitches, and facilitated focus groups with 16 investors who viewed the videos and ranked, rated, and discussed their perceptions of entrepreneurs' passion. We conducted statistical analyses to assess the extent to which entrepreneurs' personal passion and investors' perceived passion aligned. We then performed an inductive analysis of critical cases to identify specific cues that investors attributed to passion or lack thereof. Results and conclusions: We revealed a large misalignment between entrepreneurs' personal passion and investors' perceived passion. Our critical case analysis demonstrated that entrepreneurs' weak or strong presentation skills led investors either to underestimate or overestimate, respectively, perceptions of entrepreneurs' passion. We suggest that entrepreneurs should develop specific presentation skills and rhetorical strategies for displaying their passion; at the same time, investors should be wary of attending too closely to presentation skills when assessing passion.

It is in the interest of scholarly journals to publish important research and of researchers to publish in important journals. One key to making the case for the importance of research in a scholarly article is to incorporate value arguments. Yet there has been no rhetorical analysis of value arguments in the literature. In the context of rhetorical situation, stasis theory, and Swales’s linguistic analysis of moves in introductions, this article examines value arguments in introductions of science research articles. Employing a corpus of 60 articles from three science journals, the author analyzes value arguments based on Toulmin’s definition of argument and identifies three classes of value arguments and seven functions of these arguments in introductions. This analysis illuminates the rhetorical construction of value in science articles and provides a foundation for the empirical study of value in scholarship.

Research problem: In Ireland, technical communication has developed as an academic and occupational field since the late 20th century. Research on the field in Ireland is limited. Research questions: (1) To what extent do technical communicators in Ireland operate as a community of practice? (2) What steps are Irish technical communicators taking toward professionalization? Literature review: This study uses a theoretical framework that combines symbolic interactionism and communities of practice theories. While traditional professionalization theory uses a structural functionalist approach to the study of occupations, characterizing disciplines as professions depending on whether they meet certain traits (including autonomy, market closure, license to practice, and service orientation), symbolic interactionism prioritizes interactions among individuals. In this sense, it overlaps with the concerns of communities of practice. A community of practice involves a group of people working together, and creating meaning through their interactions. Studying an occupation through this lens foregrounds individual and community identity, and how that is formed and informed by work. Methodology: Mixed methods-a survey, focus groups, and interviews-were used to explore Irish technical communicators' perceptions of aspects of their field: practice, education, value and status, and professional and community structures. Results: The findings indicate that Irish technical communicators exhibit traits of communities of practice (such as joint enterprise and shared repertoires). They also identify with their job title and practice. A key finding is that some Irish technical communicators have a keen appetite for community involvement. This enthusiasm notwithstanding, barriers to professionalization include low visibility of the role in Ireland, limited evidence of professionalizing activity, and the potential for career stagnation.

Research problem: This study investigates the phenomenon of user-generated content strategy in an open-source, wiki-based content-management system (CMS) for the repair of technological devices (http://ifixit.com). By “user-generated content strategy,” we mean processes for developing systems for producing, moderating, and encouraging user-generated content. Research questions: (1) What strategies, or holistic means of organizing content, are used to manage repair manual content via an open-source, wiki-based content-management system that relies on content generated by a wide variety of users? (2) What content rules, or logical premises for how and where content is developed, emerge from a qualitative case study of such a CMS? Literature review: Though a wealth of empirical research has been conducted into user-generated content, few studies have focused on the explicit strategies employed by organizations to develop and encourage such content. At the same time, several recent calls by researchers in both academia and industry have indicated a need for such content models. Some of the challenges these thinkers have noted with creating user-generated content strategies include the difficulty of maintaining a consistent strategy across content generated by users who don't necessarily understand what strategies are in place, as well as maintaining a modicum of quality assurance without squelching user participation. Methodology: We conducted a content audit of iFixit's main educational initiative, the Technical Writing Project (http://edu.ifixit.com) to identify strategies iFixit uses to organize content in this initiative. iFixit is an open-source wiki to help users repair their own devices. We supplemented the audit with interviews with student participants in the project and iFixit technical writing staff to find out what technologies and other affordances affected users of the iFixit Technical Writing Project. Results and conclusions: The main user-generated content strategies used by iFixit include allowing users a wide range of means to participate (such as posting comments or developing their own repair guides), using a content moderation queue (or simple interface for seeing all updates to the wiki), ensuring quality assurance of all repair guide content through redundancy (such as making sure experienced users vetted every published guide), and staging (or arranging information in a linear sequence) information in a multimodal fashion (using multiple modes of communication to reinforce the same information). Such strategies represent a commitment by iFixit to opening up practices that are central to creating content, such as repair documentation, to any interested internet user. Lessons for organizations who wish to encourage user-generated content include developing strategies that protect users from the worst consequences of their actions, that encourage participation, and that allow for experienced users to vet new content.