This teaching practice paper deals with some practical ideas of teaching the concept of ‘warrant’ in Toulmin’s mode of argumentation within EFL/ESL settings. While most students are familiar with making claims and providing evidence to support them, they may not understand the role of the warrant in connecting claims and reasons. Therefore, there is a strong need for teaching students how warrant plays a key role in argumentative writing. This teaching practice paper aims at bridging the gulf between some writing theories and useful examples to dissect the complexities of teaching warrant in writing classes.

In the international business (IB) research field, many have suggested paradigmatic changes to address the complexity of cultural issues. Different paradigms represent different approaches to culture, and in this study, we apply positivist, interpretive, and critical approaches in the context of IB relationships. To address these different approaches within IB instruction, we introduce the theory of interpersonal knowledge. By utilizing this theory and examples of how to analyze business relationships using different approaches to culture, IB teachers can clarify the different approaches and help their students deepen their understanding of the meaning of interpersonal-level analysis in intercultural business settings.

Too often, those new to community literacy work naïvely overlook issues of paternalism (Mathieu), the violent aspects of literacy (Baker-Bell, Pritchard, Stuckey), and the deep legacies of racism that shape engagement (Kannan). Or, as graduate students and novice community-engaged teachers learn about ethical challenges, they can become disillusioned and paralyzed (Feigenbaum). Mentoring others in community literacy therefore requires nurturing critical hope, which I define and theorize as a disposition that blends a commitment to act with an unflinching awareness of harmful dynamics enmeshed in community literacy.  Drawing on data from sixteen students in a graduate community literacy practicum, I introduce a provisional matrix for mapping orientations to critical hope and explore factors that influenced students’ movements across the matrix. The most impactful factors were not pedagogical choices in the class, but ecological factors shaping students’ lives and community experiences. Given this finding, I suggest that instructors, mentors, and professional development facilitators who work with those new to community literacy provide spaces for personal reflection on individual critical hope ecologies, and I raise questions to consider as our field learns to better support those who are entering the unwieldy and energizing work of community literacy.   

How do we move forward when the legality of teaching and learning about social justice research is called into question by the state? This article demonstrates the efficacy of collaboration as a form of institutional critique that made it possible to provide a comprehensive graduate education following the emergence of anti-DEI legislation in Florida. To teach and learn in a tumultuous legal landscape without sacrificing rigor, eliding DEI-oriented scholarship, or violating state law, we piloted a collaborative disciplinary meta-analysis project that enabled students to study social justice research along with the field’s other major research topics. This portable approach allowed us to meet the professional and ethical imperative to engage research that has been targeted by state officials but remains foundational for disciplinary expertise. It also demonstrates the futility of removing politically unfavorable scholarship from curricula. After sharing an overview of the results of our meta-analysis project, with a special focus on our field’s take on social justice and collaboration, we reflect on the rhetorical strategies those of us working in highly politicized educational climates have deployed to manage increased oversight from zealous state legislatures challenging the legitimacy of disciplinary expertise.

Introduction: This article presents the results of an integrative literature review on artificial-intelligence (AI) literacy and AI ethics in technical and professional communication (TPC). This article demonstrates how these concepts have or have not been discussed and studied by the field. By analyzing the literature from adjacent fields and trade journals, this article sets the groundwork for pedagogies and best practices that prepare technical and professional communicators to evaluate AI technologies using ethical perspectives. Research methodology: We used the hermeneutic methodology to conduct a systematic literature review that allowed repeated cycles of searching, filtering, and interpretation across wide-ranging, interdisciplinary academic sources. Following this method to include and exclude sources resulted in a total of 32 articles that describe different case studies, frameworks, theories, and other pedagogical activities to incorporate AI ethics literacy in the curriculum. Results and discussion: Recent trends within AI ethics education document and advocate for a redesign of educational programs and curricula. To be more intentional in adopting AI ethics in pedagogy, we propose a thre -level framework (consisting of institutional, course, and instruction levels) that can be aligned to include AI ethics literacy in course and program objectives and outcomes. By drawing from technical communication work on AI literacy and mapping other TPC work that can be utilized for teaching AI ethics, we recommend incorporating AI ethics in existing courses or new ones. We also list the challenges of choosing one approach over another. Conclusions and further research: A systematic approach to AI pedagogy can help TPC instructors use existing resources to help students use, understand, and evaluate AI technology in strategic ways. This research can be expanded to include new pedagogical approaches, and by drawing connections of AI ethics to specific TPC theory, especially social justice and audience analysis.

This collection of 10 My Favorite Assignments (MFA) was first presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication Annual International Conference held Denver, Colorado, USA. Instructors can see innovative ideas for teaching current social issues, oral communication techniques, and methods to lead students to greater personal and professional development.

The public release of ChatGPT in 2022 ushered in a new era, affirming the present reality of AI-assisted writing and the critical role business instructors play in preparing students. This study presents the results of a pedagogical experiment. Specifically, it evaluates strategies for integrating and teaching about AI in the business communication classroom, focusing on the impact of generative AI on students’ understanding of business writing principles and how different levels of engagement with AI influence students’ critical AI literacy and attitudes toward AI-assisted writing in the workplace.

• This study explores GenAI's role in multimodal composition, including Adobe Firefly and DALL·E. • GenAI reshapes the composition stages of invention, designing, and revising. • Despite its limitations, GenAI offers alternative solutions to wicked problems. • Post-GenAI use, students critically revise and iterate their compositions. • The study contributes to future research and teaching of AI-assisted composition. This study explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) design technologies, including Adobe Firefly and DALL·E, into the teaching and learning of multimodal composition. Through focus group discussions and case studies, this paper demonstrates the potential of GenAI in reshaping the various stages of the composition process, including invention, designing, and revising. The findings reveal that GenAI technologies have the potential to enhance students’ multimodal composition practices and offer alternative solutions to the wicked problems encountered during the design process. Specifically, GenAI facilitates invention by offering design inspirations and enriches designing by expanding, removing, and editing the student-produced design contents. The students in this study also shared their critical stance on the revision process by modifying and iterating their designs after their uses of GenAI. Through showcasing both the opportunities and challenges of GenAI technologies, this paper contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversations on multimodal composition and pedagogy. Moreover, the paper offers implications for the future research and teaching of GenAI-assisted multimodal composition projects, with the aim of encouraging thoughtful integration of GenAI technologies to foster critical AI literacy among college composition students.

In this paper, we demonstrate how studying the rhetorics of ChatGPT prompt writing on social media can promote critical AI literacies. Prompt writing is the process of writing instructions for generative AI tools like ChatGPT to elicit desired outputs and there has been an upsurge of conversations about it on social media. To study this rhetorical activity, we build on four overlapping traditions of digital writing research in computers and composition that inform how we frame literacies, how we study social media rhetorics, how we engage iteratively and reflexively with methodologies and technologies, and how we blend computational methods with qualitative methods. Drawing on these four traditions, our paper shows our iterative research process through which we gathered and analyzed a dataset of 32,000 posts (formerly known as tweets) from X (formerly Twitter) about prompt writing posted between November 2022 to May 2023. We present five themes about these emerging AI literacy practices: (1) areas of communication impacted by prompt writing, (2) micro-literacy resources shared for prompt writing, (3) market rhetoric shaping prompt writing, (4) rhetorical characteristics of prompts, and (5) definitions of prompt writing. In discussing these themes and our methodologies, we highlight takeaways for digital writing teachers and researchers who are teaching and analyzing critical AI literacies.

This piece begins to contextualize my stance as a community college writing teacher, just over eighteen years in.

This essay discusses the conflict a compositionist from the US-Mexico border encounters in teaching composition amidst migration. Through autohistoriando, the author shares his experiences inside and outside of the composition course at this border to analyze and respond to this conflict.

This article presents a conceptual framework for enhancing business writing skills through social media integration in business communication education. By embedding platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, the framework promotes essential competencies such as clarity, audience awareness, and professional tone. Five core principles—constructivist learning, digital literacy, ethical writing practices, real-time feedback, and collaborative writing—underpin this framework, emphasizing experiential learning that bridges informal and formal communication styles. This approach offers educators a structured method for developing students’ adaptability and writing proficiency, aligning pedagogical practices with the evolving needs of modern business communication.

African immigrants in the US and across the globe are confronted with issues of language and culture retention, resistance to the loss of the same, and reconstruction of their identities while navigating the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of the host nations. The experiences of one such family are shared through the African Oral Traditional Storytelling Framework developed on the tenets of African oral traditional storytelling techniques, African ideologies, and African worldviews, in which storying is both method and analysis. Through oral stories, poetry, proverbs, and songs, the Opokus invite readers to partake in the fireside chat as they share their lived experiences and the implications those experiences have on their identity conceptualization and that of their children. The shared stories expand scholarly discourse on the social identities of African immigrant families and youths about the global, political, and economic forces that shape their experiences. Finally, it also urges English language arts teachers to engender African-centered writing approaches to acknowledge African peoples’ linguistic ambivalence and the “power” associated with the teaching and learning of English due to colonialism.

Organizations use social networking sites (SNSs) to create collaborative communication channels among employees, consumers, and clients. Organizations expect future employees to be well trained in using SNSs. However, students do not accept SNSs as a professional channel of communication since they use SNSs for fun and socializing. A hypothetical case study was developed to explain the consequences of the unmindful use of SNSs in a professional context. The article discusses the need to use a case study in this context. The effectiveness of the case is assessed through a survey questionnaire. Recommendations for BPC faculty for using the case are also discussed.

The conquest of America brought with it the introduction of rhetoric as a model of teaching and as a practice in the different manifestations of religious discourse, of which the preaching or sermon was the most important for scholars of the colonial era (16th-18th centuries) who, on the other hand, gave little importance to the three political genres: deliberative, epideictic and judicial or forensic, although these had not disappeared as discursive practices. The great classical deliberative oratory had taken a backseat in New Spain but continued to develop in the consistories of the mayoralties and in public debates; the judicial genre continued to be exercised in lawsuits before the Inquisition and local judicial bodies and the epideictic genre was manifested in the lives of saints and praises of various kinds. This situation changed during the 19th century, particularly in the second half, when great parliamentary oratory, civic and patriotic speeches that flooded the republic and judicial oratory flourished because of the new political conditions brought about by the struggle for independence and the triumph of liberalism, in addition to other important genres such as history and journalism. The purpose of this essay is, first, to offer an outline of oratory practices and rhetorical teaching during the Colony, emphasizing the importance of sermons and the oblivion of other discursive expressions and, second, to show the emergence of political genres during the 19th century, which reached their greatest splendor in discursive practices and liberal education.

Aaron Bruenger (he/they) is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester where he teaches writing and communication courses. He is interested in rhetorical criticism and theory, multimodal literacy and composition, and relational pedagogy.Ellen C. Carillo (she/her) is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014), Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018), and The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021). Ellen is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks, handbooks, and collections.Esther M. Gabay (she/her) is a PhD student at The Ohio State University, focusing on writing, literacy, disability studies, and writing assessment. She has over a decade of experience teaching first-year writing in the two-year college, and was a collaborative member of the Faculty Initiative of Teaching Reading at Kingsborough Community College. Esther has published articles in TETYC and has chapters in the forthcoming edited collections What Is College-Level Writing (vol. 3) and College Teachers Teaching Reading: Practical Strategies for Supporting Postsecondary Readers.Catherine Gabor (she/her) is professor of rhetoric and acting associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Francisco. Her professional interests are digital authorship, the scholarship of administration, and ungrading. Her work appears in the Journal of Writing Program Administration, Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy, the Journal of Basic Writing, and several edited collections.Kara K. Larson (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Hillsborough Community College–SouthShore, Florida. She was a Conference on College Composition and Communication Scholars for the Dream Award recipient in 2021. A former middle school English language arts and reading teacher for ESL students, Kara has enjoyed taking learner-centered engagement and collaborative learning strategies into the college classroom.Bronson Lemer (he/him) is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester. He is the author of The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq (2011). He is a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow and lives in St. Paul.Jessica Nastal (she/they) is assistant professor of English at College of DuPage. With Mya Poe and Christie Toth, her edited collection Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education won the CWPA Best Book Award for 2022. Jessica serves on the editorial boards of Assessing Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Composition Studies.Katherine Daily O'Meara (she/her) is assistant professor of English and director of Writing across the Curriculum at St. Norbert College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Response to Writing, The WAC Journal, and multiple edited collections. Kat's current research focuses on accessible assessment and contract grading, student self-placement, equitable/antiracist pedagogies, WAC/WID, and writing program administration.Cheryl Hogue Smith (she/her) is a professor of English, WRAC coordinator, and liberal arts coordinator at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. She is a past chair of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) and a Fellow of the National Writing Project. Her work appears in TETYC, JBW, JAAL, English Journal, JTW, and in several edited collections.Jesse Stommel (he/him) is a faculty member in the Writing Program at University of Denver. He is also cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy and Digital Pedagogy Lab. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop (2023) and coauthor of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (2018).Molly E. Ubbesen (she/they) is assistant professor and director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester. She applies critical disability studies to writing studies to support accessible and effective teaching and learning. Her work has been published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and Composition Forum. Additionally, she is an editor for the forthcoming collection Disability, Access, and the Teaching of Writing.Megan K. Von Bergen (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Murray State University, where she teaches first-year and upper-division composition courses. She is interested in inclusive, student-centered assessment practices and the programmatic structures needed to support them. Her work has appeared in Composition Studies and enculturation. In her spare time, she likes running (really) long distances.Griffin Xander Zimmerman (they/he) recently graduated with a PhD in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English from University of Arizona. Griffin's work appears in the Journal of Writing Assessment and the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. An interdisciplinary disability scholar, Griffin focuses his work on pedagogical approaches to neurodiversity, teacher training, disability rhetorics, and relationality through communities of care.

Since its release in late 2022, ChatGPT and subsequent generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools have raised a wide variety of questions and concerns for the field of technical communication: How will these tools be incorporated into professional settings? How might we appropriately integrate these tools into our research and teaching? In this review, we examine research published in 2023–2024 addressing these questions ( N = 28). Overall, we find preliminary evidence that GAI tools can positively impact student writing and assessment; they also have the potential to assist with some aspects of academic and medical research and writing. However, there are concerns about their reliability and the ethical conundrums raised when they are used inappropriately or when their outputs cannot be distinguished from humans. More research is needed for evidence-based teaching and research strategies as well as policies guiding ethical use. We offer suggestions for new research avenues and methods.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational—a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

ABSTRACTAs immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users' experience at the University of Connecticut's OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google's VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab's promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates "top-down" imaginaries that contrast with "bottom-up" imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.KEYWORDS: Immersive technologyinnovation labsvirtual realityimmersionuser experienceemerging technologyfuture imaginariessociotechnical imaginaries Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrent LuciaBrent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His recent scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and Enculturation.Matthew A. VetterMatthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research, which asks questions related to technology, rhetoric, and writing, has been published widely in venues such as Social Media and Society, Rhetoric Review, Studies in Higher Education, and Computers and Composition. His co-authored book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, was published by Routledge in 2021.David A. SolbergDavid A. Solberg is a teaching assistant at the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his MA degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His master's thesis was entitled The Use of Parallelism in Poetry Writing for the Acquisition of English Grammar (available from ProQuest).

ABSTRACTThis study examines technological research in higher education as a social justice issue. Focusing on technologies developed for war, surveillance, and policing at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), we compare institutional and activist discourses about these projects, uncovering significant differences in accommodation strategies and values-based arguments. We conclude that locally situated controversies such as this one might value not only for social justice research, but also in providing pedagogical and theoretical scaffolding toward real local change.KEYWORDS: Social justice / ethicsscience communication / environmental communicationdigital technologies / emerging technologiestextual analysis / linguistic analysis AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Alex Helberg and Laxman Singanamala, who each provided helpful feedback on drafts of this work. They are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to editors Rebecca Walton and Tracy Bridgeford for their useful comments and suggestions. In addition, they wish to thank their former colleagues and comrades at Carnegie Mellon University, who inspired many aspects of this project: particularly the members of CMU Against ICE who authored the Dis-Orientation Guide. Finally, they give special thanks to Alaina Foust and Gunjan, Manish, Siddhant, and Daksh Bhardwaj for their advice and support.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsCalvin PollakCalvin Pollak is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Technical Communication & Rhetoric at Utah State University, where he teaches courses on research methods and professional editing. His scholarly interests include institutional rhetoric, language accessibility, and social justice. He is also co-founder, co-producer, and co-host of re:verb, a podcast about language in action.Sanvi BhardwajSanvi Bhardwaj is a junior at Cornell University studying Health Care Policy and Inequality Studies. Her scholarly interests include social justice, health disparities among marginalized groups, and community-based healthcare interventions. She is also involved in local activism as a member of Cornell Progressives.

ABSTRACTWe asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to they.KEYWORDS: Editingsocial justice / ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. We explained to editors that, in each sentence, the capitalized pronoun referred to the capitalized noun phrase.2. When we refer to a "comprehensive style guide," we mean a manual that provides standards for writing, editing, and publishing texts. A comprehensive style guide may be written by a publisher or discourse community but adopted widely. For example, University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style is used by other publishers and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is used in disciplines outside of psychology.Companies may create their own style guides for internal use. Such guides may or may not be as detailed or complete as comprehensive style guides and may, in fact, be based on or direct users to a comprehensive style guide for any gaps in content. For example, ACES: The Society for Editing "Style Guide and Proofreading Checklist" (Filippini, Citation2021) is for ACES communications and based on the AP Stylebook.Some editors in this study referred to style sheets. A copyeditor creates and uses a style sheet to note a running list of grammar and usage that are specific to a manuscript and which may be different from house style or a comprehensive style guide (CMOS, Section 2.55).Despite attempting to define these terms, we recognize there are overlaps among the categories and across fields. For example, the Microsoft Writing Style Guide began as an in-house style guide and is now used by other software companies. Further, there exist other contexts of the terms "style guide" and "style sheet," such as brand style guides, programming style guides, and web design style sheets.3. Of the remaining two editors, one said that they would revise the sentence to avoid using singular they, and the other said that they would use the name Pat again instead of a pronoun.4. Only three editors (4%) said they would edit the sentence.5. The two remaining editors differed in their responses. One said that they would avoid using singular they by revising the sentence; the other said that they would change the pronoun to her.6. Ten editors said that they would edit this sentence.7. As of August 16, 2022, AP Stylebook Online advice under "accent marks" reads: "Use accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them: An officer spotted him and asked a question: "Cómo estás?" How are you? Otherwise, do not use these marks in English-language stories. Note: Many AP customers' computer systems ingest via the ANPA standard and will not receive diacritical marks published by the AP."Additional informationNotes on contributorsJo MackiewiczJo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. She studies the communication of pedagogical and workplace interactions. Her book, Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in 2022.Shaya KrautShaya Kraut is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University, where she teaches first-year writing. She has also worked as an ESL teacher, a writing center tutor, and a teacher/tutor for adult basic education. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and critical literacy.Allison DurazziAllison Durazzi is a communication professional with experience in industry settings including law, the arts, and freelance editing. She is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where she researches and teaches technical editing and teaches business, technical, and speech communication courses.

Style is a perennial concern within rhetorical studies. As one of Aristotle’s five canons, style has inspired a great deal of rhetorical theory over the past two millennia and counting. Hence, it would be reasonable to presume that there is not much, if anything, else original to contribute to the well-trodden domain of the stylistic. However, Taylor Black’s Style: A Queer Cosmology challenges this assumption by offering a fresh take on its titular concept. The book’s grounding in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies allows its author to speak to multiple audiences at once, including those invested in queer theory, race and ethnicity, popular culture, new materialism, and literary criticism. To this inventory, I would add anyone interested in the art of rhetoric, particularly those committed to incorporating new, diverse perspectives into the field’s existing analytical tool chest. Tonally whimsical but nonetheless boldly argued, Style dramatically reframes a timeworn concept in the rhetorical lexicon that many of us have likely—and mistakenly—come to take for granted.Readers of this journal will be immediately seduced by Black’s provocative rethinking of style as elemental. Here, the term “elemental” directs attention toward style as “the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun” (5). As Black infers throughout the book’s introduction, style is the expression of difference available to all human and nonhuman beings. More than aesthetic ornamentation, or the mere ability to make oneself appear outwardly beautiful, style is a mysterious yet universal condition of possibility underlying the cultivation of a personality. Style names the intertwined processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery that produce individuation as its outcome. And though everyone “has” a style, Black asserts, “not everyone is a stylist” (15). Black posits the figure of the stylist to denote a minoritarian subject who transmutes the experience of oppression into a purposeful performance of self. Upon realizing their exclusion from a majoritarian social order organized by deeply embedded attachments to a hierarchy of difference that discriminates on bases of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other intersecting codes of identification, stylists turn their failure to conform into an opportunity for opening possibilities for alternative futures.In other words, from the limitations that accompany experiences of structural oppression, style authorizes potential. Referencing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Black suggests stylists tend to dwell in cosmology, a form of storytelling or narrative fabulation about the universe’s origins and one’s place in its ongoing unfolding. “Stylists,” Black poetically avers, are “naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be” (20). Black highlights style’s fundamental elementality as emerging from cosmic renderings of marginalized experience and the pursuit of a future otherwise. To further illustrate this elemental notion of the stylistic, Black assembles an eclectic corpus of texts by those he calls “subterranean American stylists” (5), namely Quentin Crisp, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, whose lives and work he examines over seven chapters divided into three main parts. Each chapter supplies unique insights on the elementals of style, as well as its subject matter, thus allowing Black to support the thesis constructed in the introduction without ever seeming overly redundant.The first part of Style, “The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style,” consists of a preface and two chapters oriented around the specific ways stylizations of queer selfhood may function as a survival strategy and, relatedly, a means for exploring elemental mysteries of personality and being. In the initial chapter, Black analyzes texts authored by openly gay memoirist and cultural commentor Quentin Crisp, who became famous for his humorous and often brash approach to publicly discussing social issues during the last half of the twentieth century. In Crisp’s work, Black locates the inextricable relationship between style and repetition. As someone perceived by the public as an “effeminate homosexual” living during an era prior to many of the legal protections hard won by the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, Crisp deployed style ritualistically as a “path to self-preservation” (35). Crisp did so by consistently rejecting status quo standards of masculinity and defiantly repeating a style of self-presentation that blurred lines of intelligibility between available gender categories. “What Crisp has to offer us,” Black contends, is an embodied, temporal theory of style; that is, a “way of transforming being in time into an endless process of becoming: a transvaluation of life into a self-sustaining set of habits that attempt to align one’s body and spirit with the sometimes unrecognizable and not immediately knowable elements of the world” (38). From a close reading of texts like Crisp’s autobiography, readers can grasp the inherent riskiness of stylistic repetition in a social environment that constantly threatens difference with violence. Importantly, Crisp shows how, by doubling down on one’s own commitment to style as a habitualized mode of self-realization, consistent stylistic repetition builds and sustains a “queer utopia” premised in the infectious celebration, rather than the eradication, of stylized difference (40).As the second chapter begins, Black acquaints readers with Style’s topical promiscuity, a certainly queer stylistic choice that runs throughout the book. Black examines writings and other artistic productions by Flannery O’Connor, a twentieth-century writer from Georgia who acquired notoriety for short stories that stylized the U.S. South as a region of unbridled grotesquerie, and who—like Crisp—gained a queer sensibility by finding herself “in the wrong place at the wrong time” (62). Black charts how O’Connor, always well aware that her reading public was composed mostly of cosmopolitan northern audiences that imagined themselves as superior to the freakish southern characters she depicted, used style rhetorically to expose ironic similarities between the elitist gaze of northern readers and the myopic visions of those featured in her fiction. O’Connor’s application of style to draw out the fact that “everyone in the world is a freak” is an insight only the cleverest stylist could both ascertain and deploy artistically as social critique (90). For Black, this facet of O’Connor’s work is evidence of style’s elemental capacity to reveal foundational dynamics that shape the experience of existence (90).The next part of Style, “The Arrow of Time: Style and the Problems of Originality and History,” contains another preface and a pair of chapters centered around style’s temporality and its relationship to cosmology. In the third chapter, Black extends his focus on American literature by closely reading the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a stylist known for authoring works that explore connections between the macabre and the eschatological. Focusing on not only Poe’s signature style across his oeuvre but also the “whole network or infrastructure of the greater assemblage that we know now as ‘Poe,’” Black credits Poe’s enduring relevance as a figure in literary history to his ingenuity as a stylist, one that effectively alchemized his mysterious personality with that of the off-kilter content of his work to fabricate a legacy (98). Black challenges the doctrines of New Criticism, as well as postmodern declarations of “the death of the author,” by insisting that the meaning of Poe’s work and its ability to continually attract new generations of audiences depends on the imbrication of the author’s biography and the polysemy of the text itself (121). Like O’Connor, Poe creates highly stylized encounters between text and reader that permit the stylist to posthumously exert a presence on the world despite their body’s disappearance from it. And therein one can conceive of style’s indefinite effectivity as evidence of a lasting temporal futurity that is cosmic in the way it routes, shapes, and determines the direction of existence.Black nuances this perspective in the fourth chapter, which explores the folksongs of Bob Dylan. Black suggests that Dylan’s music reaches not toward a utopian future but “backward, into the graveyard of the national imagination” (128). Framing Dylan’s body as a vessel for the “ghosts” conjured by folk music, Black provides a description of the artist’s style as dynamically entangled with memories of the past, which he uses to convey his creativity and public-facing persona (132). As Dylan repetitively consults the past, he undergoes embodied, quasi-ritualistic processes of conversion that are “neither flat nor unidirectional (like the arrow of time); they are circular, recursive and prophetic” (143). Consequently, Dylan taps into the cosmological power of style, specifically its capability for transforming the direction of an in-progress history using the materials of seemingly bygone times.The last part of Style, “The Critic as Stylist: Toward a Theory of Attunement,” comprises a final preface and the book’s last three main chapters, all of which advocate for an understanding of style as an attunement to one’s most authentic version of self as it exists in relation to a broader, ever-changing universe of stylized beings. In the fifth chapter, Black insists on a notion of critical reading as an attunement to the sensate musicality of a textual artifact. “Criticism, in this sense, should seek to re-create the sensation of reading-feeling,” Black argues (162, emphasis original). Black points to Toni Morrison’s scholarship, specifically the author’s 2017 essay “Romancing Slavery,” as an exemplary study in how to self-consciously transform the act of critique into a stylistic endeavor, specifically one that is attuned to the vibratory resonance of the past’s impression on the present. Similarly, in Beloved, Morrison achieves a “sound” in the novel that is “sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious” and, in effect, infuses “the text with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can” (175).Black carries his focus on style as an orientation toward criticism into the sixth chapter. He contends that reading and interpretation are active “practices of style” or ways of “attuning our instincts with knowledge” (179). In an impressive survey of numerous schools of thought, including pragmatism, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology, Black makes a case for the humanistic critic as fundamentally a stylist concerned with thinking about and expressing “things that are in their very nature unmeasurable” (179). While some scholars of humanities working in contemporary academic institutions may feel pressures to adopt methodologies of the social or hard sciences to prove their field’s validity and/or relevance, Black mounts a defense of close textual criticism as a method that is not replicable precisely because it entails critics who employ style to better understand their places in the universe while also attuning to cosmic questions and concerns that resist capture by positivist logics and protocols of measurement.In the seventh chapter, Black finalizes this idea by turning toward academic disciplines as sites of latent stylistic creativity. Throughout, Black laments how modern disciplinary contexts are delimited and contained by rigid conventions of professionalization, such as departmental silos in universities and conference presentations at scholarly meetings. A collective embrace of style, Black promises, is the surest path for deterritorializing established fields and nurturing their revitalization as they become something new in the future.Rather than a proper conclusion, Black ends Style with a short but substantive coda. In it, Black compares style to a religious practice: “[style] is a desire to know the universe and the mysteries of the universe . . . a way of searching out mystery and forging a path against the arrow of time” (249). “Style is,” Black continues, “like God, never totally achievable but always somehow still available” (249). With this statement, Black once again makes clear his understanding of style as a way of life through which the humanist can pursue big picture questions with no clear or easy answers. Style is a resource for becoming more like oneself and, in the process, broaching topics that elementally bind everyone together as a collective body in a shared universe.While there is much to appreciate about Style, the book is not without shortcomings. Two come to mind immediately. First, on multiple occasions, Black fails to fully acknowledge the complex existing power dynamics and structures of oppression that restrict and even make impossible certain enactments of style, particularly for people belonging to marginalized communities. For instance, Black spends a great deal of time studying Quentin Crisp as a stylist whose life work facilitated extraordinary examples of queer worldmaking. But Black does not mention Crisp’s late-in-life confession that he perhaps identified more as a trans woman than as a queer man. Crisp admitted that the lack of a widespread vocabulary for describing trans phenomena during his lifetime likely prevented him from ever seeing himself in terms of any other gender identity than the one assigned to him at birth. How would Black’s book have changed if the author had contextualized Crisp as a trans stylist whose style was temporally ahead of the available terminology for describing it? I doubt that posing such a question would have diminished Black’s analysis but would have provided only more nuance for complexifying some of its inferences and implications.Second, as a rhetorician, I do wish Black had acknowledged and taken seriously at least some of the many scholarly treatments of style that have emanated specifically from the field of rhetorical studies. Unfortunately, Black dedicates no space in Style to ancient or contemporary rhetoricians who have written at length on style’s innately rhetorical dimensions. So, we will never know how a rhetorical viewpoint could have enriched Black’s insights. Fortunately, this rather large omission leaves room for future rhetoricians to fill the gaps created by the release of the book.Despite the book’s weaknesses, rhetoricians can glean from Style a version of rhetorical analysis that never quite names itself as such, but nevertheless still inspires inquiries that are indelibly rhetorical. Style is a reminder of our tradition’s possession of theoretical tools that open existential inquiries about what it means to be a human living and seeking meaning in a world that often feels all too precarious. As I finished reading Black’s book for the second time, I began to understand it as a guide for how to alchemize one’s personality and creativity in the exertion of a stylized rhetorical agency ethically collaborated toward the building of a common future. Indeed, Style is a profound performance of intellectual labor that forgoes appeals to canonicality and, in doing so, opens new scholarly routes from which rhetoricians can draw inspiration for reimagining how they approach their own work. Personally, I was inspired to return to the field’s seemingly basic analytical touchstones and begin to reimagine how I convey their meaning in my scholarship and teaching. I believe other rhetoricians will come away from Style with similar impressions, and for this reason, I highly recommend it.

This study explores how confidence levels in user prompts affect AI-generated resume text. Using six varied prompts for AI models ChatGPT-3.5, Gemini, and Perplexity, it examines how AI interprets and responds to different confidence levels. The findings reveal significant differences in AI-generated resumes based on prompt confidence, highlighting the need to adapt resume pedagogy for the AI age. Emphasizing the importance of teaching genre conventions and developing critical AI literacies, the study offers practical recommendations for integrating AI tools into resume writing instruction to better prepare students for an increasingly digital world.

Introduction: Graduates with master's degrees in Translation and Interpreting (MTI) are an important workforce in technical communication. To meet this need, we examined the pedagogy of trans-writing to better integrate technical communication (TC) into translation programs. This teaching case from two Chinese universities discusses the curriculum design, its implementation, and teaching effectiveness. Situating the case: While an increasing number of universities in China are interested in embedding TC courses into their translation programs, no research-backed effective solution has been identified. About the case: To boost the employability of MTI students, we designed the courses as “user-centered trans-writing with global content,” which features trans-writing as a strategy for global content creation, user research as the core learning task, and team projects as the primary form of engagement. Methods: We used a mixed method of interviews and surveys to investigate the course effectiveness, each targeting different groups of stakeholders. Results: We synthesized a competence framework for trans-writers based on interviews, which showed that graduates (who work as trans-writers) and their employers prioritized language/culture, user-centered mindset, and cooperation as core competencies. A survey focusing on other graduates who took our courses but did not become trans-writers also revealed positive learning outcomes, including expanded professional visions and enhanced skills in user awareness, project management, collaboration, and communication. Conclusion: The trans-writing approach is effective in equipping MTI students with the necessary competencies for global technical communication.

Introduction: Many technical and professional communication (TPC) students, practitioners, and instructors are not trained translators or localizers. However, translation and localization competencies are important in today's interconnected world and should be part of international TPC instruction. To meet this need, TPC instruction may incorporate exposure to translation issues into coursework and explore the growing use of technologies in the translation process. About the case: Recognizing the need to incorporate translation and localization (T&L) into a graduate seminar on “Global Technical Communication” (GTC), the course's instructor and students co-constructed a unique translation assignment that embraced the limitations created by most instructors’ and students’ lack of exposure to or experience with the translation process. Situating the case: TPC education has been criticized for focusing increasingly on TPC and writing classrooms as the object of study rather than sites where students eventually work and apply their knowledge. While study abroad programs or globally connected learning communities are ideal for teaching “real-world” T&L skills, substantial material limitations can impede their widespread adoption. Methods/approach: This experience report was co-authored by the instructor and TPC students from the 2020 and 2022 iterations of the GTC graduate seminar. We describe the translation assignment, its development, and the groups’ final submissions and reflections. Results/discussion: Students’ group and instructor reflections suggest the assignment's potential to facilitate closer engagement with real-world global TPC processes, deeper consideration of language and culture's relationship in TPC, and developing appropriate levels of confidence in working on similar projects as TPC researchers or practitioners. Conclusions: Our experience report provides proof of concept for how we might begin introducing T&L practices to TPC students in low-stakes but meaningful assignments.

This study reports an investigative study with 55 English-major participants in a Chinese university about using simulation in business English correspondence teaching. The study found that participants had strong needs in practical skills development and learning business English correspondence writing. The simulation approach was perceived to be effective and had positive learning outcomes in business communication skills development, motivation, confidence and vocabulary growth, business and language knowledge improvement, and more understanding about the business practice. The constraint factors in simulation included lack of business knowledge and vocabulary, ineffective group cooperation, and lack of understanding about the real-world business background.

Through the guidance of social presence theory, this study sought to understand how instructors’ affirming messages and social presence behaviors affect students’ writing apprehension in online business communication courses. The data were consistent with two models, both of which indicate that instructor affirming messages indirectly affect students’ writing apprehension in the business communication classroom. Both models also indicate that students’ burnout mediates that indirect effect. The results show how important it is for instructors to take the time to leave affirming message feedback when teaching business communication online.

Innovative classroom-tested approaches to cross-cultural communication—diversity, equity, and inclusion—and personal and professional development are featured. Readers can explore 10 teaching creations debuted at the 2023 My Favorite Assignment sessions at the Association for Business Communication Annual International Conference held in Denver, Colorado, USA.

This article presents a conceptual framework for integrating AI-enabled business communication in higher education. Drawing on established theories from business communication and educational technology, the framework provides comprehensive guidance for designing engaging learning experiences. It emphasizes the significance of social presence, cognitive load management, and constructivist learning principles. The framework is exemplified through various tasks, including role-playing with AI chatbots, analyzing nonverbal cues, communication simulations, interactive presentation assessments, and collaborative AI-supported projects. Practical considerations for implementation, including technological infrastructure, faculty training, ethics, curriculum integration, and assessment strategies, are discussed. Future directions and implications for business communication education are also explored.

In this experience report, we share our strategies for scaffolding and supporting instruction in empathy in a first-year Engineering Design studio course. Empathy is a key component of UX and design, but as Tham argued, it is a difficult skill that requires practice and critical application. Community engagement scholars have long argued that community-engaged projects help foster that empathy. Our teaching case will show how emphasizing content knowledge about user groups and creating an empathetic classroom environment impacts student designers' ability to empathize in the design process.

Design systems provide a useful approach for TPC instructors looking to teach students to design and build accessible digital products. This experience report presents a teaching unit on using design systems to introduce accessibility to students. Using the Bootstrap design system, accessibility is threaded throughout the design process and provides a grounded approach for integrating accessible design into the UX classroom. Readers will come away with an outline of the teaching unit, accompanying materials for teaching that unit, and student examples user-tested for accessibility. The author concludes on a reflection on teaching the unit and offers advice for readers looking to implement a similar unit in their own courses.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

This article reports on a study about design thinking pedagogy in technical communication courses taken by engineering students. The study suggests that design thinking pedagogy can foster engineering students' empathy for users, particularly their ability to recognize the feelings, knowledge, and perspectives of others. However, its findings reinforce the difficulty faced when encouraging students' societal-level empathy and the limitations of empathy. While engineering students may struggle to transfer user empathy to courses in their major, this study found that engineering students believe design thinking has relevance to their future careers. This article offers teaching strategies and project ideas for technical and professional communication instructors to facilitate students' ability to transfer user empathy to their disciplines.

This teaching case applies design thinking to a large-scale client project in a technical and professional communication (TPC) class. Using the 5-step design thinking process ("empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test") over 8 weeks, the students in an upper-division TPC course developed social media content and strategy for a statewide public relations campaign. The two authors, the instructing faculty and a senior student who served as project manager, illuminate how iterative design thinking, as a UX pedagogical practice, can help students set boundaries around ill-defined problems; mirror workplace collaboration to contribute to professional development; and build a toolkit for exercising agency and creativity as researchers, writers, and designers.

This article discusses a newly created method of UX journey mapping---User Experience as Racial Storytelling (UXRS)---designed to centralize Black user narratives in design thinking, and the teaching implications as a Black woman non-tenure track (NTT) online technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor. Revisiting an assigned group activity in a synchronous online technical writing course for engineers at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), this essay will share pedagogical approaches of user experience as TPC pedagogy used to scaffold this method of racial storytelling as an anti-racist practice to adapt a social justice framework. This essay suggests UXRS can aid engineering students' perspective of inclusive design.

This experience report describes a fully online graduate course on user-centered design that was designed to scaffold self-regulated learning and then redesigned to follow Anaissie et al.'s 2021 iteration of the Liberatory Design process. The pivot to Liberatory Design helped strengthen the self-regulated learning scaffolding, as each phase of the Liberatory Design process includes the processes of noticing, reflecting, and seeing the system. This article describes the prompts incorporated into major assignments, student perceptions, lessons learned, and the ways that Liberatory Design and self-regulated learning prompting can be used throughout the user-centered design process to improve the work of designers.

In the introduction, we describe the exigence for the special issue and discuss how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors teach user experience (UX) in ways that are unique, divergent, and innovative. Given the interdisciplinary nature of UX, sharing teaching stories as we do in this special issue demonstrates the multivocality of UX pedagogy and highlights the unique perspectives TPC instructors have to offer.

This paper examines ChatGPT's use of evaluative language and engagement strategies while addressing information-seeking queries. It assesses the chatbot's role as a virtual teaching assistant (VTA) across various educational settings. By employing Appraisal theory, the analysis contrasts responses generated by ChatGPT and those added by humans, focusing on the interactants’ attitude, deployment of interpersonal metaphors and evaluations of entities, revealing their views on Australian cultural practice. Two datasets were analysed: the first sample (15,909 words) was retrieved from the subreddit r/AskAnAustralian and the second (10,696 words) was obtained by prompting ChatGPT with the same questions. The findings show that, while human experts mainly opt for subjective explicit formulations to express personal viewpoints, the chatbot's preference goes out to incongruent ‘it is’-constructions to share pre-programmed perspectives, which may reflect ideological bias. Even though ChatGPT displays promising socio-communicative capabilities (SCs), its lack of contextual awareness, required to function cross-culturally as a VTA, may lead to considerable ethical issues. The study's novel contribution lies in the in-depth investigation of how the chatbot's SCs and lexicogrammatical selections may impact its role as a VTA, highlighting the need to develop students’ critical digital literacy skills while using AI learning tools.

This Instructional Note is for two-year college instructors who have attended conference presentations and read articles about the benefits of ungrading and want to know more about the pragmatics of teaching and how the shift to alternative assessment will affect their work.

In this special issue introduction about alternative grading practices, we argue that stories from two-year colleges and other underrepresented institutions matter. As our title suggests, this special issue is an attempt to recognize the unrecognized and disrupt the dominant alternative assessment narrative. To meet the needs of all students, especially those whose journeys include two-year colleges, the field must find ways to elevate faculty voices from community colleges, technical colleges, and vocational colleges in conversations about pedagogical innovations, including grading.

When we think of the civil rights movement, imagery of the mass meeting almost immediately comes to mind. We imagine the immense crowds at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, where more than a quarter million people assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Reflecting on the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., we might also think of the religious and liturgical quality that marked these mass meetings. Yet, despite their influence and importance, the use of religious genres at civil rights mass meetings remains an often-overlooked aspect of the movement. Elizabeth Ellis Miller's Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting provides a rhetorical history of the mass meeting by examining how these meetings drew upon ritual liturgies to facilitate collective political action. Miller's primary argument throughout the book is that the mass meeting drew upon the genres of prayer, song, and testimony to provide attendees rhetorical scaffolding for political participation. The book shifts attention from the speakers and speeches of the mass meeting, about which there exists a wealth of scholarship, to the constituent members of the mass meeting themselves: ordinary Black Americans. The book offers an important theoretical contribution by moving scholarly attention beyond the bounds of normative deliberation toward the rhetorical role of religious practices. As a result, the book will not only interest those who study public and religious rhetoric but also those interested in affect and deliberation.In the first of six chapters, Miller lays out the rhetorical concept of “liturgy of change” and grounds it in genre theory to facilitate her goal of examining how the mass meeting transformed “audience members in seats to activists” (106). The next three chapters include analyses of three genres that typified the mass meeting: song, prayer, and testimony. Miller draws on archival research to reconstruct the mass meeting, including notes and schedules, first-person accounts, and interviews. The chapter progression of the book is designed to reflect the order in which liturgies would be performed in the Black church. The fifth chapter explores the rhetorical significance of the liturgies by examining the frequent presence of counter protestors at mass meetings. This complication of the rhetorical situation highlights the mass meeting as a “watched, visible space,” specifically how activists responded with a radical pacifism made possible through liturgical enactment (130). The concluding chapter turns to the contemporary use and limits of liturgy as activism.Chapter two, “Sounding Civic Identity: Freedom Song Invention at the Mass Meeting,” attends to activist song as an example of genre invention and, at the same time, the rhetorical potential of sound “as a constitutive resource” (50). Freedom songs required the leader to engage in “selection, adaption, and performance” (50). Miller explains how these songs articulated a collective identity often in the very spaces where this identity was denied (50). Thus, songs like “Woke Up this Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom” and “This Little Light of Mine” demonstrate the constitutive potential of sound for configuring collective identities and establishing an activist ethos of radical pacifism. In chapter three, Miller turns to “activist prayer,” arguing that it contained a “paradox of peace and the unruly” (79). Miller argues that, while prayer remains an overlooked genre of the movement due to it being “not obviously activist” (77), collective prayer had an important rhetorical function that allowed activists to simultaneously “display peace” and engage in protest in public and segregated spaces (77). Here, Miller examines both directed and pedagogic prayers, with the former defined as prayer led by a speaker and the latter as the collective teaching of activist prayers. Thus, through “genre, gesture, and theology” (79), participants collectively “crafted [a] reverent resistant identity and posture” and, in doing so, “constituted themselves as a peaceful group insistent on change” (78). Drawing on Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt's notion of “unruly genres,” Miller defines prayer as “unruly” because it “violated racialized norms regarding what spaces Black bodies should inhabit” and “unsettled religious norms for where prayer should occur” (79).The fourth chapter explores the use of testimony at the mass meeting. Drawing on the scholarship of Geneva Smitherman, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Rhea Estelle Lathan, Miller suggests that testimony provided participants a flexible genre with which to “testify” to their lived experience of racism and to “take the first steps into collective participation and rhetorical performance” (101). The overarching claim of the book, that the mass meeting enabled rhetorical participation and moved attendees toward democratic ends, is most clearly illustrated in this chapter. Miller explains how the “fuzzy” liturgical genre of testimony was “both sacred and free-form,” which allowed participants to articulate their experiences, connecting their individual stories to a collective account of racial justice (102). The fifth chapter contextualizes how the three genres were situated within the broader landscape of radical pacifism. Examining the “external engagement dimension” of the civil rights mass meeting, Miller argues that “faithful genres” were used as rhetorical strategies to respond at mass meetings to the disruptive presence of counter protestors. The genres from the previous three chapters—prayer, song, and testimony—were used to respond kairotically before audiences that included segregationists and law enforcement (146).The final chapter, “Faith, Racial Justice, and Rhetorical Activism in the Twenty-First Century,” turns to the contemporary “limits of liturgy” for activism. Miller distinguishes between Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement, paying specific attention to three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement. Miller argues that comparing the two movements serves to “deepen our appreciation of the intellectual and sociopolitical vision of BLM, while also pointing toward the limits of liturgy as an animating concept in the movement for Black freedom” (151). The three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement are as follows. First, the mass meeting, while ostensibly egalitarian, was still beholden to a “gendered vision of freedom and citizenship” and “circumscribed the participation of women along with queer young activists” (151). Second, leaders of the era acted in ways that were antithetical to the Christian morals and values of the movement, particularly when it came to sexual ethics. Third, the movement was plagued by a frequent misalignment of the movement's leaders’ vision and the issues affecting ordinary Black people. Miller notes how BLM, founded by three queer Black women, has responded to these issues in its adoption of a restorative justice framework and attention to a range of social justice issues, including exploitative capitalism and criminal justice reform (156). In the final few pages of the book, Miller outlines recent examples of liturgy as activism to challenge the “decline narrative” of religious activism in rhetorical studies. Specific examples here include Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, a book that borrows from Black church liturgies and orders of service for its structure, as well as President Barack Obama's eulogy following the mass shooting at Emmanuel Baptist Church, which concluded with the hymn “Amazing Grace.”This concluding chapter seems at odds with the argument that Miller makes in the rest of the book. While the book explores liturgy as collective action through ordinary Black participants, the concluding chapter turns to organizational critique, comparing the leadership and ethos of BLM with that of the civil rights movement. This disjunction between the rhetorical affordances of collective action and a concluding chapter that focuses instead on leaders and organizational structure detracts from Miller's primary argument as I understood it: that the rhetorical power of a radical pacifism was made actionable through the collective enactment of “liturgies of change.” The concluding chapter not only seems inconsistent with the book's argument but potentially overlooks interesting theoretical questions and tensions, such as the relationship between genre and affect within the mass meeting and the broad implications of liturgy and radical pacifism for rhetorical theory. And while Miller attempts to confront the “decline narrative” of religious activism, her examples largely focus on speakers and leaders rather than collective action. Earlier in the book, Miller illustrates how liturgy has unique rhetorical capacities—to reconcile contradictions, to embody radical pacifism in the face of hostility, and to do constitutive work in forming collective identities. Exploring how such genres and practices could be adapted for the present might not only shed light on liturgy's continued rhetorical potential for activism but also open lines of inquiry consistent with the book's premise.The primary contribution of Liturgy of Change is its attention to religious genres as activist rhetorical strategies. Miller calls attention to the mass meeting as a constitutive event, one that was embodied and relied on the affective potential of these genres and their attendant practices: gesture, movement, song, prayer, and testimony. By providing participants with genres of rhetorical participation familiar to the Black church, the mass meeting moved those assembled to political action. Miller's attention to the rhetoricity of religious liturgies and the mass meeting as a constitutive space joins a growing body of scholarship that examines nondiscursive rhetorics that has long been overlooked in favor of the ostensibly rational and explicitly discursive. From a methodological perspective, Miller's book is useful in demonstrating, through its archival research and reconstruction of events, how this kind of scholarship might be done. Liturgy of Change thus succeeds in offering new theoretical trajectories and objects for rhetorical inquiry while providing a methodological approach for studying them. And, as the book encourages us to consider, increased attention to the relationship between religious rhetorics and social movements might indicate new paths for rhetorical engagement, working toward a more just future through genres and practices that show “moral vision, creativity, perseverance, and urgency” (162).

We report our qualitative study on two graduate student instructors’ experiences teaching alongside an experienced professor in an experimental super-sized first-year writing class. Using the framework of wobble (Fecho et al), we explore how mentors can help novice teachers navigate moments of destabilization and uncertainty.