Previous scholarship in literacy and composition has noted the importance and function of ancestors in the literacy and rhetorical practices of descendants. However, such research has not explored how ancestorship functions for people at the marginalized intersection of racialized otherness and queer sexualities and genders. This article offers one response to this gap by reporting on the role of literacy in the life stories of sixty Black queer people residing in various regions across the United States who named historical erasure as a particularly detrimental form of oppression enacted by, though subverted through, literacy. An analysis of participants' uses of literacy to navigate historical erasure reveals that as participants encounter historical erasure, they disrupt its negative impact through four patterns of ancestorship: (1) literacy is used to create, discover, and affirm relationships to ancestors; (2) ancestors model the multiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis; (3) descendants’ identity formation/affirmation is affected by an ancestors’ writing and lives; and (4) descendants receive cross-generational mandates to become ancestors through literacy. Further, while African American literacies and LGBTQ literacies have each emerged as potent areas of scholarship in literacy and composition studies, the absence of a sustained and substantive discussion at the intersection of both areas contributes to a larger critical vacuum in rhetoric and composition in which we have overlooked the literacy and composition practices shaped at the intersection of race and queerness. This article begins to address this oversight through an in-depth exploration of a specific literacy and rhetorical practice among Black LGBTQ people.

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by “The Leisure and Cultural Service Department,” the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in “an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China” (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum’s multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland’s theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the “affective dimension of politics.”

Abstract This essay analyzes three pedagogical manuals on publicity design published by the National Committee of Patriotic Societies (NCPS) during the First World War. The NCPS represented dozens of nationalistic organizations dedicated to the mission of preparedness. This essay argues that in its publicity guidebooks, the NCPS suggested that propaganda designed with a Republican aesthetic could wed the working class to the war effort. Such advice was predicated on the psychological notion that affective experiences conditioned audiences for further persuasive appeals. Examination of these manuals thus highlights the importance of psychological theories of affect to the aesthetics of propaganda.

Paradigms of writing instruction and of writing assessment are interconnected, and they are, or should be, affected by the sociocultural context in which they are embedded. In the case of writing assessment, the predominant context is the assessment of the writing proficiency of second- or third-language writers of English. Since the Second World War, English has taken a hold as the language of business and politics, and much of that interaction occurs between and among multiple groups who share only English as a common language. English is also dominantly the language of intellectual exchange, and English language tests are a critical component of decision-making about the movement of people from less-developed countries to countries where they can gain greater educational opportunity. English tests have great value. Everywhere in the world, English proficiency is one of the essential keys to unlock the door of educational opportunity and all that promises for an individual’s future. The assessment of writing is, then, socially and politically significant not only within a country’s internal struggles for opportunity for all through quality education, but also between nations.

Senior U.S. business executives reported that in making recent promotion decisions, they had placed a great deal of weight on candidates’ interpersonal skills, less weight on oral communication skills, and even less weight on writing skills. Older business managers ranked communication skills as more important than did the younger managers. If this age-related difference is a maturation effect, younger managers may place more emphasis on communication as they mature. If the age-related difference is a cohort effect, the relative importance of communication skills for advancement may shift as Generation X executives replace boomer executives in top-level positions at U.S. corporations.

Networks have a remarkable ability to bring people together in communities, both online and offline, but such community building is not the only possible result of network use. This article examines the case of a tagging network on Twitter, the online social networking service characterized by short messages. Although Twitter has many social features that foster interaction between users, the use of hashtags to signal the topic of a message exists outside of the site’s primary social structures, creating a unique writing environment. This article analyzes a hashtagged exchange surrounding the 2009 health care debate in the United States, examining the social features of this exchange and how participants used it to communicate about that debate. While traditional social features were certainly present within the exchange, they were not prominent or common; rather, users engaged the network properties of this exchange to make connections with other networks, drawing on a form of network power called switching. The analysis focuses on how the Twitter network’s structural features affect communication between users.

Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.

Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagog-ical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

Over the last 2 decades, the nations that once comprised the Soviet Union have begun to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. As a result, today's technical and professional communicators could find themselves interacting with co-workers, colleagues, and clients in these nations. Being successful in such contexts, however, requires an understanding of the cultural, historic, educational, and economic factors that have affected and continue to shape technical and professional communication practices in these countries. This article provides an overview of the literature that has been published on technical and professional communication practices in the former USSR as well as reviews educational factors that have contributed to such practices. Through such an examination, the article provides readers with a foundation they can use to engage in future research relating to technical and professional communication practices in post-Soviet states.

After reviewing the past ten years of TETYC’s “What Works for Me,” I claim these pieces offer writing instructors much more than mere teaching tips; rather, they evidence a genre in a fraught relationship to academic discourse, a genre that asks readers to consider how the ways we write the classroom affect composition as a field, our teacherly selves, and the students in our classrooms.

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

ABSTRACTJoining the New Rhetoric project's conversation about argumentation as justice, this article aims to add an expanded version of the psychological to the just resources of argumentation. After examining how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric justifies attention to—yet ultimately swerves from—contingencies of psycho-physical sensation, I turn to Burke's highly elaborated concept of identification, which adds to the New Rhetoric project by articulating the relations of physiological sensation, attitude and emotion, and persuasion. Linking ethics and form, identification provides a means by which one may grow increasingly aware of the sensation-driven defensiveness that can undermine dialogic exchange. After making this case that Burke's rhetoric can help develop what is not in the New Rhetoric project but should be—the resource of constitutive, affective identification—I end with what should be in Burke but is not—a universality that a “we” of substantially different constitutions would agree on.

This study examines the nature and value of empathic communication in call center dyads. Our research site was a multinational financial services call center that we came to know through grounded study techniques, including analyses of 289 stressful calls. Examining calls as communication genre revealed that agents and customers have conflicting organizational, service, and efficiency needs that undermine communication. But three types of empathic expression can mitigate these conflicts in some interactions. Affective expressions, such as “I’m sorry,” were less effectual, but attentive and cognitive responses could engender highly positive responses although customers’ need for them varied tremendously. Thus, customer service agents must use both diagnostic and enactment skills to perform empathic communication effectively, a coupling that we call empathy work.

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher’s social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold. The discourse surrounding multimodal composition was analyzed via inductive analysis. Students’ use of semiotic resources in the HyperStudio composition was analyzed with Unsworth’s image-language intermodal framework. Then, teacher-student conversations related to visual and linguistic signs were triangulated with students’ compositions. Findings show that a classroom teacher’s limited content knowledge as related to metafunctions and metalanguage of visual and linguistic sign systems affected the information taught to the students and, ultimately, their use of visual and linguistic signs. Students demonstrated tacit knowledge of image-language relations beyond what was taught but lacked the explicit knowledge to more strategically use visual and linguistic signs. Implications include the importance of creating opportunities for teachers to develop more substantive content knowledge of the metalanguages and metafunctions of various sign systems.

As a composition historian working with nineteenth-century American literacy artifacts, I have become increasingly aware of how particular keywords have come to dominate our histories. Specifically, I have noticed how the keyword that most resonates with my research—literacy—has been eclipsed and to some extent erased by the dominance of the keyword “rhetoric” in our history writing over the last decade. Why has this happened? How does this trend affect the materials historians look for and the questions they ask? How do our keywords modulate the voices of our artifacts? How do our keywords determine the uses we claim for history?I have surveyed book-length American composition histories published between 1999 and 2010 in order to describe the major trends shaping the kinds of histories we are producing to see if we can identify gaps and fissures, the roads not taken, in relation to these major trends. The preliminary thesis I put before you is that we are in danger of closing off certain types of materials and questions because our histories are increasingly dominated by the keyword “rhetoric.”

ABSTRACT This article focuses on attunement as a concept that intervenes in the question of how we learn to act ethically in the face of radical alterity. I use Jacques Derrida's concept of a “contraband” tonality and Gilles Deleuze's discussion of “haptic” tone to argue that tonality resonates with dimensions of affect and desire that cannot be accommodated through familiar interpretive acts of listening, hearing, and seeing. Because we are unable to fully understand and account for the tonality of others, the article suggests, we need to approach attunement as a disposition or ethos that prolongs our engagement with the alterity of others' marks and noises. Repositioned as living practice, attunement can redefine ethical action by drawing attention to the material, physical, and emotional challenges of preserving what Diane Davis calls a “radically hospitable opening to alterity.”

This article examines communication management issues of emergency aid following natural disasters. Ten aid workers involved in the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake relief were interviewed and surveyed while they were still “in the field” to determine their understanding of the role of communication in the relief effort. The analysis was framed using the three-stage process (pre-disaster, response, post-disaster). Analysis of their responses showed that there are still chronic problems in each of the stages. The importance of enhancing communication elements in the pre-disaster phase was a strong finding. In the response stage, the differential role of various media, including old technologies in poor regions, emerged as an issue. Organizational factors such as high staff turnover were also seen as negatively affecting communication efficacy. An important finding about the post-disaster stage is the importance of debriefing.

Abstract Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) involves using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the well-being of people in resource-constrained environments. Because ICTD projects involve crafting technical information and the ICTs that convey it, ICTD involves challenges familiar to technical communicators, such as balancing stakeholder interests and building credibility necessary to influence stakeholders. This article presents how trust and credibility affect ICTD projects, describing implications for development contexts and for distributed work environments. Keywords: credibilitydistributed workinformation and communication technologyresource-constrained environmentstrust ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank the project stakeholders who participated in this research, as well as the Microsoft Research Technology for Emerging Markets research group, M. Haselkorn, B. Kolko, C. Lee, and K. Toyama for their support of this work. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebecca Walton Rebecca Walton is an assistant professor at Utah State University. Her research explores how human and contextual factors affect the design and use of information and communication technologies in resource-constrained environments.

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and letters to state government officials from private citizens suggest that the public overwhelmingly adheres to concepts of standards-based education. This research is meant to further stimulate conversations in the field about how we define basic writers and how to provide these students with the opportunity to define themselves.

AbstractDewey emphasizes the perception of “indirect consequences” of transactions as the basis of responsible public identity and organization. These consequences are external; they appear in the scientifically observable world and are susceptible to technical control. But transactions may have indirect affective consequences that are part of a culturally influenced inner reality, pose obstacles to speech and communication, and fund an irresponsible public identity-cum-organization. Rhetorical theory that builds on Dewey's “public” ignores these consequences at considerable cost. This claim is supported by a social psychoanalytic conception of affects and by an interpretive-analysis of public speech-acts that moved from opposition to the largely unauthorized immigration of Latin Americans to Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee, to reactionary endorsement and legislative passage of an “English-first” ordinance.

Several government agencies are seeking quality improvement in environmental policy documents by asking for the implementation of Plain Language (PL) guidelines. Our mixed-methods research examines whether the application of certain PL guidelines affects the comprehension and perceptions of readers of environmental policy documents. Results show that the presence of pronouns affects inferential comprehension of environmental impact statement summaries (EIS summaries), but that the effect varies with the reader's education level. Further, headings in question phrasing affect a reader's perception of familiarity and reliability of EIS summaries. A reader's perceptions of EIS summaries and attitudes toward the organizations creating the documents are also affected by overall design features. PL guidelines on the use of pronouns and question headings are not fully supported by our research and need further validation with regard to comprehension. This article ends with a call for further research.

Recent scholarship in genre studies has extended its focus from studying single genres to multiple genres, as well as how these genres interact with one another. This essay seeks to contribute to this growing scholarship by adding a new concept, intermediary genre. That is, a genre that facilitates the “uptake” of a genre by another genre. This concept is designed to reveal a particular aspect of multiple genres: that one genre can be used to connect and mobilize two otherwise unconnected genres to make uptake possible. The concept is illustrated in case study of knowledge mobilization, an instance in which scientific research was used in the judicial system to inform public policies on eyewitness handling and police-lineup procedures. The case study shows how intermediary genres emerge, how they connect other genres, and how knowledge circulates as a result of such connections and affects policy decisions.

The aim of this study was to analyze the consequences of emotion during narrative writing in accordance with Hayes’s model. In this model, motivation and affect have an important role during the writing process. Moreover, according to the emotion-cognition literature, emotions are thought to create interferences in working memory, resulting in an increase of cognitive load. Following Cuisinier and colleagues, fourth and fifth graders were instructed to write autobiographical narratives with neutral emotional content, positive emotional content, and negative emotional content. The results did not indicate an effect of emotional instructions on the proportion of spelling errors, but they did reveal an effect on the text length. However, a simple regression analysis showed a correlation between working memory capacity and the number of spelling errors in the neutral condition only. The potential influence of cognitive load created by emotion on the writing process is discussed.

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/smart-media ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) This special section of Enculturation features four sets of experimental media projects produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, three by English students enrolled in different courses I have taught over the past several years and one recent experiment of my own. As indicated in the short descriptions provided by their producers, these projects vary in content, form, medium, and function, but all can be understood as emerging scholarly genres—or what we’re calling at UW-Madison smart media . At a time when bookstores are closing, when the MLA is questioning the monograph as the dominant model for dissertations, a time when academic publishers are grappling with the many challenges posed by the web, it is little wonder that smart media such as TED talks, theory comix, video essays, and interactive installations have emerged. Smart media supplement the traditional scholarly genres of book, article, and conference paper, adding elements closely identified with new media: digital images, video, and sound, as well as interactivity. These emerging scholarly genres mix ideas and affects, logos and graphe . If, as Jacques Derrida, Gregory Ulmer, and others have long argued, logocentric writing marginalizes graphe , smart media turns on the high-res display, cranks up the volume, and plays with the inputs and outputs. Writing in no way disappears: it remains a crucial though reinscribed track in a multimedia composition—or rather, design . For design is to digital media what composition is to writing: a craft that can be learned and taught, one that has a long history yet still produces surprises, amazement, and, admittedly, at times clichés and boredom. At UW-Madison, I direct DesignLab , a new design support center for student media projects that works closely with the Libraries (where it is institutionally situated), our central IT…

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer’s mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating—that is, the “monitor.” The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two experiments, the current authors investigated monitor function by examining the coordination of two common writing tasks—editing (i.e., correcting an error) and sentence composing—in the presence or absence of an error and with a low or high memory load for the writer. In the first experiment, participants could approach the editing and composing task in either order. On most trials (88%), they finished the sentence first, and less frequently (12%), they corrected the error first. The error-first approach occurred significantly more often under the low-load condition than the high-load condition. For the second experiment, participants were asked to adopt the less-used, error-first approach. Success in completing the assigned task order was affected by both memory load and error type. These results suggest that the monitor depends on the relative availability of working memory resources and coordinates subtasks to mitigate direct competition over those resources.

Michael MacDonald , University of Waterloo Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/martial-mcluhan-2 ( Published: June 26, 2012 ) Editor’s Note: This is part two of an essay published in Enculturation’s special issue on Marshall McLuhan, “McLuhan @ 100.” In “Martial McLuhan I: Framing Information Warfare,” Michael MacDonald argues that McLuhan’s basic theoretical frame for understanding media was rhetoric. This rhetorical focus allowed McLuhan to see that war is about both the destruction of physical infrastructure and the shaping and reconfiguring of bodies and brains, affects and attitudes. In “Martial McLuhan II,” MacDonald uses McLuhan’s understanding of media ecology, embodiment, and information environments to examine military theory. That analysis presents a detailed account of how Info War strategies take aim at the body and brain by using information as a “soft kill” weapon. In On War , Carl von Clausewitz argues that every battle revolves around a “central hub” of activity—a center of gravity or “heavy point” ( Schwerpunkt )—that forms the nodal point of the enemy’s material military power. Info War, however, makes civil society itself the center of gravity. Info War targets not only the physical infrastructure of information (nodes, cables, links, servers, towers, routers, electricity grids) but also the decision makers, “human or automated,” plugged into the grid. “The friendly or adversary personnel who make decision and handle information,” notes the Joint Publication on Information Operations , “constitute a critical component of the GII [emphasis added]” (Glossary GL-6). According to McLuhan, the “sheer inclusiveness” of information as a medium and as a concept expands both the field of battle and the semantic field of war. “Real, total war has become information war,” notes McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage , “it is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly” (138). Building on The Mechanical Bride…

Abstract This article explores Lyndon Baines Johnsons and George W. Bushs use of key policy terms to justify their education policies. President Johnson foregrounded the key policy term of "opportunity," whereas President Bush emphasized the term "accountability." Conveying a confident, forward-looking view of society opportunity charged the federal government with distributing educational resources among local communities. Replacing confidence with skepticism, accountability shifted the federal role from providing inputs to insisting on outcomes. Accountability situated the federal government as the ultimate authority that set educational standards and determined if local communities met them.

AbstractLincoln's First Inaugural Address was not designed to coax the seceded states back into the Union, because he never conceded that they had left. Rather, he sought to define the situation so that, if war broke out, the seceders would be cast as the aggressors and the federal government as acting in self-defense. To this end, he presented a principled case against the legitimacy or even possibility of secession while applying the arguments to the exigence at hand. He identifies the cause of the trouble as “unwarranted apprehension” among the southern states, announces his policy as a minimalist assertion of national sovereignty, and urges that disaffected southerners not act in haste to threaten that sovereignty further. Not only does he explicitly call for slowing down the push to war but the speech itself enacts a slowing of time. In sum, the First Inaugural illustrates both Lincoln's philosophical grounding and his rhetorical dexterity.

Based on interviews with students who had recently returned to school, this essay demonstrates the need for, challenges of, and ways to respond to the writing anxiety many adults bring with them back to school.

The author argues that within the classroom, an affective response to Holocaust literature can be blended with an analytical approach. She demonstrates how this dual perspective is possible by examining a fragmentary song found on a child who was murdered at Majdanek.

This article describes my experiment with surveillance technology as a composition teaching tool in a computer classroom. The technology, a software program called Remote Desktop, displayed live on my lectern screen all of my students' activities on their computers. While I first intended mainly to use Remote Desktop to monitor students' focus on assigned tasks, I quickly became interested in the pedagogical possibilities it presented. Because I could read students' work as they were composing it, I could intervene quickly when they were struggling and offer near-instant feedback; I could also guide class discussions by identifying patterns of weakness to address, strong examples to share, or the single answer a given student had gotten right to praise. I could anticipate how debates might unfold among students with differing opinions, or how similarly minded students might offer support to one another. While these strategies might have been possible without the technology, they were significantly facilitated by it — especially because this group of students was particularly underprepared and found discussion difficult. Class time became more productive and built their confidence in their own abilities as readers, writers, and editors.

Upon entering college composition courses, students often report a dislike for writing. Because researchers report that writing anxiety may be linked to high-stakes writing exams, a study of graduates of New York high schools was conducted to investigate whether the state's Regents Comprehensive Examination in English shapes attitudes or assumptions about writing. For this study, first-year writing students responded to a prompt that asked them to reconstruct an essay they wrote for the exam, as well as their feelings before, during, and after writing the essay. Evidence suggests that most students strongly dislike taking the exam. Preparing for and responding to it may impart lessons contradictory to objectives of many first-year writing programs. Most students report critical engagement with the test question but suppress critical commentary in their official responses so as to please the imagined graders, whom most students conflate with the specific audience posited by the question. The study indicates that open-form, experimental writing about standardized writing exams at the outset of the semester may help students transform resistance to writing from a general feeling to an attitude associated with a particular memory and, thus, may help clear the air for the work of college-level writing.

Of the many fields affected by current economic conditions, the humanities are often hit especially hard because the very category “humanities” is inchoate. Mangum joins scholars who seek ways to bring the values of fields such as literature and history into focus for various public audiences. Engaging nonspecialists in practices of the humanities offers one way of “going public.” The forms of publicly engaged teaching, learning, scholarship, and collaboration can stretch as far as teachers' and scholars' imaginations and are applicable to social sciences and other disciplines as well.

This empirical study surveyed academic staff at a Swedish university about their experiences and perceptions of the use of English in their academic fields. The objective was to examine how the influence of English in disciplinary domains might affect the viability of Swedish in the academic sphere and to investigate how it might disadvantage Swedish scholars. The data findings were analyzed quantitatively and are complemented with a qualitative content analysis, outlining perception and attitude patterns in the responses. Findings suggest power asymmetry between English and Swedish, as the data contain indications of perceived unequal opportunities between native and nonnative speakers in the international academic community. Swedish scholars highlighted the nuanced expressions of academic discourse found in social science writing as creating particular difficulty when writing in English.

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

This article argues for a rethinking of the rhetorical canon of memory as a productive tool for understanding and effectively responding to recent changes in culture, economics, and politics. After reviewing historical conceptions of rhetorical memory both before and after its “canonization,” we identify two processes at the heart of the contemporary relationships between persuasion and memory: an “externalization” of memory and commonplace rhetorical structures through information networks and technologies, and an “internalization” of memory and dispositions that takes place in human affective systems. We conclude by arguing for the value of such an expanded notion of rhetorical memory for addressing two of the more pervasive and significant registers of contemporary persuasion: advertising and populist politics.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

Through an eighty-one-year-old woman’s literacy narrative, I argue that literacy researchers should pay greater attention to elder writers, readers, and learners. Particularly asnotions of literacy shift in digital times, the perspective of a lifespan can reveal otherwise hidden complexities of literacy, including the motivational impact of affective histories and embodied practices over time.

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander & Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an “Other space” (Foucault, 1986), as a space created without the constraints of a mandated curriculum or standardized test pressures and as a space informed by an understanding of the connections among literacies, lived experiences, and identities. Through the presentation and analysis of five vignettes, I consider how the students shaped the course to their own ends and pursued agentive literacy work resonant with the epistemologies in the literacy tradition of African American women. While I situate these contributions and literacy practices within Black feminist and postpositivist realist theories of identities, I contend their full measure cannot be understood without a look at the physical aspects of the space, the travel of texts into and out of it, and its relational and affective dimensions. I conclude with considerations for pursuing literacy pedagogies attentive to social identities and for creating ”Other spaces” within a time of standardization and testing.

This article analyzes classroom discussions of Boaz Yakin's 1994 film Fresh—an unsettling urban drama about a young boy (Fresh) who devises a creative escape from the drug dealers in his environment: he buys a large amount of cocaine that he uses to trick those dealers into thinking that they're all trying to break into each others' markets. In the end, he turns these negative and violent forces against each other and then enters the Witness Protection Program. The social commentary in the film is paramount since it highlights the disturbing cultural reasons why a twelve–year-old African American boy has to devise his own escape from the inner city. Most important, class discussions of (as well as the writing assignments focused on) Yakin's film necessarily confront the role that class hierarchies play in America as well as the cultural myths—like the unconditional individual—that affect many of our expectations and assumptions. Herein resides the film's pedagogical importance: it offers an intensely emotional and intellectual challenge to many of our foundational understandings of American values and cultural narratives. That is, it critiques the problematic rationalizations (like “the just-world phenomenon”) that seek to not only dis-empower but also neglect whole segments of American society.

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions. Conceiving of agency in this way enables writers to recognize their rhetorical acts, whether conscious or nonconscious, as acts that make them who they are, that affect others, and that can contribute to the common good. Responsible rhetorical agency entails being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion.

This article examines how working-class bodies perform physically, affectively, and discursively in academic spaces. Through its conversation between a tenured professor and graduate student, the article employs performance theory to highlight how disruptive working-class teacher-bodies can be and the potential they offer for understanding the ideological work of academic social space.

Writing is common skill for many whose job requires them to communicate through business documents. But there are many professionals who seemingly have difficulty with writing. Many engineers are required to write proposals and reports yet have received little formal writing instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine if writing apprehension, their composition process, or the presence of deadlines affects the production of documents. The hypothesis was that engineers have high writing apprehension, generally use a product-based approach, and tight deadlines negatively affect the end quality. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with civil engineers to gauge their level of apprehension, learn their personal composition process and determine how deadlines affect their writing. While the hypothesis was not conclusively supported, the study revealed six key themes into how engineers structure their writing tasks and found that the writing environment of engineers significantly impacts the composition process.

This article discusses how a group of multilingual scholars in Jordan negotiate multiple linguistic and cultural affiliations. These writers’ experiences demonstrate the varied ways English’s global dominance affects individuals’ lives. The scholars find both empowerment and disempowerment in English, viewing English as linked to Western hegemony in some situations and as de-nationalized and de-territorialized in others.

This essay explores how the “heat of composition” is inexorably linked to ethos and also how writers, student or otherwise, might seek to create and intensify pleasure through a sustained textual becoming. I consider how this ethics of affect is an unfolding, an exteriorization of the intensities and forces of becoming writers, student or otherwise, who engage with the movements of desire.

This article examines the social influences that affect how women perform in a composition course focused on first-year students. We know that society encourages young women to be good girls, but does being a good girl lead to being a good student? Can first-year composition assignments illuminate gender gaps at play in higher education?

Abstract This essay argues for a reprivileging of the object of speech in the study of public address. To this end, public discourse concerning the tonal qualities of male and female speech, particularly in moments of affective transgression, is examined to better discern our deeply gendered, cultural norms of eloquence. The primary case study analyzes reactions to the oratory ofBarack Obama and Hillary Clinton to show how their respective vocal tones played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.

Error analysis involves detecting, diagnosing, and correcting discrepancies between the text produced so far (TPSF) and the writers mental representation of what the text should be. The use of different writing modes, like keyboard-based word processing and speech recognition, causes different type of errors during text production. While many factors determine the choice of error-correction strategy, cognitive effort is a major contributor to this choice. This research shows how cognitive effort during error analysis affects strategy choice and success as measured by a series of online text production measures. Text production is shown to be influenced most by error span, that is, whether the error spans more or less than two characters. Next, it is influenced by input mode, that is, whether the error has been generated by speech recognition or keyboard, and finally by lexicality, that is, whether the error comprises an existing word. Correction of larger error spans is more successful than that of smaller errors. Writers impose a wise speed accuracy trade-off during large error spans since correction is better, but preparation times (time to first action) and production times take longer, and interference reaction times are slower. During large error spans, there is a tendency to opt for error correction first, especially when errors occurred in the condition in which the TPSF is not preceded by an auditory prompt. In general, the addition of speech frees the cognitive demands of writing. Writers also opt more often to continue text production when the TPSF is presented auditorially first.

Abstract In this essay we explicate notions of technology, self, and writing imbricated in new media responses to the Virginia Tech shootings. In our analysis we bring a consideration of affect and the normalization of emotional responses to bear on "aftermath texts" (online commentary on the shootings and on Cho's writing itself). We ultimately argue for a greater awareness of subjectivity and affect in our disciplinary and pedagogical explorations and narrations of technology. Notes 1We thank our RR peer reviewers Shawn Parry-Giles and Shane Borrowman for their insightful feedback as we worked on this essay. 2It is a sad reality that neither the Virginia Tech tragedy nor the human response to it is unique. Cell phones, texting, and amateur video have played a role in every major disaster since the technologies became readily available. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, for example, documented their plans for Columbine on videotapes, a number of which were found in Harris's bedroom after the massacre, and there are, literally, terabytes of digital archiving and commentary on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the 2005 London subway bombings, and roadside ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our profession and others have responded to trauma and its implications for our work: Witness Shane Borrowman's 2005 collection Trauma and the Teaching of Writing; the 2004 two-volume issue of JAC focused on "Trauma and Rhetoric"; online discussions on the WPA listserv about using writing and the composition class to respond to institution-wide tragedies; and, of course, the burgeoning field of trauma studies. Indeed, the sad, simultaneous proliferation of technology and tragedy has offered much evidence of the epistemelogical power of writing; to write is to make sense, even if what we write about is, finally, senseless. 3See CNN.com for more information about the Columbine shooting and the shooters' use of video and other technology: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/US/12/12/columbine.tapes/index.html 4Dissenting views on the blogsite appeared scattered throughout the postings: 5Certainly, like many of our colleagues in English and writing studies across the country, we sympathized with our colleagues at Virginia Tech and understood that writing and literature courses would be among the primary places—given their size and the humanist content and subjects frequently taught in them—in which students (and faculty) would want to process such a terrifying and tragic experience. We also understood that Cho's status as an English major, and the fact that both his print and video texts were held up as objects of scrutiny and even as "explanations" for his behavior, demanded an accounting of the connections between violence, writing, and subjectivity. We know we are not alone in our continuing horror in response to that April morning in Virginia. We wonder, again, how we as a culture might prevent such violence, and we are keenly aware of the fundamental inability of academic texts to respond to such a tragedy. We thus offer this essay as an exploration of yet another explosive instance of what Lynn Worsham famously called "pedagogic violence." Indeed, such tragedies as the Virginia Tech murders pose seemingly unanswerable questions: Why would someone do such a thing? What kind of person is capable of killing so many others? What must his sense of self, his interior life, have been like? And how have his actions changed the interior and communal lives of others? Such questions cut to the heart of subjectivity, and they were frequently debated through a wide variety of electronic media. At the same time, such questions evoked Worsham's exploration of pedagogic violence in "Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion." Many of us wanted, as Worsham writes, to "be comforted by the view that violence is the unfortunate result of individual pathology" rather than an outlaw response to regimes of affect that are the "primary and most valuable product" of late consumer capitalism" (219). To some great extent, Cho's behavior up to and including his multiple murders offers us that comfort. It also points to larger issues of systemic violence, to the relative ease of gun possession, to institutional inabilities to prevent violence, and so forth, in ways that removed that comfort for us almost immediately. 6Some of our previous work has touched on this idea; specifically, see Jonathan's Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web, which examines students' development of rhetorical savvy in the design of websites for a variety of purposes—personal, communal, and even political.

This article presents a consideration of how students’ existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools.