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

As we enter a new academic year in North American universities, we continue to think about the many ways that teachers, learners, and other writers respond to written texts. While JRW publishes primarily research looking at academic writing, mostly done in institutions of higher education and with courses that specifically teach students how to write, we are also interested in the ways that people (or computers) respond to writing in many other contexts and for many diverse purposes. We welcome manuscripts that consider writing done by professionals in the workplace, writing in graduate science courses, writing for publication, fiction-writing groups, children’s first written texts, responding to writing in languages other than English, and anything else that could be considered in the broad realm of response. Please encourage your colleagues to read the journal and contribute.

This paper extends our research into a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine, where Primary School children produce animated stories through writing computer code. We first discuss the theoretical basis of our engine design, drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, embodied cognition and perceived animacy. This design aims to help children draw on the appearances of characters, props and scenery to evoke linguistic constructs leading to the emergence of stories. The second part of this paper reports on an empirical study where we aim to answer two research questions. First can compositions so produced be seen as valid compositions? To answer this question we conducted a linguistic analysis of coded stories and those written in an English classroom, and also using teacher ratings of these stories. Results indicate that while there are no significant linguistic differences between coded and English stories, coded stories are impoverished and should be seen as a first-draft to be revised in the English classroom. The second question was to probe our observation that while coding, children spontaneously told stories. Here we draw upon theories of embodied cognition and of perceived animacy. Our analysis suggests that these theories, taken together, help to explain the spontaneous emergence of stories.

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

This article argues that the primary role of the instructor is to help students understand and work with the difficult emotional states that arise from struggling to learn. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and using his own experience with digital humanities instruction as a case study, the author offers ways to center emotional work, especially work involving frustration and anxiety, in the classroom. Asking students to develop failed prototypes and reflect on the process, for example, can provide them with a better sense of what it might mean to succeed. Giving the same exercise twice, with artificially imposed difficulties the second time, might help them learn concrete steps for working through mounting irritation. In short, frustration and anxiety are not things that emerge from time to time—they are ever-present. The author argues that it is the job of instructors to develop ways to prepare students not for the unexpected failure but for the inevitable frustration that comes even with success.

This mixed-methods study investigates writers’ task representation and the factors affecting it in test-like and non-test-like conditions. Five advanced-level L2 writers wrote two argumentative essays each, one in test-like conditions and the other in non-test-like conditions where the participants were allowed to use all the time and online materials they needed. The writing was done on computers, and we recorded the writing process and keystrokes using the Screen Capture Video and Inputlog programs. We audio recorded stimulated recall interviews after each writing session, with the writers reporting and commenting on their writing strategies and their reasons for following them. The findings of this study suggest that there are several factors that play a role in task representation, such as previous education, personal beliefs, and task conditions. Although these factors were present in all participants’ responses, the differences in the writers’ approaches to interpret and execute the writing were marked. The results highlight various pedagogical issues and options related to teaching writing in general and to the place of task representation on writing programs in particular.

Looking into the definition of rhetoric in the digital space, one often encounters the view that rhetoric is too remote or too “ancient” to be used as a conceptual, theoretical or practical framework for researching digital media. However, a substantial body of contemporary media research applies the theory of rhetoric, using a modern conceptual apparatus (e.g. cognitive theories of metaphor). Based on Kenneth Burke’s model of the pentad, the article aims to show that media messages in the digital environment are based on the notion of the rhetorical situation and demonstrate that the rhetorical apparatus has a crucial role in discerning the ways to modify the discourse space in human-computer-human communication. The source of modification in the traditional model of a rhetorical situation is the interactive nature of communication in digital media and the fact that the recipient [agent a] is bestowed with the role of an active participant who can influence the content of the message. Thanks to the use of the rhetorical model of pentad, the argument goes that in contrast to traditional media, modifications in the model act 1 → agent → agency → act 2 are possible and they result from the inclusion of external participants [agent b] and changes in the ontological status of the digital medium from the role of an intermediary to an active participant in the communication process [agent c].

Background: Business competition, globalization, increasing opportunities presented by information and communication technology, the increased number of remote workers, and the emergence of computer-mediated groups have propelled the use, deployment, and growth of virtual teams in the past decade. A recent survey of 1,372 business respondents from 80 countries found that 85% of the respondents worked on virtual teams. The increasingly important role of virtual teams in organizations has spurred a parallel growth in research examining various aspects and challenges of these teams. Research goal: This paper reports on a systematic examination of the literature on virtual teams through which we provide a thorough review, analysis, and synthesis of research published in the past 10 years. Methodology: We follow the systematic literature review methodology proposed by Ramey and Rao to examine theories, research problems, research focuses, research methodologies, and major findings of 149 related studies on virtual teams published between 2007 and 2018. Results and conclusions: By using thematic analysis, we develop a research taxonomy that summarizes the main themes of existing research in the field; we develop a research model of independent, dependent, and moderator constructs that the existing research has examined; we identify the major limitations, unresolved issues, and gaps of existing research; and we suggest opportunities and directions to guide future research by proposing a set of research questions that remain unanswered. The research offers several theoretical and practical implications for scholars, remote workers, knowledge engineers, technology developers and designers, and professionals working in virtual settings.

This webtext explores the pedagogical possibilities of teaching with and through "monkey selfies" as the issue of animal authorship and copyright opens up new pedagogical avenues for challenging the static and fixed views of authorship in composing practices.

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric – primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions – to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change.

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems “out there” to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift—along with the advent of online media, which similarly blurs traditional urban versus rural boundaries between communities—invites us to update classic studies of advocacy rhetoric from the 1990s and early 2000s. Accordingly, this study addresses advocates’ use of online media in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project. I reconstruct wildlife advocates’ attitudes toward the Project, as expressed online in press releases and blog posts, by using a combination of topology—a method that looks at patterns of topoi (shared beliefs, values, and norms) that a community expresses in a given rhetorical situation—and Kenneth Burke’s theories of attitudes and identification. I then compare advocates’ attitudes with the attitudes of project administrators and landowners in the reintroduction area, reconstructed in earlier work. I conclude that advocates amplify their identification with allies (chiefly wolves and supportive sectors of “the public”) and their alienation from competitors (chiefly public-land ranchers and project administrators) via the creation of “straw attitudes” for these communities that conflict both with their own attitude and with the documented attitudes of these communities. This rhetorical strategy creates a zero-sum political scenario for communication in the Project and recapitulates old political divisions in the southwestern United States. I finish by recommending rhetorical strategies aimed to increase identification, rather than alienation, in the Project and by showing what online advocacy rhetoric can teach us about the structure of Burkean theories of identification.

Over the past decade, compositionists have made a number of claims about opportunities presented by Wikipedia for teaching writing. The encyclopedia allows for transparent observation of concepts and skills related to process, research, collaboration, and rhetoric. Beyond observation, Wikipedia allows for public writing with an authentic audience, which often results in increased motivation. Much of this early research has dealt in opportunities and possibilities: speculation about how Wikipedia sponsors particular pedagogies and learning outcomes, and there remains a need for more empirical evidence. This article presents select data from a recent large-scale study conducted by the Wiki Education Foundation that begins to meet this need, and that confirms and extends research from the computers and writing community. Key findings from this research include positive evaluations of Wikipedia-based assignments in general, as well as positive evaluations concerning the capacity of Wikipedia-based assignments to teach critical thinking skills, source evaluation and research, public writing, literature review and synthesis, and peer review. This study also adds significantly to our field's knowledge of how contextual factors related to the course and assignment affect students’ evaluation of a Wikipedia-based assignment. Finally, this article suggests key recommendations for teaching with Wikipedia based on these findings.

Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

Technologists, research scientists, communication professionals, and others involved in computer and internet technologies, including graduate students, will find this book both relevant and prescient. Readers interested in philosophy, futurism, or the fate of humanity will like it too. The book achieves its purpose of outlining, with salient references and a sense of history, the prominent strains of thought in the transhumanist and human enhancement communities - and their philosophical forebears - along with critical responses. The book stands out as a comprehensive, measured look at technology, its future, and its narratives. The author's well-researched, historical look at the stories we tell ourselves about the future—and, crucially, how those stories drive technological advances and policies—details the beliefs of transhumanism: where those beliefs came from and how they are driving the shape of our future. The author also balances the book with critical responses to each of these narratives. The book is focused more on the mythology of the future and technology, rather than on practical applications of any of the technologies discussed. Therefore, it would be most suited to a graduate-level course, or for consideration by policy makers and designers who are potentially influenced by these myths. The book’s value - and its contribution to its field - is in its scope and context, as well as its critical balance.

Computers are now programmed to support emotion; we communicate with our computers as if the computer was another human, not a machine. As a result, user interfaces are being “cutesified” because people love and respond to cute things. This is the basic premise of Cuteness Engineering. Designers, developers, usability researchers, and graduate students will learn the history, key terms, problems, research findings, and international issues pertaining to cuteness engineering, and they will gain exposure to case studies from Japan and China. The book offers strategies and interviews with cuteness designers. This book serves as an introduction to the developing field of cuteness design in the user experience. It is divided into five main chapters, excluding the introduction and conclusion chapters. The first two chapters explore cuteness in Japan and China, the next chapter provides a taxonomy of cuteness, and the final two chapters consist of interview transcripts with user-experience designers. The next logical question the book addresses is “Why cuteness?” To answer this question on a broad scale, the authors use cross-cultural research to examine cuteness in different cultures. This research was used to create and validate their taxonomy of cuteness. However, this taxonomy is general and does not consider the culture-specific attributes of cuteness. To address this problem, the authors study the specific, attributes of cuteness in Japan, China, and the US. They hypothesize that cuteness varies among cultures. According to this theory, different styles of cuteness should be used in different cultures. At the same time, the authors also claim that cuteness can be universal and shared amongst a global audience. Since cuteness is considered a universal language, cuteness is a tool used to help close the gap between technologies, designs, and users. This contradiction limits the overall findings of this book. However, this limitation can be rectified by further clarifying the difference between the goals of cuteness itself (which are universal), and the goals of the individual styles of cuteness (which vary based on culture). Exploring this relationship between the purpose of cuteness and the styles of cute presents an opportunity for future research in cuteness engineering.

To date, research into functional descriptions of unfolding language has been almost entirely focused on speech. And whilst writing research has examined the revision of language units, it has backgrounded how these revisions contribute to the unfolding of a text’s meanings. Therefore, using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an underlying framework, and keystroke logging software (Inputlog) as a data collection tool, this paper takes a first step toward a dynamic description of written text in terms of the language structures, functions, and systemic choices found in the written revisions of two 2nd year UK undergraduates. More specifically, in detailed textual analysis of four unfolding, digitally composed text, whose end products totalled approximately 1700 words, this paper focuses on the revisions made during consecutive writing sessions, which lasted anything from 8mins to 8hrs 37mins and totalled 56hrs 18mins of recordings. The findings suggest that certain language choices may play a key role when it comes to shaping academic essays, and it is proposed that this new model of analysis can provide an additional perspective on writing behaviour in terms of how meaning-making practices unfold in real time.

Every organization relies on information to communicate with prospects and customers - blog posts, articles, whitepapers, user manuals, web portals, videos, tweets, social media posts, moderated forums, and more. This means that many people are creating content and are delivering it in multiple ways. To meet our users' needs, we need information architecture (IA) to provide the framework for developing and delivering this information. Although most content creators do not think of themselves as information architects, many of them perform tasks that are information architecture responsibilities. If you decide what information gets created and delivered, identify keywords to support findability, or organize the hierarchy for a table of contents, you are performing IA tasks. To learn who was performing these tasks and how they ended up with this role, I conducted a survey. This article presents my analysis of the results based upon my experience and relevant industry sources.

Review of Sites of Transition: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric by Laura Gonzales.

Honorable Mention for the 2019 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award Since its public launch in 2008, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) has collected approximately 7500 unique contributions of people’s literacy experiences from across the globe and from a variety of backgrounds. The Archive as Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives showcases the variety of innovative ways educators have used this resource in classroom practice.

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team’s related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how scientists conceptualize and adapt their multimodal writing for specialized scientific audiences as well as lay audiences interested in the work of scientific inquiry. Three concepts— meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—were used to analyze the multimodal strategies that scientists employ when composing for different audiences. Findings suggest that while scientists often restrict their writing practices to meaning compression to maintain the values and conventions of scientific genres, they also sometimes deploy a wider range of multimodal strategies when writing for nonspecialist audiences. These findings underscore the complex rhetorical environments scientists navigate and the need to support emerging scientific writers’ development as versatile writers able to adapt varied multimodal strategies to diverse rhetorical and epistemic goals.

This paper introduces a new social media data-analysis tool called FireAnt that allows technical and professional communication researchers, instructors, and students to easily collect, analyze, and visualize social media communication.Problem:Currently, most social media analysis is carried out using custom computer scripts written in programming languages such as Python and R. Although these custom scripts can be very powerful, they create an enormous barrier to those without a strong computational background or the resources to hire a software engineer or data scientist.Key concepts:FireAnt is a freeware, stand-alone, multiplatform social media data-analysis tool designed for both novice and expert computer users. It can be used to collect, analyze, and subsequently visualize social media data as time-series plots, geopositional maps, and network graphs. It can also export results for further processing using traditional corpus tools, statistical packages, and custom scripts. Key lessons:This paper will show how FireAnt can be used to collect social media data related to specific companies, analyze those data, and visualize the data in a variety of ways.Implications for practice:FireAnt has applications in various technical and professional communication settings-for example, as part of a strategy to develop a social media presence and in the analysis of company-customer interactions and user perceptions of goods and services. It can also be used in the technical writing classroom as part of instructor- and student-centered instruction on the safe, appropriate, and effective use of language on social media platforms .

This article, based on an ethnographic study of aging among women, reports on the benefits of literacy across the lifespan. Using methods based on phenomenological human science, I selected four participants in their eighties and nineties from a small town in Western Massachusetts whom I regarded as exemplars of positive aging. The importance of reading and writing over a lifetime emerged as a central theme in helping to explain how these women coped with the challenges of aging. In the participants’ elder years, literate activities were particularly significant as a way of constructing meaning. With illustrations drawn from the women’s literacy experiences over the better part of a century, I focus on the importance of early literacy development, the key role of literacy sponsors, the self-sponsored nature of memorable literacy experiences, and the differing ways in which the women used reading and writing in their adult years. All four expressed alienation from computers and modern communication technology. Despite this limitation, however, literate activities remained central into old age, helping them to make meaning of their lives, a crucial developmental task in old age. For the women in this study, active, lifelong literacy was a key factor in their continued vitality and involvement in the elder years.

In order to contribute new knowledge about the digital literacies of midlife and older adults on social media, this study examines the literate practices of a subpopulation of Instagram users: female lifestyle Instagrammers and bloggers who self-identify as being over fifty. Survey results reveal why these women use blogs and Instagram, how they developed digital literacies, and who or what influences their practices. Case studies provide examples of the unique ways three women use Instagram to achieve visibility. Whereas most existing scholarship on visual depictions of age focuses on images that are controlled by other people (e.g., advertisers, community groups), I show how women use digital literacies and the affordances of Instagram and blog platforms to control their self-representations. Through their multimodal performances of identity, the women participate in discourses on aging and gender and pursue their goals of self-expression, inspiration, connection, and promotion.

This paper discusses implementation of blog writing as a formative assessment within a final year undergraduate module. Drawing on students’ perceptions and experiences, it proposes that blogging offers a more inclusive writing genre for Higher Education than traditional forms of academic scholarship.

This research explores a presumed link between today’s use of digital media and an ever-increasing lack of rhetorical awareness in students. Specifically, the study pilots a method for measuring rhetorical awareness through students’ e-mail transactions with faculty in technical writing service courses, questioning whether rhetorical awareness has decreased in the preceding 10 years. The findings indicate that students might be more rhetorically aware today than they were 10 years ago, but levels remain below expectations.

Expanding Literate Landscapes: Persons, Practices, and Sociohistoric Perspectives of Disciplinary Development by Kevin Roozen and Joe Erickson (2017) Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2017. Web.

This article focuses on how supervisors and students perceive their responsibilities at the beginning of the thesis writing process. Students in general do little research writing before beginning their Bachelor’s or Master’s programs and they often find academic writing to be a complicated task, which means that many do not complete their thesis writing within the stipulated time. A survey was conducted at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) and the Department of Child and Youth Studies (BUV) at Stockholm University, Sweden. In addition to the distribution of responsibility, participants ranked the importance of four issues: the student’s own collected data in the thesis; language, layout, and correct referencing; the thesis as an excellent product; and the student’s development of his or her competence. In general, students and supervisors agreed on the distribution of responsibilities between them and the importance of some of the issues. The opinions were coherent, considering the survey was conducted early in the thesis writing period. It is suggested that future research includes an in-depth investigation of cultural differences between departments.

The genre of the study-abroad blog prompts students who are studying abroad to identify with marginalized populations they encounter during the travel experience, a practice that is particularly exigent amid the increasing commercialization of the studyabroad industry. To understand the conventions and ethical implications of the genre, the author examines an advice column on blogging abroad and students' reflections on their own writing from a recent studyabroad course. The blog conventions show that students are encouraged to use the misfortune of others to affirm their own privilege, while the interviews suggest that students need more support in responding to the complex cultural conditions of study abroad. To challenge the conventions of the studyabroad blog and ultimately the ideologies that contribute to the genre, faculty members leading students abroad should undertake pedagogical practices that encourage “empathic unsettlement. Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

The authors describe the process of editing a special issue ofDigital Humanities Quarterlyfocused on Comics as Scholarship, reflecting on the complications for scholarly practice and editorial assumptions when working with scholarly comics.

Technical and professional communication instruction is well suited to helping students develop digital literacy but must be informed by research regarding how students are using specific social media platforms, particularly the propensity to post content that could damage their career capital. This study examined this question for students in Austria, Australia, and the United States. In Austria and Australia, this behavior was found to be no greater for Twitter than it was for Facebook. Conversely, for the United States, the behavior was found to be more pronounced. These and additional results regarding attitudes toward information privacy are reported.

This study examines the experiences and perceptions of writers who composed text using “distraction-free” writing tools that stand as alternatives to standard word processing programs. The purpose of this research was to develop a clearer understanding of how digital writing tools may shape the activities and practices of writers, as well as what writing with unfamiliar tools and technologies might reveal about writing processes. Analysis of study participants’ reflective narratives of their composing experience suggests the extent to which writing tools and technologies influence routine practices, assist writers as they try to direct their attention (and avoid distraction), motivate writing, and impact writers’ “text sense” as they compose. Moreover, findings indicate how different tools and technologies may be viewed as more or less useful for different writing tasks. This article ends with a call for writing researchers, writing teachers, and software developers to attend more critically to the ways writing technologies shape the practices of writers.

To succeed beyond the writing classroom, students need creative thinking and adaptable, transferable writing and learning strategies, both of which are emphasized by a classroom approach called “postpedagogy.” Postpedagogy emphasizes experimentation and reflection as integral to composing processes, especially digital composing. One feature of postpedagogical classrooms is writing assignments that require students to make a broader range of rhetorical choices and experiment with new approaches, audiences, mediums, and/or technologies. I offer my “definitional text” assignment as an example of one such writing assignment. Though the experimentation encouraged by postpedagogical approaches may lead to initial failures and frustration, such failure can be made productive via intensive, sustained, and specific reflection on composing and learning processes.

Rooted in a hybrid, themed, first-year writing course titled Please Like Us: Selling with Social Media and drawing on the disciplines of business, marketing, and writing studies, the two sequenced assignments explored here rely upon role-playing and “role-writing” for specific outside professional audiences. A semester-long blog project serves as a jumping off point for a researched, multi-disciplinary social media marketing proposal, providing students with the chance to examine social media in both rhetorical and professional terms. The accompanying article explores these assignments in the context of “authenticity” and with an eye toward not only principles of writing pedagogy, but also the transfer of knowledge and process between academic and professional writing.

This study audits and analyzes the online content provided by the U.S. government for The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). In order to both educate Americans about the ACA and enroll those who needed insurance into plans offered by the U.S. and/or state governments, policy analysts, communication designers, and web developers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) created and published a substantial array of online content. These policy statements, infographics, blog posts, videos, forms, and other resources were designed to engage the public and translate the complexities of the ACA into usable information for patients. However, a content audit and analysis of ACA-related online content reveals the ways that this content did not provide a navigational structure for patients newly insured (or already insured) to find them, as over time the e-commerce function of the site buried its educational purpose. From this analysis, designers of online public policy information will gain a better understanding of how to design as a part of a strategy to balance multiple, critical user roles and tasks.

Introduction: Virtual reality (VR) has gained popularity across industries for its ability to engage users on a level unprecedented by print or 2-D media; however, few guidelines exist for the use of VR technologies in technical and professional communication (TPC) curricula. To address this need, this experience report details the study of a recognizable and adopted set of VR devices to promote understanding of the ways in which emerging VR technologies provide new approaches to pedagogy. Literature review: Drawing from literature in computer science, communication studies, and anthropology, as well as embodiment and phenomenology, the authors provide a historical account of VR development. About the study: Using three concurrent case studies and qualitative interviews, the authors share their deployment of three low-end to high-end VR devices: Google Cardboard, Google Daydream View, and HTC Vive. Using a modified heuristic, the authors assess the functions, features, and uses of the devices; showcase current or potential deployments; and for triangulation, provide a user study of two devices. Results/discussion: VR immersion can provide students with a deeper understanding of course content; immersion in future workplaces can give students an initial vision of their project and profession; concepts can be seen from new vantage points; and user themes include felt experience, sense and sensibility, agency and autonomy, and constant identities. Together, these themes provide an entry into discussions of designing VR content for technical and professional communication. Conclusion: The authors discuss limitations to VR integration and provide resources so practitioners might implement VR in engaging and relevant ways.

The present study experimentally manipulated the gender of an email sender, closing salutation, and sending mode (i.e., email sent via desktop computer/laptop as compared with email sent via a mobile device) to determine if these specific cues influence first impressions of the sender’s competence, professionalism, positive affect, and negative affect. Although no effect of sending mode was found, closing salutation influenced perceptions; females were viewed as less professional when using “Thanks!” as opposed to using “Best,” “Thank you,” or no salutation. However, in general, females were viewed as more professional than males, and “Thanks!” elicited perceptions of positive affect.

Rhetoricians first saw “the digital” flickering on screens but now feel its effects transducing our most fundamental of social practices. This essay traces digital emergence on screens and through networks and further into everyday life through infrastructures and algorithms. We argue that while “the digital” may have once been but one more example of the available means of persuasion, “digital rhetoric” has become an ambient condition.