Source-based writing skills, which include evaluating, synthesizing, and citing sources, are skills that students are expected to acquire as part of college-level writing. Unfortunately, many multilingual writers (MLWs), especially those in advanced degree programs, lack programmatic support and instruction. Thus, writing centers represent a critical site to offer MLWs tutorial-based support. Our study examined whether or not writing centers can help MLWs develop—and transfer—source-based writing skills in a sequence of three tutorials. We recruited five advanced student MLW participants from different cultural backgrounds who were uncomfortable with source use. Through pre-and postwriting samples, interviews, writing process recording videos, and a long-term follow-up, our findings indicate that our three-sequence tutorial significantly improved advanced MLWs’ source-based writing skills and transferred to the next semester. Improvements occurred in the areas of selecting, organizing, and connecting sources as well as in engaging in appropriate source use and avoiding plagiarism, although some areas showed stronger gains than others. This study contributes to the field’s development of replicable, aggregable, and data-supported best practices to explore the efficacy of tutoring for specific populations. We offer suggestions for writing centers to develop, test, and create tutoring-based MLW support programs.

English writing centers at Chinese universities present a fascinating paradox. On one hand, the number of universities with writing centers and the professional interest in writing centers in China have grown steadily over the past two decades. But on the other, the number of centers is still modest and only a few centers have had a significant influence on the culture of writing on their campuses, which is surprising given the vast number of universities in China and the documented need for strengthening and expanding writing instruction in English. This international research study explores the current state of English writing centers in China in a more comprehensive way than previous literature has done. Using data from new in-depth interviews with 17 professionals involved with English writing centers at 15 Chinese universities—professors, tutors, instructors, directors, administrators, and university leaders—as well as data from publicly available websites and WeChat accounts and published literature in Chinese and in English, this study identifies important needs that English writing centers can meet in Chinese universities, offers a typology and descriptions of existing centers, and identifies challenges that writing centers face and possible paths forward, or strategic action fields, for successfully institutionalizing writing centers in China. This study not only offers practical advice to support the promising future of writing centers in China but also introduces English writing centers in China to a larger international audience and reveals powerful insights into the ways models, principles, and practices of writing centers travel and change across continents and educational cultures.

This article explores hospitality as a theoretical framework for valuing emotional engagement and rhetorical listening in writing center consultations, challenging traditional views that prioritize rationality and detachment. Anchored in a university writing center, the study investigates how writing tutors engage with writers, adopting hospitality as a core principle. Semi-structured postconsultation interviews and a focus group allowed tutors to reflect collaboratively on their application of the hospitality framework. Thematic analysis with in vivo coding ensured participants’ voices remained central to the findings. By examining the lived experiences of tutors, the study highlights the dynamic relationship between emotional and rational responses in hospitable tutoring. The results demonstrate the transformative potential of hospitality-based pedagogy in fostering healthier writing relationships, improving writer retention, and enhancing tutors’ academic and emotional skills. The article advocates for the criticality of emotional validation and rhetorical listening as central tenets of effective and hospitable tutoring.

While one-to- one writing tutoring is often viewed as a supportive space for student writers, it can also reproduce racialized linguistic hierarchies that exacerbate anxiety for multilingual students. This article examines second language (L2) anxiety as a structurally induced emotional response to native-speakerism— the ideology that privileges white, Anglophone, native English speakers as the standard for language competence. Drawing from L2 anxiety research in applied linguistics and writing center studies, the article explores how native-speakerism influences multilingual students’ self-perception, interaction, and performance in L2 during one-to- one tutoring. It discusses the sources and dimensions of L2 anxiety across all four language domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—and argues that this anxiety persists even at advanced proficiency levels due to internalized linguistic deficit ideologies. By reframing L2 anxiety as a structural equity issue, the article calls for a more justice-oriented tutoring ecology and offers concrete pedagogical strategies and recommendations to help writing tutors recognize and respond to the often-invisible emotional labor multilingual students carry.

This article argues for a shift in writing center pedagogy toward prioritizing transnational writing assets as the basis of our work with international multilingual writers specifically and every writer we encounter generally. While writing center scholarship has paid attention to the influences of language, cultural and rhetorical differences among native and non-native English speakers/ tutors in the writing center, much of this discussion has taken the “comparative” route rather than a “trans-d” (transnational) route with potentials to transform our engagements with scholars, students, and writers from other parts of the world. This IRB-approved research reveals that international multilingual writers possess unique knowledge of how writing works, influenced by their linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical competencies. These competencies function as transnational writing assets that participants willingly share with their writing consultants, providing an environment that encourages open dialogue about such transnational writing assets and that positions students as valuable contributors of knowledge about writing. The study concludes with recommendations that advance transnational writing dispositions as a transformative pedagogical approach in writing center work to enrich our interactions with writers from different parts of the world.

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.

VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the Composition Classroom, where these young men engage in the writing process—from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, to peer review and revision, and ultimately to publishing their work. From their choice of photos to the essays, short stories, poetry, and sketches they chose to include in this publication, VOICES shows how writing communities foster confidence, nurture scholarship, and provide a positive space for Black male voices, which is where Black activism ultimately begins.

Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate the importance of resistance in my first- year writing courses as well as the role that exploring social justice continues to play in my pedagogy.

This article extends the engagement with decolonial theories within Latinx writing studies, particularly by engaging the ways literacy has been taken up within Basic Writing scholarship. In what follows, I argue that coloniality and decoloniality are crucial resources for Basic Writing and literacy scholarship under the larger umbrella of literacy/composition/rhetoric studies, and that in a symmetrical fashion a consideration of Basic Writing and the “politics of remediation” cannot be neglected or ignored within LCR studies’ decolonial turn if the decolonial imperative is to be achieved. To this effect, I advance three core claims. First, that the decolonial turn in LCR studies offers a potent set of resources for resolving core contradictions in Basic Writing scholarship. Second, that the decolonial turn offers Basic Writing scholars an opportunity to connect advocacy for students and student centered resources to larger public conversations about pedagogy and literacy. Finally, I argue that a decolonial turn in LCR studies offers Basic Writing scholarship a way to reconceive of its own historiography so as to overcome its current deadlocks.

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.   

In my sometimes-murky role as a writing program administrator, I often think about Eli Goldblatt's chapter "Lunch" in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum.Goldblatt posits the main job of a writing program administrator is to have lunch with as many people on campus as possible.His advice is simple.I tell myself it's a lesson I already know.Yet again and again, just as I begin to wonder if I should renew that WPA contract the next time, I run into someone new on campus, we discover all that we share in our hopes for our institution, we make a plan or two, and I remember I have Eli to thank.This kind of move characterizes Goldblatt, both as a person and as a writer and scholar.His personability leads, distracting us from the fact that he is also a profound thinker whose writing models what we value most in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies: it gently sets aside our concerns with form-genre form, forms of difference, disciplinary forms-and helps us commune, instead, through practice.For that reason, we are lucky now to have Goldblatt's new book, Alone with Each Other: Literature and Literacy Intertwined, a compilation of his published writing from the beginning of his career in rhetoric and composition to the present, between 1995 and 2022.Divided into three sections by topic-Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Community Literacy, and Poetics and Practice-the collection reveals, at last, just how much is really going on in Goldblatt's work when we see it in its wholeness.In the excellent new introductory chapter, Goldblatt shows us how he's been thinking of his tripartite work all these years, straddling university writing programs and literature departments, community literacy settings, and the poetry community.Goldblatt loosens literacy and literature from their disciplinary forms and reframes them, so that "literacy" denotes reading and writing in the world, and "literature" means reading and writing for art's sake.Then he argues that this reframing allows us to make our way around and through their politicized institutional histories.While we in composition have often lamented our precarity and lesser status in relation to literary study, Goldblatt shows us how to respect our own grounding in our peculiar intersection of college writing, English literature, and English education.But what Goldblatt also achieves-without stating as his aim-is a tender embrace of the varying stances, and dare I say open conflicts, within composition itself.He extols Aja Martinez's work drawing on Critical Race Theory, for instance, seeing a kindred spirit in the conviction that "argumentation divorced from accounts of lived experience too easily leaves oppressive structures in place" (7).He brings this newer critical work into conversation with the earlier energies of the social turn, especially the "often . . .

The positive effects of dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) on linguistic accuracy are well-documented (Evans et al., 2010). However, studies on DWCF without exception have adopted a pretest-posttest research design; therefore, they were unable to explore the dynamics of development (Larsen-Freeman, 2006). In addition, all of the previous DWCF studies exclusively provided indirect feedback to students. Consequently, our knowledge is limited as to whether a modified version (providing direct feedback) of DWCF would be effective. To address this issue, in this study 24 university undergraduate students composed a total of 288 essays and received modified DWCF (direct feedback) on a weekly basis in two advanced writing courses over 12 weeks. The essays were analysed by applying both pretest-posttest and time-series analyses. Statistically significant differences were found in the linguistic accuracy indices (errors per words, errors-free clause ratio) in the student’s data between the pretest and posttest. The time-series analysis showed dynamics of the development of linguistic accuracy. This study showed that a modified version of DWCF is also effective and provides deeper insight into the dynamic processes of linguistic accuracy development.

Although writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs have been commonplace since the 1970s, the focus has largely been at the level of assessment and programmatic development and less on the instructors, particularly graduate teaching assistants (TAs) who adopt these practices. In this article, we describe a pilot WAC graduate-level course in writing pedagogy that our institution developed as part of our recent membership in the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). We also share how one science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate student revised her approach to assignment design, feedback, and assessment for a general education course and deepened her understanding of herself as an instructor as well as her students. We end by reflecting on how training in writing pedagogy can support graduate student identity development and improve student learning.

Current scholarship in writing pedagogy and peer review focuses on how and what to write and say. What is often left unaddressed in these discussions are how we listen and how we teach our students to listen, making listening an often overlooked and understudied piece of the peer review and writing response process. Yet, the quality of the feedback we receive and offer is directly tied to how well we listen to what is said and written. To this fill this gap, this teaching article offers two activities, Lighting Talks and 2x2x2 Storytelling, that promote students’ listening skills so that writing instructors might close the response feedback loop by teaching students how to listen and in turn, teach students how to engage more fully in peer review.

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.

Introduction: Research shows that empathy is a core competence of communication professionals. Still, the pedagogy of including empathy in professional communication curricula has been underexposed in the literature. About the case: This article describes the development and evaluation of a course aimed at increasing students’ empathy competence in the final year of a Dutch bachelor-level communication program. A detailed description of the course is provided. Situating the case: The course operationalizes a recent model of empathy competence in professional communication settings. It focuses on empathy-related skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Experiential learning and student-led discussions are core elements in the course. Methods/approach: The course was taught in two different classes (N = 47). Student evaluations and reflections included standard institutional course assessment data, a report from an institution-led student panel evaluation, and student reflections during coursework as well as before, immediately after, and two years after the course. Results/discussion: The course was evaluated very positively in the institutional course assessment and panel evaluation. The student reflections show that students had a great appreciation for the course overall, as well as for specific course elements. The course made them aware of the complexity and multifaceted nature of empathy, and had a profound impact on their professional and personal identity. Conclusion: This article demonstrates the effectiveness of a course designed to develop empathy competence in communication professionals and advocates for future research to explore long-term effects and cross-industry applications.

Drawing upon a framework of “assemblage thinking,” this article offers an approach to considering artificial intelligence (AI) and ethics that seeks to think relationally across the positions occupied as educators and students at a business school. To complement discussions of assemblage and examinations of ethics in the AI era, we draw upon the perspectives of a relatively understudied population in this conversation—students themselves navigating AI and writing within a business-focused context—and extend assemblage thinking to capture important thought toward the future of business communication, pedagogy, ethics, and AI.

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.

In Amplifying Voices in UX, a diverse group of scholars and practitioners come together to explore different aspects of user experience (UX) with a focus on inclusivity and social justice. This book moves beyond conventional UX frameworks, presenting innovative pedagogical strategies and methodologies that highlight empathy, accessibility, and the importance of considering marginalized voices in design. The authors delve into areas often overlooked in mainstream UX discourse, offering new perspectives on how to create more inclusive and impactful user experiences.

• 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.

In this article, I provide a chronological narrative to my ungrading choices in composition classes as a neurodiverse single mother from a working-class background. I discuss my positionality as a White person committed to justice and my experiences as an “assessment killjoy” (West-Puckett et al.) during the ethical turn in writing studies. From this foundation, I reflect on my attempts to grade more equitably. I discuss my pedagogical goals, which are grounded in intersectional feminist theory (hooks; Royster and Kirsch), standpoint theory (Harding), learning sciences (Hammond; Ross), and a robust model of the writing construct (White et al.), and analyze the consequences of exit portfolios, labor-based contract grading (Inoue), and specifications grading (Nilson) via this integrated framework.

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data, exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college’s students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two distinct semesters, before and after extensive developmental education reform, the article presents an approach to deep assessment that is necessary for English departments at community colleges as they analyze and adjust to specific reforms.

This article shares three focal participant profiles from a national study on graduate student writing pedagogy in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. Working toward a more linguistically just discipline, this research explores how we might teach graduate students disciplinary genre expectations while centering their embodied ways of composing.

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.

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in two community colleges in the Midwest in order to support these students, especially in developmental courses. This study draws from qualitative data collected at two community colleges, Mann College and Kinsella College (pseudonyms). This exploratory study provides recommendations for the kind of professional development that faculty may need in order to support Latinx students, the importance of understanding students’ myriad identities, and the ways political forces may shape students’ experiences.

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.

Medical documentation--i.e., charting--is widely known to be crucial for patient care, billing, and legal protection, but it is simultaneously largely viewed as tedious, time-consuming busywork that takes clinicians away from patients, especially in the era of electronic health records (EHRs). There has been excellent but limited research on how writing skills (and thus, explicit writing instruction) influence both the charting experience and charting outcomes (Schryer, 1993; Opel & Hart-Davidson, 2019). In this project, I investigate how progress notes within EHRs could be improved if medical providers had more training in rhetoric and technical writing. Specifically, I focus on primary care, as primary-care providers have been shown to spend the most time on EHRs (Rotenstein et al, 2023). I draw upon a corpus of de-identified primary-care progress notes and the insights of primary-care providers, both sourced from clinics in rural Oregon. My major conclusions are that primary-care providers would benefit from being taught how to write with attention to audience and purpose and that rhetoricians of health and medicine have an opportunity to help improve patient charting.

The aim of this article was twofold: first, to introduce a design for a writing test intended for application in large-scale assessments of writing, and second, to experimentally examine the effects of employing a device for activating prior knowledge of topic and genre as a means of controlling construct-irrelevant variance and enhancing validity. An authentic, situated writing task was devised, offering students a communicative purpose and a defined audience. Two devices were utilized for the cognitive activation of topic and genre knowledge: an infographic and a genre model. The participants in this study were 162 fifth-grade students from Santiago de Chile, with 78 students assigned to the experimental condition (with activation device) and 84 students assigned to the control condition (without activation device). The results demonstrate that the odds of presenting good writing ability are higher for students who were part of the experimental group, even when controlling for text transcription ability, considered a predictor of writing. These findings hold implications for the development of large-scale tests of writing guided by principles of educational and social justice. • Genre and topic knowledge are forms of prior knowledge relevant to writing. • Higher odds for better writing in students exposed to prior knowledge activation. • Results support use of prior knowledge activation in standardized assessment.

Abstract This article focuses on student perceptions of their experiences in an ungraded classroom that uses engagement-based grading contracts (EBGCs). The assessment ecology is described in detail, and then the author shares student reflections on their experiences with EBGCs, which were collected in the form of an end-of-semester memo assignment. Comprehensively, students find EBGC use to be a positive and worthwhile assessment experience. While there is a learning curve involved, students appreciate the real-life approach to both labor and engagement on writing tasks, the amount of agency and choice built into the contract, and the ecology's incorporation of extensive written feedback in lieu of scores or points. Another key takeaway is its positive impact on student affect — especially in instances of students self-disclosing diagnoses of anxiety. Student-reported challenges to EBGC use are also discussed, including their own wrestling with ideas about past experiences with traditional grading, personal levels of motivation, and accountability. Overall, an engagement-based grading contract approach appears to be a pleasurable and accessible assessment option for teachers looking to pursue an ungraded approach in their writing classrooms.

Abstract This article offers a theory of action model for grading in first-year writing classes, as enacted at two public, suburban, Midwestern two-year colleges. First, it analyzes labor-based contract grading and specifications grading through this model, examining how these popular grading methods have manifested in unintended negative consequences for historically and multiply marginalized students. Then, it proposes a sociocognitive grading model designed to maximize course-level success rates for New Majority college students. The sociocognitive model was iteratively built on feminist standpoint theory, intersectional learning sciences, multilingual writing pedagogy, and disability studies. Thus far, student course-level success has improved, along with their learning in four domains of a robust writing construct: intrapersonal, interpersonal, cognitive, and health. While it does not prescribe specific patterns of response, this model nevertheless establishes an overall referential frame that holds the potential to incorporate empirically based best response practices.

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.

Abstract While ungrading is gaining traction within higher education, many teachers still struggle with applying ungrading systems successfully in their classrooms. This article is designed to bridge the gap between an ideological commitment to ungrading and pedagogical praxis by focusing on the ideologies that are embedded in ungrading systems. This represents an important shift from the focus on tools or methods to a focus on the habits of mind necessary to adapt ungrading to individual classrooms. This article claims that one of the key challenges to implementing ungrading stems from attempting to tack alternative assessment onto existing pedagogical frameworks. By utilizing a disability justice approach, the author offers a praxis-based primer to support educators in shifting their habits of mind to facilitate ungrading. First, the article asks readers to examine their ideological assumptions surrounding classrooms and demonstrates how these ideologies influence and interact with ungrading principles. Next, the article explores how a disability justice framework provides important contextualizing guidance to enacting ungrading ideologies. Finally, it synthesizes key lessons from disability justice theory and localizes them in examples of classroom praxis, demonstrating how a reorientation away from a “best practices” approach to ungrading facilitates successful implementation in the classroom.

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.

This study explores how prompting techniques, especially those integrated with rhetorical analysis results, may improve the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated business communication messages. I conducted an experiment to assess the effectiveness of these prompting techniques in the context of crafting a negative message generated with ChatGPT 3.5 ( n = 85). A multiple regression was calculated to explore prompting techniques’ impact on the negative message grades and how each technique influences the message grade. The results ( F(4, 80) = 31.84, p < .001), with an adjusted R2 = .595, indicate a positive relationship between prompting techniques and the effectiveness of AI-generated messages. This study also identified challenges related to students’ AI literacy. I conclude the study by recommending practical measures on how to incorporate AI into business and professional writing classrooms.

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.

Developing students’ source-based argument writing skills is a vital educational goal for the 21st-century information society. Consequently, researchers and educators continually seek ways to understand and improve students’ capacities for advancing arguments and synthesizing multiple documents, texts, or sources in a range of subject areas in secondary schools. This study examined differences between middle and high school students’ argument essays (N = 207) in multiple dimensions of source-based argument writing in history, the dimensions writing in history, and the relations of identified dimensions to overall writing quality. Using multivariate analysis of covariance, middle and high school students’ writing significantly varied in areas of writing related to language use, the presentation of ideas, and evidence use. Their writing varied less so for skills related to historical thinking, indicating a lack of development in these skills across secondary school. Findings from confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling showed a bifactor model with a general factor and 4 specific factors—Presentation of Ideas, Evidence Use, Language Use, and Historical Thinking—best represented writing in this genre, with the general factor strongly predicting holistic writing scores. Implications for both research and educational practice are discussed, including the importance of attending to developmental variation in discrete writing skills.

Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal email writing. Findings reveal the influences of communicative situation, L1 background, and L2 proficiency on pragmatic competence in email writing. First, L2 learners show a significantly lower degree of situational variability compared with ES teachers. Second, L1 backgrounds have a significant impact on L2 writing performance. Third, L2 learners with higher English proficiency tend to use more indirect request strategies, but they have not developed pragmatic competence to adjust their usage across written contexts. Findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications for developing writing competence of L2 learners, which should be attuned to diverse rhetorical expectations and individual needs.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are at the forefront of pedagogical considerations in classrooms across the academy. Many studies have spoken to the technology’s capacity to generate one-off texts in a variety of genres. This study complements those by inquiring into its capacity to generate compelling texts at scale. In this study, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a small corpus of generated texts in two genres and gauge it against novice and published academic writers along known dimensions of linguistic variation. Theoretically, we position and historicize ChatGPT as a writing technology and consider the ways in which generated text may not be congruent with established trajectories of writing development in higher education. Our study found that generated texts are more informationally dense than authored texts and often read as dialogically closed, “empty,” and “fluffy.” We close with a discussion of potentially explanatory linguistic features, as well as relevant pedagogical implications.

ABSTRACT The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) pose important questions for rhetorical theory and pedagogy. This article offers an overview of how LLMs like GPT work and a consideration of whether they should be considered rhetorical agents. To answer this question, the article considers structural and argumentative similarities in classical theorizations of rhetoric and the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. GPT’s particular method of encoding statistical patterns in language gives it some rudimentary semantics and reliably generates acceptable natural language output, so it should be considered to have a degree of rhetorical agency. But it is also badly limited by its restriction to written text, and an analysis of its interface shows that much of its rhetorical savvy is caused by the highly restricted rhetorical situation created by the ChatGPT interface.

ABSTRACT Despite seemingly broad acceptance within rhetorical theory, the category of the unconscious has remained understudied and misunderstood ever since Kenneth Burke first appropriated the concept from psychoanalysis, and his unquestioned commitment to conventional anthropocentric binaries continues to obscure the role and function of the unconscious within communication into this century. Offering a corrective reanalysis of the Freudian apparatus for contemporary rhetoricians, this article shows where Burke went wrong in his early encounter with psychoanalysis and suggests a vital alternative approach in the cybernetic recasting of Jacques Lacan, which suggests the possibility of an unconscious without Dramatism’s traditional humanist assumptions. In a lateral turn bringing this imagined dialogue between Burke and Lacan into our era, the article demonstrates how a Lacan-inflected posthumanist revision of rhetoric’s unconscious is better suited to address contemporary issues of mediated communication, such as the pedagogical import of AI and ChatGPT.

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.

The ability to carefully craft writing for an intended audience is crucial in creating persuasive rhetorical arguments. Learning to do so requires knowledge beyond IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion). Many graduate students learn by mimicking this structure, yet lack audience awareness and overuse jargon, producing low-readability texts. What is more, they increasingly rely on AI-based writing tools that mimic the same structures that are already often poorly written. The results are too often uncommunicative articles that fail to persuade the intended audience. Therefore, we suggest writing pedagogy includes a deeper understanding of effective written science communication using the rhetorical triangle. As graduate students most readily understand the importance of logos, i.e., the scientific content, our job as writing instructors should be to emphasize the role a carefully aimed pathos and ethos plays in producing highly readable, persuasive, publishable articles. To this end, this paper first presents a brief background on the IMRaD structure before outlining the much-overlooked role of the rhetorical triangle in scientific writing. Specifically, we offer a detailed table for graduate students to use in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).