Current cognitive and sociocognitive models of writing conceptualize writing processes as complex interactions between multidimensional mechanisms that activate a writer’s social motivations, psychomotor processes, and cognitive resources in order to engage in writing. These models have been developed through years of empirical research employing a variety of data channels, such as keystroke logging; however, research about mobile writing processes have been understudied. This paper presents a study of mobile writing processes that used keystroke-logging methods in order to expand scholarship of writing processes into the realm of mobile writing. By examining how participants ( N = 10) wrote on mobile devices at the keystroke level, as well as combining textual and keystroke analysis to examine context text-message (SMS) composition, this study argues for theoretically framing mobile writing as an embodied performance.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the theoretical concept of meta-argumentative fallacy is useful. The authors argue for this along two lines. The first is that with the concept, the authors may clarify the concept of meta-argumentation. That is, by theorizing where meta-argument goes wrong, the authors may capture the norms of this level of argumentation. The second is that the concept of meta-argumentative fallacies provides an explanatory model for a variety of errors in argument otherwise difficult to theorize. The authors take three as exemplary: the straw man, both sides, and free speech fallacies.

ABSTRACT Tense is the clue to the discovery of the meaning of time. Speaking hints at thinking, and language suggests a way to conceive of philosophical concepts. Here, the universality of temporality is that out of which the grammar of tense and the concept of time first come. Temporality, however, is not simply present in tense or time. On the contrary, temporality’s way of being—like being’s—is implication: tense is implied by how the verbality of verbs can be spoken; time, by how temporal beings come to presence—just as being is implied in Greek, and many other languages. But then, the habits of modern Western language and philosophy must be radically reformed in order to learn how to imply again, and to think and speak about time and being as implications.

Abstract Antilynching activists in the United States have agitated to establish criminal civil rights violations for lynching for more than a century. Ida B. Wells, a renowned antilynching activist, tapped into and expanded upon existing transnational advocacy networks to mainstream antilynching rhetorics across borders in the late nineteenth century. This essay analyzes Wells's dispatches to the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean during her 1894 transatlantic antilynching tour. I argue that Wells provides an example of how rhetors can mainstream social justice issues through transnational advocacy networks by refuting and recirculating key arguments, which in turn amplifies them to exert pressure on potential change agents. As activists work to stem modern-day violence that persists with frightening similarities to the lynching violence of the 1890s, Wells's strategy of amplification provides further insight into transnational rhetorical movement and efforts to mainstream social justice issues across borders.

Abstract This essay contends that the red MAGA hat in the modern conservative movement plays off Donald Trump's populist construction of his supporters as victims by creating opportunities for the performance of what we call “rehearsed victimhood.” As an enactment of vulnerability that allows individuals in historically powerful positions to claim marginalized status by manifesting material evidence of their subjugation, we argue that rehearsed victimhood relies on weaponized polysemy to bait critics, the cooptation of civil rights rhetoric, and acts of humiliation and violent self-sacrifice. We illustrate the performance of rehearsed victimhood through a close reading of media coverage of numerous incidents where Trump supporters claimed discrimination after being attacked, fired, or ridiculed for wearing a MAGA hat.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

This article asserts that auditory cues can be categorized by rhetorical function into the categories of visual rhetoric, defined by Amare and Manning under Peirce’s Ten Classes of Sign, understanding visual rhetoric to include both images and text. This article expands this definition to aural-visual rhetoric, including auditory elements as visual rhetoric to analyze multimodal Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), demonstrating this method using the opening tutorial scene from Portal 2.

AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.

AbstractWriting assessment and social justice rely largely on success-trajectory narratives, which sideline productive failure as a means of resisting normative futurity-based modes of education and policy. This essay offers an alternative perspective on failure in writing assessment and social justice by illustrating how relying on rhetoric as a hope and means for positive change can undermine aims of social justice and a critical education. By examining the queer (non)possibilities for assessment and acceptance without dependence on constant improvement and success, instructors may find more inclusive ways of thinking about the value of rhetoric's role in a generative acceptance of difference.

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

ABSTRACT The logic of humor has been acknowledged as an essential dimension of every joke. However, what is the logic of jokes, exactly? The modern theories of humor maintain that jokes are characterized by their own logic, dubbed “pseudo,” “playful,” or “local,” which has been the object of frequent criticisms. This article intends to address the limitations of the current perspectives on the logic of jokes by proposing a rhetorical approach to humorous texts. Building on the traditional development of Aristotle’s almost neglected view of jokes as surprising enthymemes, the former are analyzed as rhetorical arguments. Like enthymemes, jokes are characterized by natural inferences that can be represented as topics, and quasi-formalized in argumentation theory as argumentation schemes. Like rhetorical arguments, jokes express a reason in support of different types of conclusions and proceed from distinct kinds of reasoning and semantic relations.

This study analyzes the visualization of census data in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to 1925. I examine how visual strategies were used to construct an American identity by contrasting the “native” population with the “other”—new immigrants and African Americans, which were visualized as undesirable counterparts. By defining the “other,” the Atlases created a pan ethnic identity of the “native white” population, established a racial hierarchy, and hardened the division between old and new immigrants. The study develops a rhetorical framework for understanding how data design is used to marginalize racially and ethnically minority groups.

This article examines visuals used in the reporting of the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in order to explore the use of different image forms and genres in communicating health information to distinct audiences. By tracing an informational report through several publication types, the use of different image forms and rhetorical genres are observed, as is the robustness and flexibility of these categorizations.

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

Though the remote internship is certainly not a new phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of this model for undergraduate experiential learning. As we consider this shift, we must evaluate how to best assist students completing remote internships. In this article, we argue that infrastructure offers a useful framework for understanding students’ internship experience and corresponding professionalization. We present two case studies of student remote internship experiences, analyzing areas of challenge and success through the infrastructural areas of writing projects, communication, and logistics. We offer recommendations for faculty working with remote student interns to promote positive learning experiences.

Initiating and continuing rhetorical invention is an important practice for teams seeking to innovate. Workplace professionals demonstrate one potential model of rhetorical innovation by instantiating four rhetorical moves that make up a broader practice of difference-driven inquiry (DDI). But it remains unknown how DDI, as a model of innovative rhetoric, can be taught in the technical and professional communication classroom. Over the course of two studies, the author investigated a pedagogy attempting to teach practices for innovation rhetoric. The results show that the pedagogy can be effective but that more scaffolding is needed.

Successfully adapting to organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis necessitated the effective deployment of technical communication texts delineating the expectations and structures for guiding behavior and interactions. A dearth of system-wide familiarity with changes in modalities has disrupted expectations and impacted engagement. During acute events, business and technical communicators will probably not be the initial source of transition messaging. Instead, this task will fall on managers, faculty, and other front-line communicators. The authors present pragmatic recommendations for adapting familiar discourses, semiotics, and mental scripts so that communicators can more effectively intervene during crises to ease organizational transitions and decrease uncertainty.

The present article examines collaborative writing in organizational consulting and training, where writing takes place as part of a group discussion assignment and is carried out by using digital writing technologies. In the training, the groups use digital tablets as their writing device in order to document their answers in the shared digital platform. Using multimodal conversation analysis as a method, the article illustrates the way writing is interactionally accomplished in this setting where digital writing intertwines with face-to-face interaction as the groups jointly formulate a documentable written entry for specific institutional purposes. The results show how writing is managed in situated ways and organized by three specific aspects: access, publicity, and broader organizational practice. The article advances prior understanding of the embodied nature of writing and writing with technologies by demonstrating how the body and the material and social nature of writing technologies intertwine within situated social interaction.

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader’s comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels.

Abstract This essay argues that the serial murderer's rituals are homologous to those that structure the more quotidian or administrative, but equally sadistic, forms of violence against fungible bodies in US civil society. At stake in this homology is recognizing that the sadism publics so readily associate with the depraved serial killer are present in the many cruelties that such publics enthusiastically condone and enjoy. Serial murder is a modernist ritual among many others, and its capacity to induce affective investment from consuming publics, just as surely as the killer himself, is a function of what I am calling sadistic form. To clarify this argument, the essay reads serial killer Ted Bundy's many crimes as ritualistic enactments of sadistic form, as well as the varied responses during his 1989 execution. In so doing, I illustrate how different rituals function to obscure or amplify the sadism to which they give expression.

Abstract On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol, demanding the head of Vice-President Mike Pence while challenging the results of a fair presidential election. Amid the shock, US journalists—finding few words to describe the severity of the moment—dusted off the old term: “banana republic.” Banana republics are countries whose economy depends on the export of a finite natural resource, like bananas. By design, the ruling elites of banana republics work alongside foreign, multinational corporations to benefit from the republic's human labor. Banana republics are typically governed by a military dictator appointed by a foreign power and elected through illegitimate elections. Notably, dictators ascend to power through military and/or populist violence, like coups d’état and magnicide. Among the reckonings that US Americans encountered the days following the riots was the idea that their country had been relegated beside those so-called “banana republics.” Indeed, the public display of violence brought about by a populist insurrection indicated a failure of the highest rank. In this essay, I ask: “What are the implications of treating violence seriously as a rhetorical event?” I suggest that referring to the United States as a “banana republic” due to populist violence against sacrosanct, democratic institutions requires that US Americans open themselves to the possibility of unexceptionalism, a recognition that—like a medicine—few are willing to stomach. I offer the idea that Donald Trump is the first Latin American president of the United States, and, in turn, that the United States has opened itself to a vulnerability whose damage is unknowable. To do so, I revisit two works by Jacques Derrida: Autoimmunity (2003), an interview where he describes the paradox of post-9/11 counterterrorist violence as autoimmunity, or, how organisms attack themselves in a quasi-suicidal fashion; and Plato's Pharmacy (1968), where he demonstrates an approach to unveiling the unseen ideological traces that haunt particular words. I ask: what is the unseen, terroristic force concealed by the claim that the United States is a banana republic? I explore the Capitol riots as a new “major event” (a televised moment playing on loop and accompanied by specific phrases), where a new type of terrorist uses state-sanctioned freedoms to inflict violence upon itself. I then draw from Chilean poets to provide scholars a lesson on the role of violence in the forming of national identity.

Abstract This essay serves as the introductory essay for this special issue on “The Rhetoric of Violence.” In conversation with the six other essays in this special issue, I suggest that scholars in our field need to focus more explicitly on the rhetorical purposes of physical violence. To support that suggestion, I offer a working definition of how we might conceptualize violence broadly and then distinguish physical violence from two others kinds that rhetorical scholars have been studying for years now—rhetorical violence and structural violence. Distinguishing that first mode of violence as worthy of more of our attention. I then argue that the primary purpose of most physical violence is to affectively and symbolically define and reinforce individual and group identities.

This article offers an approach to providing identity-specific routes for engagement in pro-Black futures in distributed ways. We outline a model designed for Black practitioners and non-Black practitioners in professional environments to navigate their complex relationships given the historical, cultural, and social nature of coalitional work. We demonstrate this model as a possible pathway for situated and distributed everyday coalitional work through reflective and introspective storytelling based on individual and shared positionality.

Fierce competition has made innovation increasingly necessary for business success, and this has increased the importance of user-based innovation strategies like design thinking (DT). While many studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) have explored how DT can be used pedagogically, no studies have done this through investigating how DT is used as a workplace composing process. This study does exactly that. First, it presents the current state of research on pedagogical uses of DT in TPC, and then it builds upon those suggestions with an empirical study that chronicles on how two web design firms use DT to make websites. My main suggestion is to teach DT as a recursive process that allows students transcend potentially incorrect assumptions built into design tasks through gathering data not only from users, but from clients as well.

This article presents an ethnographic study on the user experience (UX) design of the photo- and video-editing apps of millennial and Generation Z participants from different cultural groups. The case study calls attention to the implications of rhetorical misrepresentations of reality that photo- and video-editing apps afford and encourages future large-scale studies on the negative psychological and behavioral impacts such apps can have on users’ psychology, behaviors, and well-being. The authors use frameworks in virtue ethics to argue that despite slight variations, photo and video app UX has ethical implications that can negatively impact young adult users. For example, the study suggests that the photo and video app features tend to subvert the traditional Chinese virtues of modesty, honesty, and the middle way and that hyperbolic and playful designs can cause addictive behaviors.

This article historicizes the impact of the Common Rule, which mandates the existence of Institutional Review Boards, on technical and professional communication (TPC) research with a focus on the principle of justice. Justice is discussed as a complex principle that must be internally and coherently balanced along several axes in the design, implementation, and promulgation of research in technical communication. The author proposes that with shared language, which in this article begins with one principle—justice—TPC researchers can more plainly articulate their positions in the development and dissemination of scholarship, thereby adding coherence to ethical work in the 21st century.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learning. This classroom research investigated multimodal composition using the virtual paint program Google Tilt Brush™ with 47 elementary school students (ages 10–11 years) using a head-mounted display and motion sensors. Multimodal analysis of video, screen capture, and think-aloud data attended to sensory-motor affordances and constraints for embodiment. Modal constraints were the immateriality of the virtual text, virtual disembodiment, and somatosensory mismatch between the virtual and physical worlds. Potentials for new forms of embodied multimodal representation in VR involved extensive bodily, haptic, and locomotive movement. The findings are significant given that research of embodied cognition points to sensorimotor action as the basis for language and communication.

Abstract This essay examines the cybernetic rhetoric of Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth, a cybernetician and prominent Mexican intellectual. Published in a journal reaffirming Mexico's political image in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, his essay offered a counter to one of the government's rationales for the violence enacted against the movimiento estudiantil at Tlatelolco—the influence of el extranjero. Rosenblueth's essay evinced a mediating path between complete disavowal of Mexico's statist tendencies and support for the Mexican state in post-Tlatelolco Mexico. Yet, in invoking cybernetics as a rhetoric for public intervention in this moment of crisis, I argue that Rosenblueth's use of cybernetics both empowered his proposals calling for an adjustment to perceptions of el extranjero and supported the survival of a strong Mexican state enacting violence against it. I conclude from my reading of Rosenblueth's essay that the political possibilities of cybernetic rhetoric lie not only on the cybernetician's ideological commitments or political context(s) but by a plasticity constitutive of cybernetics.

Abstract Donald Trump's tweets on writing, whether his own or the print media's, typically employ an extreme form of rhetoric involving the manipulation of meaning and construction of self-serving arguments. The practice of close reading suggests that these tweets often display several types of rhetorical operation, which distort the message through the amalgamation, expansion, contraction, and reversal of meaning to create expressions like “the Fake News.” These polysemous expressions are then combined to form word groups, all centered on the self but each designed to meet a particular narcissistic need, from self-promotion and self-proclaimed victory to self-defense and self-casting as the Messiah. Trump's tweets often take the form of a triangular configuration, composed of the writer to proclaim, an adversary to be conquered, and a witness to validate the victory. By putting at least two of the three actors into play within its reduced space, the tweet becomes a miniature psychodrama—scripted, cast, and staged by the narcissist for an audience of kindred spirit.

Abstract When side-by-side photographs of the 2009 and 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration crowds circulated after President Trump's inauguration, few doubted what they saw: the crowd in 2017 was significantly smaller than it had been eight years earlier. Whereas popular discourse around the photo obsessed over size of the crowds, I argue that differences in contrast, color, and clarity suggest a different narrative than the logic of quantity: Trump will return an orderly, white national body, cleansed of Obama's unruly, sepia swarm. This essay re-reads a key moment of recent U.S. visual politics, turning what came to be read as either a joke or a preview of the “death of facts” as something more sinister: a visual harbinger of Trump's white supremacist program.

ABSTRACTAssuming that withdrawal is ontological, no method of inquiry will breach the “essence” of an object. As such, this article raises a question of onto-epistemological access to complicate the development of recent rhetorical theories and rhetorical method/ologies informed by object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms. This article wonders about the drive to know and to feel forwarded in these rhetorical method/ologies without discussing how things hide from other things and from themselves, how things elude critics, and how scholars access others through ethnographic and embodied methodologies. Explicating epistemist and anti-epistemist approaches to the question of onto-epistemological access, this article makes a modest proposal for rhetoric scholars to conjure rhetorics of unavailable diversities to remake the gap between knowledge and reality again and again.

Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of information disorders which have permeated the internet. Scholars have made significant progress in defining and theorizing information literacy and its various aspects, as well as in designing programs to help students acquire the relevant skills for evaluating information. Nevertheless, further exploration is needed, for example to understand the roles of criteria in information evaluation. The present study draws on scholarship in discourse and rhetoric studies to suggest how discursive strategies, a key concept in these convergent areas, can inform approaches to information evaluation. To illustrate this improved approach, this study explores the case of a recent piece of fake news that involves both text and image and has circulated widely as a digital flyer on social media.

An instructor of undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses creates a mind-mapping activity for syllabus review to engage her students.

Abstract This article discusses how we have used undergraduate research (UR) to foster habits of mind associated with information literacy (IL). Our strategy is course based and involves students as potential contributors to the Graphic Narrative Database (GND), a digital work in progress. Presenting students with focused parameters for their research and with the prospect of an authentic audience for their writing, the assignment provides students with many opportunities to explore our complex information landscape as practitioners. Students deploy a wide array of strategies to gather and share information about a body of texts that are themselves richly multimodal.

AbstractThis article describes a creative public humanities project undertaken to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that transformed the entire novel into an erasure poem made by incarcerated and nonincarcerated participants. The article traces its genesis, outlines the pedagogies that informed it, and closely reads one image from the erasure poem as a touchstone for reflecting on the lessons learned from the project. It also addresses the absence of critical discussions of failure in the discourse of the public humanities.

AbstractThis article reports on an undergraduate course centered on autobiographies written by people who manage mental illnesses. Students learned about neurodiversity from multiple perspectives, examined social and medical models of mental illness, developed interpretive skills, and advanced their ability to write compellingly about both literature and their own experiences.

ABSTRACT In the West’s Will to Know and its attendant rhetorical forms, speech has been related to silence in primarily three ways. In rhetoric and dialectic, speech pursues speech; in rhetorical education, silence pursues speech; and in sacred, ascetic rhetoric, silence pursues silence. These three relations of speech to silence as a form of knowledge in the Western rhetorical tradition leave a fourth untraversed. Yet to be explored is speech in pursuit of silence. This essay turns to the Buddhist tradition of rhetoric and dialectic to identify a form of knowledge where speech—negation—pursues silence. I then trace the same model of negatory speech in pursuit of silence in the long-repressed practice of sophistic antilogos.

ABSTRACT How can one sum up an argument in 150 words? If one can, then the argument is in no need to be explicated over an essay. This is the conundrum at the heart of procedures that govern “what cannot be said.” This conundrum has two roots: one is the neoliberal assent to managerial procedures whereby a procedure inserted in a debate closes it up; the other is a perverse recourse to “conversation,” which is tantamount to impose an idiom as an ideal of virtue. Both are summary and summarizing speech acts that cast opposition as blasphemy. This essay explores the assertoric, apodictic, and euphemistic modes by which “what cannot be said” materializes into “what must not be thought.”

ABSTRACT This essay meditates on the entanglement of history and memory with forgetfulness, with silencing, with what is before or outside speech. Recalling along the way a few of the manifold varieties of the unthinkable made manifest in recent events, it notes the same mute iteration that led Freud to the death drive, only to be troubled once again by the very same repetitions enfolded in the diagnosis of cultural malaise Freud built upon his insight. Turning to Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money for an alternative, non-psychoanalytic account of unconscious purpose as a trans-individual, cultural phenomenon, it arrives once again at the hypertrophic life-technologies of the modern—and at Simmel’s account of money as the ultimate being without qualities, “the most extreme … configuration of Geist” itself, which so thoroughly underpins ways of living that, obscuring dimensions of value that cannot be quantified, silently hum on in the face of catastrophe.

The virtual museum tour has claimed new audiences during the pandemic, but not all virtual tours are created equal. First, this paper will explore the world of virtual museums and UX scholarship. Secondly, the paper will propose a viable set of options in determining effectiveness of virtual museums. Thirdly, the paper will discuss specific examples of UX design among museum virtual exhibits offered currently, specifically those that do not require any additional downloads or software. Finally, the paper intends to discuss the implications of high quality UX design within the realm of virtual museum tour.

As infographics are implicated in racist policies like redlining, we need to decolonize the genre. But previous studies have found that infographics’ panopticism—their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues—makes them tend to support hegemonic power structures in spite of their designers’ intentions. A way out of this dilemma can be located in the first attempt to decolonize the infographic: W.E.B. Du Bois's series depicting Black life in the United States, created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This topological analysis of Du Bois's decolonial project reveals both problematic and promising avenues for our own attempts to decolonize the infographic.

In this study, we examined burst length and its relation with working memory, attentional control, transcription skills, discourse oral language, and writing quality, using data from English-speaking children in Grade 2 ( N = 177; Mage = 7.19). Results from structural equation modeling showed that burst length was related to writing quality after accounting for transcription skills, discourse oral language, working memory, and attentional control. Burst length completely mediated the relations of attentional control and handwriting fluency to writing quality, whereas it partially mediated the relations of working memory and spelling to writing quality. Discourse oral language had a suppression effect on burst length but was positively and independently related to writing quality. Working memory had an indirect relation to burst length via transcription skills, whereas attentional control had a direct and indirect relation. These results suggest roles of domain-general cognitions and transcription skills in burst length, and reveal the nature of their relations to writing quality.