There is an assumption in education that allowing students to choose their writing topics and positions is beneficial; however, there is little research to support this belief, particularly from the students’ perspectives. In the present study, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with students at a large university in the Southwest of the United States after they completed two in-class argumentative writing assignments in a course on exceptional children, one where they chose their writing position and one where they were assigned their writing position. As a group, these 20 students (13 female, 7 male) were above average writers in their first to third year of study, and the majority of them were education majors (70%), followed by arts and sciences (25%), and design and the arts (5%). The interview protocol focused upon their shifting perspectives on the underlying motivational construct of choice related to this and other writing assignments. Taking a grounded theory approach to thematic analysis, findings indicated that having choice in writing was important because it allowed students to write about topics that they find easier, more interesting, and possess greater knowledge. Choice also allowed students to demonstrate their autonomy, which they believed, influenced their motivation and writing quality/grades. While the university students in this study generally preferred choice, a majority of them identified benefits of not choosing, including opportunities to improve writing tenacity, enhance their writing skills, and achieve new perspectives.

Although healthcare providers’ decision-making is informed by data and proto­cols for care, recent research suggests that individuals’ intuition—which integrates previous experiences with situational awareness and sensory knowledge—also plays a large role in directing action. Drawing on two different datasets from research on EMS providers and nurses in clinical nursing simulations, this article intro­duces a taxonomy for the various cues that trigger intuitive action and unpacks how intuition manifests at different stages of care. We argue that healthcare providers rhetorically navigate a wide range of both external and internal intuitive cues, and that external cues draw on sensory engagement with bodies, technology, and the environment as well as collaborative interpersonal exchanges. Intuition, then, is more than an unconscious ability to inform action—it is a type of intelligence that develops from experience, and from the ability to be attuned to the surrounding environment and material conditions of a workplace. By creating a taxonomy for articulating intuition’s complex and diverse cues, this article aims to provide both rhetoricians of health and medicine and healthcare providers with an impetus for recognizing and valuing its key role in patient care.

This persuasion brief suggests that the rhetorical concepts of techne and rhetorical work facilitate the creation of public health crisis communication. To illustrate this claim, we present findings from a case study with the Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, a transdisciplinary group that collaborated with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola crisis. The team created multimodal documentation to support healthcare providers as they prepared to treat patients and crafted communication to alleviate the fear among health workers and the public caused by the threat of Ebola. Ultimately, we frame public health crisis communication as a rhetorical endeavor guided by a focus on failure, situated expertise, and techne. This focus pushes specialists to tend to the processes involved in creating a response, and it highlights how gut feelings factor into the process of designing and implementing a public health crisis intervention.

In this paper, we provide a mental-chronometry measurement (reaction time, RT) and a mathematical model to support the hypothesis that writing increases long-term memory (LTM) consolidation. Twenty-five subjects read short passages, wrote or spoke summaries of the texts, and performed a word-recognition episodic memory task. In the recognition task, participants responded faster in the written condition than in the spoken condition. We fit 15 drift-diffusion models to the accuracy and RT data to explore which components of the memory retrieval process reflect the learning effect of writing. Model selection methods showed that the nondecision parameter accounts for this effect, suggesting that initial stages of learning through writing are associated with fast episodic-memory retrieval. We suggest that the current approach could be used as a tool to compare different models of writing to learn. Furthermore, we show how combining mental chronometry, evidence-accumulation models of behavioral data, and dynamic causal models of functional magnetic resonance imaging could further the goal of understanding how writing affects learning. With a broader perspective, this approach provides a feasible experimental link between the field of writing to learn and the cognitive neurosciences.

This paper examines how the cognitive framework of collective mindfulness complements tenets of user experience in public health crisis communication. Collective mindfulness attunes an organization into preemptively identifying and avoiding potential failures that can have adverse safety and public relations outcomes. To illustrate the connection between this cognitive framework and user experience, this article shares findings from a case study with the 2014 Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, whose primary goals were to improve the usability of Ebola personal protective equipment protocols and to prepare healthcare providers for a U.S. Ebola crisis. Based on a grounded theory investigation, this article suggests that the collective mindfulness principles of deference to expertise, resilience, and refusal to simplify complex procedures informed the team's ability to avoid a catastrophic communication failure. Additionally, these principles allowed the team to attune to key user experience principles, including addressing user context and user limitations.

Solving Problems in Technical Communication follows up Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber's influential 2004 collection of previously published work, Central Works in Technical Communication....

This article examines memory and distributed cognition involved in the writing practices of emergency medical services (EMS) professionals. Results from a 16-month study indicate that EMS professionals rely on distributed cognition and three kinds of memory: individual, collaborative, and professional. Distributed cognition and the three types of memory reduce cognitive workload during a 911 response, and they help evoke information as an EMS professional composes the legally binding patient care report. In addition to presenting results, the article details the author’s interaction with two institutional review boards, which influenced the study’s methods. The article argues that scholars should conduct more research on the collaborative and distributed nature of memory as it relates to workplace writing practices. Furthermore, the article calls for developing writing research methods that involve participant recollection.

Drawing on pandemic flu metaphor research and building on previous metaphor theory, this article uses rhetorical analysis to examine and move toward understanding the metaphors surrounding H1N1 and swine flu. To understand these metaphors, I created two Google Alerts for the terms “H1N1” and “swine flu” and collected data using these Google Alerts from November 10, 2009 to December 10, 2009. I then examined the headlines and content found in the news articles, blogs, and websites from the Google Alerts, and grouped the metaphors used in these headlines and content thematically. These themes work toward providing a rhetoric of pandemic flu, a rhetoric that might assist health care recipients in being more aware of how metaphors used in electronic media create meaning for health concerns.

This essay examines the impact of difference in the service-learning classroom and offers an overview of three approaches to creating community while engaging students in dialogues on difference. The authors reflect on the local pedagogies they create in response to the anger, tensions, and challenges that arise In the classroom and at the service learning site. By composing this essay together, the authors hope to embody the collaborative nature of service learning courses.

Three formats for presenting a number of similar procedures in printed instructions were compared in an experiment: separate lists, an integrated list, and a table. Participants had to operate a device on the computer screen, following procedures that were presented in one of these three formats. The integrated list format and the table format were expected to provide an overview of the features common to the similar procedures, which would help incidental learning of the procedures. However, the experiment did not yield such results. None of the formats scored significantly better than the other in the augmentation of incidental learning. Since instructions in integrated list format take more time to read in the beginning than the other formats, the integrated list format can be considered as the least favorable format.

An introduction to text processing is intended for computer science students with a background in computer terminology and programming. The author discusses various aspects of the way a computer handles a particular document or text and how computer scientists can make the computer more efficient and user-friendly. The design of computer software is discussed from the standpoint of the programmer and of the user in both natural and programming languages.

Designing usable texts contains a wealth of information and advice for document preparation. The book covers theoretical and practical aspects of writing, editing, and evaluating a document and also includes information concerning the use of graphics in text design.