Although self-assessment is an important genre in both the academy and the workplace, it is often static. The resulting fixed identities are problematic in a creative economy that requires fluidity. Drawing on the work of Carruthers and Goffman, among others, we argue that memory and meditation, encompassing inventory and invention and coupled with rhetorical performance, constitute dynamic self-assessment.

Over the past two decades, studies have examined how social contexts influence the composition and production of workplace documents. But much remains to be known about what happens when writers move from one social context to another—from the academy to the workplace, for instance. This article demonstrates that students in scientific and technical communication classrooms learn what they are taught about composing. They take this knowledge with them to the workplace, where they apply it, practically and theoretically, and improve their understanding of it with repeated use.

This paper builds on the calls and responses of the last two decades to methodological interdisciplinarity. It proposes that as we set goals for the next decade's research, we ask ourselves who benefits from our work. Scholars motivated by their desire to contribute to the study of rhetoric and to its pedagogy are certainly beneficiaries. And researchers interested in building bridges between their schools and neighborhoods are as well. But in addition to those who belong to professional organizations, attend academic conferences, and read journals, who benefits? I hope here to suggest that those members of our communities who participate in our research projects are some of the most important beneficiaries, or users, of the information our projects offer. I propose ways to work toward a more reciprocal research methodology by including project participants in discussions about the purpose and design of our research before we launch it and as we navigate it. To demonstrate how reciprocity like this might work, I describe human factors, usability, and participatory design theory and explain how they have been useful in my own work. Combining these principles from professional communication offers a new approach to research, which I call "user-centered" and which can be valuable to rhetorical studies for a variety of practical and philosophical reasons.