This article examines what activism looks like in an age of "deep writing." As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices.

In this article, we draw on focus group interviews collected for the Wayfinding Project to explore how university alumni orient themselves as writers while participating in social media after graduation. By looking at alumni's self descriptions of their writing processes across public networks, we are able to trace pathways that recognize the rhetorical and communicative intentions of users, while also acknowledging the roles that serendipity, creativity, and the unexpected play in shaping these literate practices. Specifically, we point to how these alumni describe their experiences as they adapt to addressing audiences across different platforms and confront the “reach” of those platforms for engaging unexpected audiences. Several focus group participants use the term “branding” as a way to describe how they conceive of their writing across multiple social networks. These participants describe their public, networked writing as a form of managing their identities at the same time that they are “branding” themselves to manage the expectations of multiple audiences. In sum, our research shows us how the unexpected audiences generated through social media participation operate in tension with writers’ deliberate shaping of their messages and their self-presentation.

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In this essay, we map out four major approaches to the study of writing experiences: (a) worlds apart, (b) literacy in the wild, (c) ecologies and networks, and (d) transfer. We examine how the primary metaphors used in each approach have contributed to our field’s understanding of writing. In focusing on specific dimensions of writing, each framework privileges a different aspect of the writing process, writing development, and/or writers’ context(s). Building on these approaches, we propose the concept of wayfinding to emphasize how writers navigate their own writing development, skills acquisition, and changing knowledge about writing over time. Wayfinding offers a metaphor that resonates with recent work on lifelong learning and meaningful writing. Among other characteristics, wayfinding emphasizes how writers encounter a continuous potentiality in writing and how they navigate unanticipated challenges and opportunities.

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This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008 Bacey , J. , & Barry , T. ( 2008 ). A comparison study of the proper use of Hester-Dendy® samplers to achieve maximum diversity and population size of benthic macroinvertebrates Sacramento Valley, California (Report No. EH08-2) . Sarcramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]; Levine et al., 2005 Levine , J. , Kim , D. , Goh , K. S. , Ganapathy , C. , Hsu , J. , Feng , H. , & Lee , P. ( 2005 ). Surface and ground water monitoring of pesticides used in the Red Imported Fire Ant Control Program (Report EH05-02) . Sacramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.