With their timely, interactive nature and wide public access, social media have provided a new platform that empowers stakeholders and corporations to interact in crisis communication. This study investigates crisis communication strategies and stakeholders’ emotions in response to a real corporate crisis—the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214—in order to enhance our understanding of socially mediated crisis communication. The authors examine 8,530 responses from Chinese stakeholders to crisis communication on the Chinese microblogging Web site Sina Weibo. Their findings suggest that the integrated use of accommodative and defensive communication strategies in the early stage of postcrisis communication prevented escalation of the crisis.

A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their experiences contextualized, enhanced, and complicated their theoretical knowledge of public rhetoric and community literacy. Inspired by her students’ reflections, the faculty co-author issues a call to graduate programs in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and technical communication to develop a conscious commitment to graduate students’ civic engagement by supporting opportunities to learn, teach, and research with community partners.

Drawing on an earlier study that views CEO communication as an important strategic tool, this study analyzes the content of CEO messages on Web sites of major corporations in Greater China to reveal their extratextual and intratextual characteristics. The study suggests that the language style employed in these messages, including the linguistic characteristics, regional themes, and interlingual themes, is associated with a corporate communication strategy that is underpinned by CEOs’ beliefs and rooted in cultural values. The findings enhance our understanding of how CEOs view their stakeholders and the content that they include in their messages to stakeholders in order to compete in this digital age.

Over the past three decades, the World Health Organization has negotiated a global consensus among activists, governments, and the pharmaceutical industry with regard to the human rights of persons with AIDS, and those at highest risk of contracting HIV. More recently, epidemiologic modelers have proposed a “treatment as prevention” in which strategies like safe sex and harm reduction are considered unnecessary because mass HIV testing and aggressive maintenance of individual with HIV are believed sufficient to drive down population level viral load, thereby decreasing the individual odds of encounter a person with infectious HIV. This article considers the historical evolution of the human rights approach to HIV, and analyzes the loss in rights and dignity that may accrue from a shift toward a population-level approach to prevention.

This article reports a study of one high school senior’s process of academic bullshitting as she wrote an analytic essay interpreting Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. The construct of bullshit has received little scholarly attention; although it is known as a common phenomenon in academic speech and writing, it has rarely been the subject of empirical research. This study is comprised of a protocol analysis of one writer as she attempted to produce an academic essay on a topic in which her understanding of the play’s content was insufficient for the task of producing the essay. The coding system identified subcodes within the major categories of content, genre, and process that enabled the researchers to infer what is involved in academic bullshitting. The analysis found that, in the absence of sufficient content knowledge, a writer familiar in discourse conventions may employ knowledge of the genre of academic writing and processes for producing generic features to create the impression that her content knowledge is adequate. The study concludes with a discussion of the phenomenon of academic bullshitting and its implications for teaching and learning academic writing.

Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years, it turned its attention to validity. Overall, the field has exhibited a tension between reliability and validity, with the latter increasingly being conceptualized as involving a whole set of considerations that need to be theorized.

An assessment project aimed at examining transfer of learning from English 101 to a subsequent psychology course provided insight on transfer and on student metacognition and also created a rich opportunity to exchange scholarship and ideas between disciplines.

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

The propagation and mainstream acceptance of the Internet has become a hot topic addressed in media, business, and scholarly environments. The gender implications of technology are studied in various ways across the disciplines of communications, gender studies, and technology and society. This study overviews and summarizes articles dealing with gender implications of the Internet in journals in these fields. The analysis identified 132 articles during the period of 1995–2003 in 28 publications in which frequencies, trends, and potential gaps were assessed using quantitative and qualitative meta-analysis. Most of the research in this area is being done in technology publications (59.7% of articles). Women's usage of the Internet is the most frequently studied level of participation. Results indicates that the survey method was the most predominant, but various qualitative methods are often employed. Notable themes included those of equal access yet unequal participation, the existence of both negative and positive aspects of the Internet, and the dichotomy of online/offline activities. The purpose of this study was to encourage interest in performing continued research on this topic as women's Internet access meets and exceeds that of men.

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Examines the collaborative discourse practices of the Red River Writing Project Teacher Research Group (RRWPTRG) as well as the processes by which this diverse group of classroom teachers developed into a discourse community of teacher researchers.

Claims personal narrative essays, although controversial, touch a unique chord in listeners and in readers. Suggest incorporating critical thinking and modeling by the instructor into personal narrative essay assignments.

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