Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the “tool-based interview” (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused textual disruptions of DBIs, TBIs, by altering authors’ writing tools, disrupt conventionalized writing processes, an approach useful when access to texts is limited for security, privacy, confidentiality, or proprietary reasons. We illustrate this method by describing its use in the development of Journaling , a digital tool for intelligence analysts. After describing our research context and procedures, we describe three sample disruptions from our interviews with intelligence practitioners and the knowledge elicited through these. We conclude with a comparison of the knowledge elicited by our TBIs with that from DBIs and discuss the limitations of each in light of recent work on tacit knowledge.

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team’s related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how scientists conceptualize and adapt their multimodal writing for specialized scientific audiences as well as lay audiences interested in the work of scientific inquiry. Three concepts— meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—were used to analyze the multimodal strategies that scientists employ when composing for different audiences. Findings suggest that while scientists often restrict their writing practices to meaning compression to maintain the values and conventions of scientific genres, they also sometimes deploy a wider range of multimodal strategies when writing for nonspecialist audiences. These findings underscore the complex rhetorical environments scientists navigate and the need to support emerging scientific writers’ development as versatile writers able to adapt varied multimodal strategies to diverse rhetorical and epistemic goals.