This article draws on narratives of 45 career-change professionals and explores the use of models as onboarding tools through the lens of writing transfer and the crucial rhetorical thinking and metacognition that it requires. These interviews show that the use of models often limits the opportunity for writing transfer for these professionals by deemphasizing the “invention” phase while they learn to write new documents in their new workplaces. The article argues that invention, rooted in rhetorical thinking, in the workplace can be a prompt for writing transfer, which is often difficult for new communicators in professional settings. The author suggests ways to position students as advocates of invention-related practices in their future workplaces, so that writing transfer might happen more seamlessly.

In the introduction to Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing, author John R. Gallagher recalls the project’s spark coming from an interview he conducted with a blogger who casually me...

ABSTRACT “Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

The value of higher education in the United States tends to be addressed in terms of the postmodern commodification of knowledge.As Lyotard (1984) reported, the grand narratives of modernity, which had unified knowledge and legitimated it as Truth or Emancipation, have disintegrated into incommensurate language games, fragmenting knowledge, which is now legitimated by performativity.According to Lyotard, each game consists of rules that form among its players a consensus on which utterances, or moves, are meaningful, with the objective of the game being to produce, with maximum efficiency, knowledge as a commodity: a game is legitimated when investment in it is exceeded by the economic value of the knowledge it produces; conversely, a game is delegitimated when investment in it exceeds the economic value of the knowledge it produces.As college tuition costs continue to outpace median income, with student loan debt having collectively surpassed a staggering $1.5 trillion, what return on an investment in the game of higher education can be expected by graduates entering a highly competitive global economy?It seems uncertain.Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Schlueter (2016) argued that with digital technology making information widely available, the purpose of colleges and universities must be to teach the critical thinking skills necessary to process that information.Having surveyed a number of university mission statements, Schlueter observed that higher education has indeed come to widely promote critical thinking as its central learning outcome.But at the same time, he contended, there exists as yet no consensus on what critical thinking is, whether it exists, and whether it can be taught.Given the stakes involved, it is clear, according to Schlueter, that "higher education has gambled on critical thinking" (para.7) and that it needs to secure a consensus on it "if we are not to lose our shirts on this bet" (para.22). 1 Schlueter's (2016) discussion of critical thinking suggests a conflict within performativity between how this knowledge operates and its legitimation in economic terms.As a gamble on what students will be able to do by graduation, critical thinking has essentially become a commodity in the futures market.The uncertainty of its value is, however, due not to the vicissitudes of the market but to an instability of the rules needed to produce critical thinking as a clear and coherent product, which can thereby be assigned a value.Consider that, beginning in 1981, when college tuition costs began to increase sharply, 2 so did the frequency of the phrase "critical thinking" appearing in American English books. 3It seems that as investment in the game of higher education has grown, it has been played more often.And yet, despite the stakes having been raised over these last four decades, research over this period has shown a range of critical thinking definitions, theories, and test results, reflecting, both implicitly and explicitly, variations in the rules of the game.So if higher education has gambled on critical thinking, it is a wager in which final gains or losses seem to be deferred indefinitely and can, therefore, be neither legitimated nor delegitimated by performativity.

Rooted in a hybrid, themed, first-year writing course titled Please Like Us: Selling with Social Media and drawing on the disciplines of business, marketing, and writing studies, the two sequenced assignments explored here rely upon role-playing and “role-writing” for specific outside professional audiences. A semester-long blog project serves as a jumping off point for a researched, multi-disciplinary social media marketing proposal, providing students with the chance to examine social media in both rhetorical and professional terms. The accompanying article explores these assignments in the context of “authenticity” and with an eye toward not only principles of writing pedagogy, but also the transfer of knowledge and process between academic and professional writing.