The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

This article proposes a sensemaking methodology to enhance human-in-the-loop technical and professional communication (TPC) practices when working with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) output, which is often ambiguous and not always accurate. Sensemaking describes actions and cognitive strategies humans use to make sense of new/ambiguous information. We argue that sensemaking can help TPC students navigate making sense of GenAI output for better judgment in evaluating AI output. Particularly, we leverage sensemaking's Situation-Gap-Bridge-Outcome framework as a heuristic to identify situational contexts outside of GenAI, gaps in knowledge, create bridges for those gaps, and evaluate outcomes and connect this to extant TPC literature and discuss its implications.

Combining keystroke logging, screen recordings, interviews, and text quality assessment in two mixed-methods studies with technical writers, this research (1) identifies defining variables of technical writing processes and (2) examines their correlations with and predictive power for text quality. Study 1, an exploratory investigation with 10 participants, identified 22 distinct writing behaviors under six categories of information searching, information reusing, content shaping, organization structuring, language styling, and layout designing during planning, translating, and reviewing sessions. These behavioral variables, together with time-related variables, were subsequently analyzed as “process indicators” in a comparative experiment with 43 participants across experience levels. Results of Study 2 revealed significant differences among experience levels in writing speed, planning duration, pause, search, reuse, content shaping, and structuring. Detailed planning and systematic content/structure editing were strongly associated with higher-quality texts. Building on these findings, we propose a process model of technical writing, explain its correlations with writing score, and depict process profiles of different experience levels. We also highlight the importance of information processing skills in enhancing writing efficiency, offering empirical guidance for technical writing instruction and professional training.

ChatGPT has created considerable anxiety among teachers concerned that students might turn to large language models (LLMs) to write their assignments. Many of these models are able to create grammatically accurate and coherent texts, thus potentially enabling cheating and undermining literacy and critical thinking skills. This study seeks to explore the extent LLMs can mimic human-produced texts by comparing essays by ChatGPT and student writers. By analyzing 145 essays from each group, we focus on the way writers relate to their readers with respect to the positions they advance in their texts by examining the frequency and types of engagement markers. The findings reveal that student essays are significantly richer in the quantity and variety of engagement features, producing a more interactive and persuasive discourse. The ChatGPT-generated essays exhibited fewer engagement markers, particularly questions and personal asides, indicating its limitations in building interactional arguments. We attribute the patterns in ChatGPT’s output to the language data used to train the model and its underlying statistical algorithms. The study suggests a number of pedagogical implications for incorporating ChatGPT in writing instruction.

In this study, we examine educators’ orientations to the teaching of “standardized English” (SE)—an idealized form often associated with academic and professional contexts. The perceived status of SE is reinforced by normative standard language ideologies and is often oriented as “correct” and necessary for success in education and employment. SE is also a primary focus in English language arts (ELA) classrooms, with educators often positioned as gatekeepers. In this study, we analyze discussion posts from 91 educators enrolled in an online master’s level sociolinguistics course in which they describe how they would define SE for their students. Through iterative, multi-level qualitative collaborative coding of participants’ discussion posts, we interpret six ideological orientations to SE, ranging from standard language ideology to critical language awareness, with varying degrees of acceptance of linguistic diversity and criticality regarding societal sociolinguistic power relations. Importantly, we discuss the messiness of language ideologies, especially as they pertain to ELA. This study highlights the prevalence of hybrid orientations to SE, indicating that educators’ views on SE are complex and often integrate multiple, sometimes conflicting, language ideologies. We argue for the need for teacher preparation and continuing education programs to address language ideologies, promoting strategies that go beyond respecting linguistic diversity to challenging standard language norms as inroads toward dismantling raciolinguistic and colonial legacies in English language education.

Adopting text mining and semantic network analysis, this study compares employers' expectations for UX and UI design-related jobs. Analyzing a total of 3,269 job ads on LinkedIn, it discovered notable convergences in titles, seniority levels, industry types, and expectations for some competencies and deliverables, indicative of a significant interconnection between UX and UI design. Nonetheless, distinctions emerged in desired skills like research, development, coding, and background knowledge. Furthermore, specific tools and power skills received varying degrees of emphasis across the two domains. This nuanced understanding sheds light on the landscape of UX and UI design through the recruiters' lens.

• This study explores GenAI's role in multimodal composition, including Adobe Firefly and DALL·E. • GenAI reshapes the composition stages of invention, designing, and revising. • Despite its limitations, GenAI offers alternative solutions to wicked problems. • Post-GenAI use, students critically revise and iterate their compositions. • The study contributes to future research and teaching of AI-assisted composition. This study explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) design technologies, including Adobe Firefly and DALL·E, into the teaching and learning of multimodal composition. Through focus group discussions and case studies, this paper demonstrates the potential of GenAI in reshaping the various stages of the composition process, including invention, designing, and revising. The findings reveal that GenAI technologies have the potential to enhance students’ multimodal composition practices and offer alternative solutions to the wicked problems encountered during the design process. Specifically, GenAI facilitates invention by offering design inspirations and enriches designing by expanding, removing, and editing the student-produced design contents. The students in this study also shared their critical stance on the revision process by modifying and iterating their designs after their uses of GenAI. Through showcasing both the opportunities and challenges of GenAI technologies, this paper contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversations on multimodal composition and pedagogy. Moreover, the paper offers implications for the future research and teaching of GenAI-assisted multimodal composition projects, with the aim of encouraging thoughtful integration of GenAI technologies to foster critical AI literacy among college composition students.

This article reports findings from interviews with twenty college instructors who have facilitated multimodal advocacy projects, identifying their affective significance through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of instructor responses, we present the implications of multimodal engagement and what it means for doing social advocacy pedagogies with the community.

Positioning affective agency as a site of investigation, this study documents how first-year writing students create multimodal antiracist campaigns to critically address the sociopolitical issue of racial justice and to collectively challenge the hegemonic violence of racial profiling. In describing students’ affective engagements with the multimodal campaigns, this study demonstrates the potential of multimodal writing pedagogies in enacting affective agency, weaving antiracist assemblages, and transforming affective relations, all of which will provide starting points for social change and antiracist action.

This study examines the role of multimodality in facilitating service-learning goals. We report findings from qualitative interviews with 20 college instructors who have designed and facilitated multimodal community-engaged learning projects, identifying their motivations, goals, and the impact of these projects through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of these instructor responses, we discuss the technological and pedagogical implications of multimodal social advocacy projects in technical and professional writing courses.

Research abstracts are an increasingly important aspect of research articles in all knowledge fields, summarizing the full article and encouraging readers to access it. Graetz suggests that four main features contribute to this purpose—the use of past tense, third person, passive, and the non-use of negatives, although this claim has never been confirmed. In this article, we set out to explore the extent to which these forms are used in the abstracts of four disciplines, the functions they perform and how their frequency has changed over the past 30 years. Drawing on a corpus of 6,000 abstracts taken from the top 10 journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we found high but decreasing frequencies of past tense and passives, an increasing number of third person forms, and more than one negation every two texts. We also noted a remarkable decrease of past tense and passives in the hard sciences and an increase in applied linguistics, with sociologists making greater use of negation. These results suggest that abstracts have developed a distinctive argumentative style, rhetorically linked both to their communicative function and to the changing social contexts in which academic writing is produced and consumed.

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of current and former tutors, we added questions that addressed demographics, multilingualism, and worker conditions. We conducted a mixed methods case study and collected data via surveys and focus group interviews with tutor alumni before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2022). Our findings connect with many results of the original PWTARP and other responses about economic vulnerability and the emotional labor of tutoring. Also, our survey produced many useful findings about issues related to being a contingent worker, including economic pressures, emotional labor, and professional development.

This mixed methods study examines whether veteran–novice mentorship between tutors, as part of continuous in-service professional development, would have a positive effect on either party’s transferable skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, and professionalism). Quantitative findings from pre- and postsurveys about the veteran–novice mentorship suggest that tutors have significant gains in some transferable skills, such as oral/written communication skills, teamwork/collaboration skills, digital technology skills, and career management skills, after attending the continuous in-service professional development. Quantitative findings from the pre- and postsurveys further indicate that novice tutors improve more, compared to veteran tutors, in their self-perceived oral/written communication skill levels. Qualitative findings from postmentorship interviews explain findings suggested by quantitative analysis, with contextual factors. This research study has bifold significance: “a theoretical perspective” on writing center work and research-supported professional development strategies. The findings of this study provide more food for thought on the subjects of how to design veteran–novice mentorships, how to target some transferable skills for professional development in the future, and how to exemplify the transferable skills in the survey to make those abstract constructs more concrete.

In this reflective paper, the authors share the trials of their writing center’s graduate writing program as it transitioned from fully physical and in person pre-COVID to fully virtual during COVID. The graduate writing program aims to help establish a channel for graduate students from the stage of completing coursework to that of completing graduate degrees when attrition is likely to happen. With four semesters and three phases, the current writing group program includes the following features: multitudinous collaborations, allocated space, appropriate accountability, and progressive reciprocity. These features have increased student retention and improved student isolation, creating opportunities for companionship in academic writing. As a result, this has increased the success of participating graduate programs. The authors’ accumulated reflections contribute to writing center practice with the aim of developing similar writing support programs in other centers and contributing to writing center scholarship as another layer of experiential introduction to more Replicable, Agreeable and Data-supported (RAD) research studies. Keywords : multitudinous collaborations, allocated space, appropriate accountability, progressive reciprocity

In the information age, discourse plays an increasingly important role in promoting innovative products. But how language works in the innovation process remains underexplored. This study explores the discursive communication strategies used to introduce innovation by analyzing the content, cohesion, and coherence of product launch presentations by Steve Jobs. It reveals that such discursive communication strategies improve the audience’s understanding, recognition, and acceptance of innovative products. This study contributes to both business communication studies in general and research on innovation communication in product launches in particular.

A large number of U.S. university writing centers (WCs) hire undergraduates as peer tutors, and many of them are menstruators. Menstruators have received strong cultural messages, including that menstruation should be concealed. Menstruating tutors’ damaged self-recognition received from the world around them can lead to internalized self-identification and further impact their perceptions of their knowledge and consultations with student writers every day in WCs. The acceptance and accessibility of menstrual products in WCs would help boost work ethic among menstruating tutors and break down the taboo about menstruation. To explore what impact such acceptance and accessibility exert on menstruating tutors, we conducted a mixed methods case study on menstruating tutors’ perceptions about themselves, their professionalism and work ethic, as well as their experiences, with and without having free access to menstrual products at their WC. We collected data via a set of pre and post surveys and individual interviews of 15 participants at the WC. The quantitative data from pre and post surveys did not reveal statistical significance, while the qualitative data helped explain why there was no statistical significance. Nevertheless, integration of all the data from this pioneering project has contributed rich findings to the existing WC scholarship about space and access, mindfulness, and social justice at large. The findings have practical applications to day-to-day WC practice.

Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

This webtext explores the pedagogical possibilities of teaching with and through "monkey selfies" as the issue of animal authorship and copyright opens up new pedagogical avenues for challenging the static and fixed views of authorship in composing practices.

This study aims to investigate the different and competing perspectives of stakeholders of cultural heritage sites by examining the Mutianyu Great Wall in China.Literature review:Most studies focus on investigating the tourism destination image from the perspective of only one stakeholder, and only a small amount of research has attempted to integrate the perspectives of competing stakeholders into a single study.Research questions:1. How did the business operator perceive the Mutianyu Great Wall? 2. How did UNESCO perceive the Mutianyu Great Wall? 3. How did international tourists on TripAdvisor perceive the Mutianyu Great Wall? 4. What are the dynamics among the three stakeholders' perceptions? 5. In those dynamics, what are the contested issues in the Great Wall's heritage preservation and tourism development? Methodology:The study adopts a discursive approach to social constructivism in examining the images of the site as perceived by the three important stakeholders. It incorporates qualitative thematic and multimodal discourse analysis with quantitative high-frequency word analysis, supplemented by an interview with the heritage site administrator and a field trip. Results:The business operator perceived the Mutianyu Great Wall as a scenic spot for modern rural tourism, UNESCO emphasized its historical and cultural significance, and international tourists perceived it as a hybrid image.Conclusions: The study identified a preservation-growth continuum and showed different and even competing perspectives. It also discussed two contested issues in the field. The study contributes to heritage studies by developing an interdisciplinary discursive framework and suggests practical implications to heritage management and professional communication.

Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view toward the issues they discuss while anticipating readers’ imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the past three decades. Recognizing that academic writing is less objective and “author evacuated” than Geertz and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers. Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this article we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.

Knowledge contribution in virtual communities is an important issue in the field of knowledge management. Based on Ames's theoretical framework on motivation, we propose a model for knowledge contribution in problem-solving virtual communities (PSVCs). The model includes two second-order individual motivations, with four major mechanisms in PSVCs that are associated with these motivations. Results confirm that only egoistic motives affect members' knowledge contribution in PSVCs. Further, knowledge repository and social identity are found to be important mechanisms for promoting knowledge contribution through egoistic motives. This paper concludes with theoretical and practical implications and provides insights for future research.

In this article, the author demonstrates that the semiotic model proposed by Charles Morris enables us to optimize our understanding of technical communication practices and provides a good point of inquiry. To illustrate this point, the author exemplifies the semiotic approaches by scholars in technical communication and elaborates Morris's model through analyzing visual and verbal elements of technical communication brochures from semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels. The discussion of semiotic approach reinforced by various examples illustrates that the semiotic model can be a tangible theoretical and practical tool to help students and practitioners study and analyze the use of visual and verbal elements in technical communication.

Communication skills are crucial to the successful completion of an information system (IS) project. The ability to interact with all potential stakeholders in an organization, to clearly document requirements, and to effectively express ideas has long been recognized by researchers and practitioners as critical success factors. This study examines how communication skills of IS professionals during a development project are viewed by three different stakeholders. Specifically, each of three stakeholder groups is examined to determine the extent to which a gap between expectations and perceived performance leads to lower satisfaction of the system of the users, lower perceived job performance by IS managers, or less career satisfaction for the IS professionals. A matched survey indicates that user satisfaction and job performance ratings by managers are related to a perceived failure to meet expectations, but that IS professionals do not relate career satisfaction directly to a lack in these skills. Organizations looking for success in the IS function must take steps to improve the communication skills of the IS professionals to the level expected by other stakeholders.