Identifying the effects of online templates, such as empty state pages (ESPs), sheds light on the user writing habits and best practices for user design. By using assemblage theory and extending previous studies of ESPs to grant proposal writing on the crowded-funded website Experiment.com, this large-scale study (n = 778) finds that required fields are more likely to be filled to the character limit than optional fields.

James Berlin’s pedagogy employs generalized heuristics grounded in human agency and social-epistemic critique to enable political awareness. By contrast, actor-network theory (ANT) does not explain the composition of reality through pre-fixed heuristics but instead seeks to describe the unique composition of political objects through symmetrical accounts of human and nonhuman agency. ANT-as-pedagogy can be productively applied in the classroom to realize students’ capacities as moralists who comprehend the rhetorical difference between explanation (Berlin) and description (ANT) with regard to their political agencies as writers.