Editors' Introduction to Volume 9 Issue 2

The increasing adoption of automated essay scoring (AES) in high-stakes educational contexts necessitates careful examination of potential biases within the systems. This study investigates how the demographic composition of training data influences fairness in AES systems developed from finetuned large language models (LLMs). Using the PERSUADE corpus of 26,000 student essays, we conducted a systematic analysis using demographically restricted training sets to isolate the impact of training data demographics on LLM-AES performance. Each demographically restricted training set comprised essays written by one racial/ethnic group. Four variants of a Longformer-based AES were developed: one trained on demographically balanced data and three trained on demographically restricted datasets. An initial analysis of the human ratings indicated that demographic factors significantly predict human essay scores (marginal R² = 0.125), a pattern that is paralleled in national writing assessment data. LLM-AES systems trained on demographically restricted data exhibited small systematic biases (marginal R² = 0.043). However, the LLM trained on balanced data showed minimal demographic bias, suggesting that representative training data can effectively prevent amplification of demographic disparities beyond those present in human ratings. These results highlight both the importance and limitations of training data diversity in achieving fair assessment outcomes. • 12.5% of variance in human essay ratings was explained by demographics. • We construct demographically restricted training sets to isolate bias. • Balanced training data minimized LLM-AES bias across demographic groups. • LLM-AES trained on demographically restricted data showed more bias.

Background: Hospital educators are designated individuals who provide hospitalized K-12 children with their schooling during the time of their stay. They play a vital role in maintaining educational continuity for hospitalized children, yet their professional information and communication practices remain understudied in US settings. Literature review: We build on literature within technical and professional communication (TPC), specifically scholars who have studied technology and health in understanding US hospital educators' unique technological needs and communication practices within highly regulated healthcare environments. Research questions: How do hospital educators navigate professional communication, adapt teaching practices to meet diverse student needs, and utilize technology in hospital settings? What opportunities exist for artificial-intelligence (AI) integration? Research method: We conducted semistructured interviews with four hospital educators across US hospitals, applying reflexive thematic analysis, informed by Participatory Communication Theory, Sociotechnical Systems Perspectives, and Knowledge Justice. Analysis employed iterative open coding followed by theory-informed thematic development, where communication theory guided the identification of dialogical patterns, systems theory directed attention to sociotechnical interactions, and knowledge justice sensitized us to power dynamics affecting professional knowledge access and sharing. Results/discussion: Findings reveal characteristics of US hospital education contexts in our study: short patient stays, strict security requirements, institutional variability across hospital settings, and emphasis on engagement over assessment. Educators demonstrate remarkable adaptability in coordinating among stakeholders while navigating institutional constraints and developing strategies for rapid assessment and flexible instruction. While educational technologies offer benefits, implementation faces significant challenges regarding security, practical limitations, and offline functionality needs. Conclusion: We propose guideline themes for developing information and communication technologies–including some that use AI–that support hospital educators' professional needs while respecting hospital setting constraints. This research contributes to understanding how technologies can enhance hospital education while highlighting the importance of context-specific design that empowers rather than replaces educator expertise.

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Rhetoricians and bioethicists have analyzed medical assistance in dying (MAiD), sometimes referred to as physician assisted suicide or euthanasia, and suggested that it falls into predictable topoi. To deepen our understanding of public deliberation around medical assistance in dying, we propose a Multi-Methodological, Multiply Ontological (M3O) approach. M3O encourages phronesis through methodological and ontological pivots. Diverging findings from each pivot may surface complexities that only come from putting those findings into conversation. We analyzed public testimony about MAiD bills proposed in Connecticut and Nevada with both framegram and topoi analysis, to discern how pro and anti-MAiD rhetors conceptualized personhood in this discourse. We found that both sides build arguments around intersecting topoi of (1) personhood as a set of ontological traits, (2) personhood as a social practice, (3) questions of autonomy, and (4) issues of vulnerability to suffering. When placed into the context of existing data on MAiD discourse and policy, we found that questions of dignity and personhood may be placed into deeper conversation with an analysis of risk and autonomy to complicate our assumptions about the values implied in this discourse.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 9 Issue 1

Since the launch of ChatGPT, the use of and debate around generative AI has grown rapidly. Professionals whose work depends on writing have expressed concern about the potential impact of such tools on their roles. But are these concerns justified? Can ChatGPT truly take on the responsibilities of a professional writer? This study investigates that question by comparing the performance of ChatGPT with that of professional editors tasked with optimizing business communication. We conducted two studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first, three experienced editors were asked to rewrite four business letters. Their editing processes were recorded using the Microsoft Snipping Tool, and immediately afterward, we conducted retrospective interviews using stimulated recall. These interviews were transcribed and analyzed. Insights from the observations and interviews informed the design of the prompt instructions used in the second study. In the second study, we asked ChatGPT to revise the same four letters using three different prompt types. The Simple prompt instructed the model to “make this text reader-focused.” The B1 prompt referred explicitly to the CEFR B1 language level, requiring ChatGPT to tailor the text for intermediate readers. Finally, the Process prompt simulated the editing steps observed in the professional editors’ workflows. To evaluate outcomes, we conducted both a qualitative comparison of the revised texts and a quantitative readability analysis using LiNT, a validated tool developed for Dutch texts. Our results show that the human editors substantially improved the readability of the original letters, reducing the use of unfamiliar words, shortening complex sentences, and increasing personal engagement through pronoun use. Among the AI outputs, ChatGPT B1 achieved results most comparable to the editors, both in readability and accuracy. In contrast, ChatGPT Simple fell short in terms of clarity and introduced errors through faulty inferences. Surprisingly, ChatGPT Process also underperformed compared to ChatGPT B1 and the human editors. Only the editors' and ChatGPT B1versions were free from errors. In the discussion, we reflect on how generative AI is reshaping the concept of writing within organizations, the skills required to produce effective written communication and the impact on writing pedagogy. Rather than replacing human editors, we argue that generative AI can play a valuable role as a collaborative tool in the organizational writing process.

This study examines how metaphor and gender interact in venture capital pitches. We analyzed 60 pitches from a global competition, comparing metaphor usage between male and female winners and non-winners. Results show distinct metaphor preferences: male entrepreneurs used more BUILDING metaphors, while female entrepreneurs used more WAR and PLANT metaphors. The association between WAR metaphors and female winners suggests strategic metaphorical framing interacts with gender to impact persuasion. These findings reveal that gender norms influence decision making, and entrepreneurs can leverage metaphor to construct persuasive advantages, providing strategic and pedagogical direction for refining their figurative language in practice and training.

This paper introduces a new approach to support academic writing: the Journal Article Structure Template (JAST). In an ever-more competitive publishing landscape, academics face increasing pressure to produce high-quality papers quickly. The writing process can be time-consuming and being faced with a blank page can prove daunting. While submission guidelines typically outline formal requirements, the more nuanced stylistic and structural expectations of journals can be harder to discern. This is particularly apparent for the growing number of researchers working across disciplines. Shifting publishing trends within journals, evolving editorial orientations and tacit knowledge add further complexity. This article outlines the development of JAST, a set of Open Educational Resources designed to support researchers, particularly those new to academic writing,  to identify, explore and understand journal expectations in a more nuanced way beyond author guidelines. The paper provides an overview of the rationale for, and development of, JAST. Guidance is offered on how to use the stepwise template-based approach, along with the tool’s applications to date and feedback from scholars across a range of disciplines. Users consistently report that JAST is effective, time-efficient and flexible, helping them navigate structural conventions, stylistic preferences and content trends.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 8 issue 4

This article examines how students use and perceive digital writing tools, including chat platforms and generative AI, within academic writing environments. It describes a qualitative study of 15 undergraduate students in guided focus group discussions. In a grounded theory analysis of focus group transcripts, the researchers explored undergraduates’ sense of copresence—their perception of support through both human interaction with both peers and instructors and AI technologies during their writing processes. Findings reveal that students’ trust in both peer feedback and AI assistance plays a crucial role in their writing, shaping their decisions about which tools to use and how they integrate human and AI feedback in the development and revisions of their writing. The study sheds light on students’ nuanced understanding of the affordances and limitations of multimodal chat platforms and generative AI technologies. We conclude by highlighting the need for pedagogical practices that support students’ choice of tools when collaborating in digital spaces. We suggest future research directions that will enable us to better understand how copresence and trust influence students’ writing in these contexts.

Providing effective written feedback to ESL students poses a challenging yet crucial task for language teachers. While numerous studies have delved into critical feedback, few have explored students' perceptions of praise in written feedback. To gauge students’ view of praise, we analyzed responses to two types: person praise (e.g., "You are a good writer") and performance praise (e.g., "You used the past tense correctly"). Language proficiency levels (high and low) and cultural backgrounds (Asian and Romance) were also considered. ESL students ( n = 100) were given feedback on an essay they wrote and surveyed about praise comments. In addition, three focus groups were conducted. Quantitative data indicated a preference for both praise types, while focus groups revealed a preference for performance over person praise. Lower proficiency students valued and considered praise to be more change-invoking than high-proficiency peers. Additionally, students from Romance cultures favored praise more than Asian cultures. Interaction effects highlighted nuances, such as high-proficiency Asian students perceiving praise as less kind, valuable, positive, and clear than their Romance counterparts. These findings offer insights for teachers and administrators to develop an informed praise philosophy and recognize which praise type best meets their students’ needs.

Few studies to date examined the emotional unrest that results from communication across cultures in multinational teams (MNTs). Through examination of 12 in-depth interviews and a focus group of respondents from MNTs, this study investigates the impact of language-induced emotions in MNTs resulting from a corporate language mandate. Even with highly proficient linguists, MNTs still experience collaborative difficulties caused by language differences and associated emotions. Issues identified include loss of information, ambiguity over equivalence of meaning, variability in sociolinguistic competence, and problems of adjustment to cultural norms. The research also pinpointed several lingua-culturally adaptive behavioral strategies relating to international leadership.

In Feminist Technical Communication , Erin Clark both articulates and demonstrates an apparent feminist lens on the idea of slow crisis. She does this through a case study of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (DHD), the 2008 oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico in which the lack of clear answers on health impacts demonstrates a critical need for transparency. By tracing DHD through a feminist lens and under the realm of crisis management, Clark raises important questions about what we mean when we talk about efficiency, how we define crisis, and how critical these questions are to the reconsideration of technical communication as neutral or objective. Her primary argument focuses on her theoretical contribution of apparent feminism that works to acknowledge and bring to light the need for explicitly feminist practices. Through Feminist Technical Communication , Clark provides scholars, practitioners, and community members with a new approach to crisis and risk communication.

Many linguistic studies of writing assume a single linear relationship between linguistic features in the text and human judgments of writing quality. However, writing quality may be better understood as a complex latent construct that can be constructed in a number of different ways through different linguistic profiles of high-quality writing styles as shown in Crossley et al. (2014). This study builds on the exploratory study reported by Crossley et al. by analyzing a representational corpus of 4,170 highly rated persuasive essays written by secondary-school students. The study uses natural language processing tools to derive quantitative representations for the linguistic features found in the texts. These linguistic features inform a k-means cluster analysis which indicates that a four-cluster profile best fits the data. By examining the indices most and least distinctive of each cluster, the study identifies a structured writing style, a conversational writing style, a reportive writing style, and an academic writing style. The findings support the notion that writers can employ a variety of writing profiles to successfully write an argumentative essay.

The article analyzes Margo Tamez’s artistic, scholarly, and activist work as a decolonial practice of truthing that aims at dismantling contemporary discourses of nation- and border-building as part of rhetorical imperialism that legitimizes the colonially-rooted ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples in the name of the safety and sovereignty of a settler colonial nation-state. I argue that Tamez’s work, be it in the form of the written text, the spoken word, or performance, should be seen as a site of rhetorical power aimed at identifying and confronting the forces that have framed the Lipan Apache people as walled-in and thus non-existent in the state-engineered discourses of border and nation security.

This qualitative study explores how mindful leadership communication fosters organizational mattering in East Asian workplaces shaped by Confucian values and collectivist traditions. Drawing on interviews with mid-level managers, the findings identifies culturally embedded communication strategies such as formal and informal recognition, mutual respect, and nonverbal cues that build trust, enhance belonging, and promote empowerment. These practices contribute to collective workplace cohesion and employees’ sense of relatedness. Mindful leadership communication functions both as a psychological enabler and a strategic tool, reinforcing relationships and engagement. It emerges as a core component of mattering in high-context East Asian organizational cultures, supporting sustainable organizational development.

This study assesses the potential use of artificial intelligence-programmed managers in the workplace through two experiments that manipulated source cues and time cues. Data were collected before the Novel Coronavirus pandemic and then 3 years after the pandemic’s outbreak when many businesses had returned to normal operations and ChatGPT had been released. Results held across the two experiments. Neither time nor source automation cues had an impact on the affective impressions participants formed of the simulated email exchange. Attention check data further suggests time cues may no longer be a relevant predictor of impression formation in workplace communication.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 8 issue 3

In this collection, we present the perspectives of seven different writing instructors from backgrounds ranging from comparative literature, creative writing, English, history, and writing studies. We all work in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program, which has multiple upper-division courses and a Professional Writing Minor track in Science Communication. Here we share our different pedagogical reflections, as well as specific assignments, to illustrate a range of interdisciplinary lenses that can be brought to the classroom.

Purpose: This study offers an in-depth review of the body of research articles on the topic of boundary spanning and the dynamic nature of different actors to provide a more comprehensive knowledge on different boundary spanning activities and their effects on performance, flexibility, and resilience in educational institutions. Design/methodology/approach: To address the limited research on boundary-spanning functions in education, this study employed a two-round systematic literature review (SLR). The first round, which included an analysis of 338 research studies, sought to identify boundary-spanning functions and their activities. Using data from 39 studies, the second round sought to examine the boundary-spanning function and the critical role that information transfer plays in enabling boundary spanning in education. Findings: This review of literature led researchers to draw the main variables/strategies that facilitate boundary spanning in education (leadership and instructional strategies; collaboration and networking; training and development; teamwork; and revised pedagogical approaches). Also, the review highlighted the importance of knowledge transfer in facilitating boundary-spanning functions. Originality/value: Researchers, practitioners, and decision makers looking to improve boundary-spanning activities by utilizing networks and knowledge transfer might use this systematic review as a source. It also provides various strategies of how boundary spanners and leaders can support and facilitate the function of boundary spanning in educational institutions.

As global disasters such as COVID-19 continue to disrupt lives, this article calls on professional communicators, practitioners, and volunteers who work during a crisis to rethink their crisis-communication and disaster-response strategies in order to address the needs of marginalized and vulnerable communities. To expand such strategies, the author presents an analysis of interviews with 30 feminist grassroots organizers and volunteers from Nepal, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago who were disaster responders and crisis communicators during COVID-19. She illustrates how inclusive, intersectional disaster management and advocacy-based crisis communication are required when responding to any kind of disaster.

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of the near absence of personal naming of opponents in speeches made in the classical Athenian Assembly, casting the phenomenon as a discursive strategy which allows the orator of the moment to recommend his own superior qualities and reject his opponents not as individuals but as an undifferentiated (and uniformly wrong) mass. The article then examines Demosthenes’s use (and the sincerity of his commitment to his use) of this strategy to pursue this pair of persuasive aims across his Assembly career, and as part of the rhetorical toolkit with which he manages his transition from “outsider” status in the late 350s and early 340s BCE to a position of steadily growing political influence from 346 BCE onwards.

This research aims to explain the volume of eWOM in the context of international trade shows based on (1) social media content strategies, (2) social media message features, and (3) time frame (posting date ex ante COVID-19 crisis or posting date ex post COVID-19 crisis). The data were collected from Twitter, using a tweet as the unit of analysis. In total 3,482 tweets were analyzed: 1,930 tweets from January 1, 2019, to March 10, 2020 (period 1, posting date ex ante COVID-19) and 1,552 tweets from March 11, 2020, to August 31, 2021 (period 2, posting date ex post COVID-19). Our results show, on one side, that the usage of some social media content strategies (informational and transformational strategies) and some social media message features (videos, mentions and photos) influences the eWOM volume. On another side, tweets published in ex ante COVID-19 predicted eWOM volume better than ex post.

Important challenges faced by inexperienced academic writers include how to present an appropriate stance when commenting on their own research or on work by others, and how to successfully acknowledge and engage with readers’ needs, queries, and perspectives. This study investigated how well 22 new graduate writers from L1 and L2 backgrounds were able to convey stance and engagement in literature review assignments prepared for a graduate writing course. They claimed little or no prior knowledge in this skill area before taking part in 12–14 hours of instruction and practice where stance and engagement strategies were a core component before submitting reviews of approximately 1000 words. Analysis of post-instruction texts and students’ reflective comments revealed that students’ declarative knowledge had progressed, and that most were able to display an adequate or satisfactory level of proficiency in their writing. Based on these findings, I hypothesize a trajectory of stages of writers’ skill learning of stance and engagement strategies that acknowledges its complexities and the need for extensive practice to develop procedural skill. This proposed pathway makes explicit the fact that learning by novices is likely to progress incrementally, together with advances in their knowledge and self-confidence as academic writers and members of their disciplinary communities.

This study explores the influence mechanism of literacy strategy use and independent language skills (e.g., reading and writing) on integrated writing (IW) performance. 322 Secondary Four students from four schools in Hong Kong completed single-text reading, multiple-text reading, independent writing, and IW tasks, along with questionnaires investigating their reading strategy use and IW strategy use. Path analyses revealed that multiple-text reading and independent writing had comparable significant impacts on IW, mediating the influence of single-text comprehension. In addition, reading strategy use impacted IW indirectly through independent literacy skills and IW strategy use, while IW strategies exerted a direct influence on IW. Our findings underscore the critical role of language skills in mediating the influence of reading strategies on IW performance among young first language (L1) learners. The implications for research and practice, are discussed, emphasizing the complexity of the IW construct and the need for balanced language skills and strategy instruction to enhance IW task performance. • A noble exploration of concurrent effects of strategies and independent skills on IW. • Multiple-text reading and independent writing directly influence IW performance. • Independent skills mediate the impact of reading strategies on IW performance. • Reading strategy indirectly affect IW through independent skills and IW strategy. • Balanced language skills and strategy instruction are crucial for IW performance.

Abstract What is a pedagogy of the Anthropocene? Put another way, what would it look like to teach in a way that disrupts the logic of fossil fuel extraction? Building on critiques of Enlightenment thought that identify the causalities between dualistic models such as mind/body or nature/culture and systems of enslavement and extraction, the author argues we must orient ourselves against the toxic logic that has led to our current planetary crisis, and that a class on “climate fiction” can estrange students from the ubiquity of an epistemology that alienates us from the natural world and each other. Stories about climate change, whether speculative or realistic, can pry students loose from more familiar narratives that have immiserated us as a species and a planet. The author encourages a reorientation of how we teach that reframes the classroom as a space for students to imagine each other as allies rather than as competition, displacing the fetishization of “rigor” that aligns us to false idols of meritocracy and scarcity instead of the abundance that is possible when we find happiness in collective as opposed to individual success.

This article explores how entrepreneurs engage users in innovation in order to identify collaboration opportunities between entrepreneurship and technical and professional communication (TPC) scholars interested in user experience (UX). This article surveyed American entrepreneurs (N = 100) asking when and how they involve users in product development. The results suggest that most entrepreneurs do engage users to drive innovation and understand their markets, but do so largely through informal means. Our research suggests that UX can serve as a connection point for TPC scholars and entrepreneurs, especially if TPC emphasizes the role of UX in innovation and offers entrepreneurs efficient yet reliable user-research methodologies.

Environmental discussions have increased on social media, along with the rising interest in sustainability. This study introduces a modified procedure for a deliberate metaphor analysis of environmental metaphors in two U.S. energy companies’ Twitter (now X) accounts. Its findings suggest that the two U.S. companies used HUMAN, WEALTH, COLOR, JOURNEY, WAR, SPORTS, STEWARDSHIP, EVIL CREATURE, FOOD, and CRIME metaphors to fulfill publicizing, commercial, persuasive, evocative, and interactive functions, as well as to communicate their inherent environmental identities as protectors, stewards, competitors, and collaborators. These findings provide insights into corporate environmental communication and offer new perspectives on the communicative functions of deliberate metaphors.

While researchers have explored the relationship between writing self-regulation and writing self-efficacy in student performance on academic writing tasks, less research has been conducted on the mediating effect of autonomous motivation on self-regulation and self-efficiency. In this study, researchers surveyed 445 elementary school students in China using the Writing Self-Regulation Strategies Scale, the Writing Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Autonomous Writing Motivation Scale. Researchers then compared the results of student responses to the scale items with scores on three written compositions. The results show that (1) writing self-regulation strategy positively predicts writing scores; (2) writing self-regulation strategies not only directly impact students’ writing scores, but also affect students’ performances indirectly through the mediation of writing self-efficacy; and (3) autonomous writing motivation modulates the first half of the “writing self-regulation strategy → writing self-efficacy → writing scores” path. Compared to students with low autonomous writing motivation, the writing self-regulation strategies of students with high autonomous writing motivation are more effective in enhancing their writing self-efficacy.

The widespread adoption of GenAI tools has the potential to reproduce hegemonic and colonial discourse as the writing process is radically disrupted. As a writing center in an Indigenous-serving institution, we address GenAI’s reproduction of privileged discourses through framing writing as a conscious political act of survivance and work to re-establishing writers’ rhetorical sovereignty through place-based pedagogy. In this praxis-oriented piece, we demonstrate how writing centers can use their values as a foundation to develop strategies that empower GenAI users to re-enter the writing process and reclaim agency.

Innovation and technological adoption are continuous processes, which makes them difficult to periodize. At the same time, acquiring new tools and literacies inspires in the adopters a reflection, however brief, on their preparedness for the acquisition. Adopters may face the new technologies with confidence, excitement, curiosity, trepidation, or all the above. The emotions often result from a sense of how equipped adopters feel to receive the innovation. Yet the speed of innovation, and the social and professional need to keep up, might obstruct self-analysis that would ideally help define and sharpen the relevant skills and knowledge. This talking picture book documents how the Hendrix College Writing Center staff reflects collectively on the transition that the arrival of generative artificial intelligence has ignited. As of the Summer of 2024, our writing center has not yet implemented solid AI-related policies and procedures, working instead on research. By responding to four questions about encounters with AI with a still image and an accompanying oral, recorded narration, four student consultants and the center’s director make material memories about the current moment, which the rapid technological development has rendered elusive and even distant. The idea is to create a nostalgia for the present to intensify our recollections of the experiences and abilities that would enable us to interact and grow with AI when it becomes part of our regular operations. Keywords : technological adoption, the speed of technological change, assistive technologies, reflection, still photograph and the imaginary, voice recording and the real, preparedness This work—a collection of still images and voice recordings—examines a part of the process by which a writing center adopts a new technology—a reflection on the staff’s readiness. The Hendrix College Writing Center serves a small, liberal arts, private institution with around 1200 undergraduate students. With that in mind, we are designing procedures (for individual appointments, workshops, course collaborations, and so on) to tackle the AI-related needs of students and faculty. We have not formally implemented any of those procedures under the belief that we still need to learn more. Whether we will know when we have reached a critical mass of knowledge for the implementation to happen remains an open question (although we are certain the learning process will not stop). What we do know is how much self-reflection the recent prominence of text-generating AI has ignited in our center. Contemplation must eventually give way to actionable conclusions for the current moment, even if they might come with an expiration date. That fact does not mean we can’t extend the contemplation a bit longer for the purposes of investigating our Center and our campus at what will certainly be an inflection point. This piece attempts to stage two artificialities to give us more room to think and match the condition of its subject. The first artificiality concerns something that technological development never deliberately affords most citizens: a pause to consider who citizens are (a sense of their place in their lives and in their communities), and how ready they feel, before adopting a new technology. Everett M. Rogers’s (1962) technology adoption life cycle indicates that citizens incorporate technical advancements at different times, classifying them into five groups: “innovators,” “early adopters,” “early majority,” “late majority,” and “laggards” (p. 161). Given the particularity of the experiences and circumstances around every citizen, Rogers warns that models to track the timeline of technology diffusion across populations are “conceptual,” a useful tool to understand the impact of a continuous phenomenon and to identify trends. Something that becomes clear from following the spread of innovations is that innovators rarely spend time speaking to consumers about the effects and implications of their work before that work is widely available. Educational, legal, and governmental institutions struggle to anticipate technologically driven change. Instead, they react to every development. The lag happens because, for Preeta Bansal (quoted in Wadhwa, 2014), codified behaviors require social consensus, while technological innovation does not. The speed of the “technological vitalism” (p. 45) of which Paul Virilio (1986) speaks runs right past the much more difficult optimization of agreement. Our project is similar to Rogers’s in that it also exists on a conceptual plane: it conceives of a reflective stoppage in technological adoption as a situated, almost nostalgically defined period. This talking picture book imagines what it would be like to expand the reflection before a community (in this case, the writing center) creates protocols to mark the perhaps irreversible presence of artificial intelligence in their practice. Like Rogers’s device, making visual and aural mementos of the current moment means to contain, however abstractly, an ungraspable and ongoing process. Yet we differ from Rogers in one respect: “Each adopter of an innovation in a social system could be described, but this would be a tedious task” (p. 159).  As believers in the counterhistorical value of the anecdote, however, we propose describing this small group of adopters in some detail, so that a fuller picture of AI’s spread comes into view—one harder to categorize in one of the five groups above. We distinguish between that pause and the preliminary groundwork for institutional change because, so far, the preparation we have undertaken has relied on current, forward-looking research. The past, the a priori of our technological and disciplinary knowledge, always informs the envisioning of our future. Still, our center has not defined that past in concrete terms. We have not named what we possess that would let us inhabit a practice alongside AI. Defining our past would, in turn, clarify our present, a perpetually in-flux moment that never stands still long enough to comprehensively assimilate it. An analog detailing of the conditions that shape the adoption of new tools at the writing center appears in research on the selection of assistive technologies for writers. Nankee et al. (2009), for example, break down the factors involved in writing: visual perception, neuromuscular abilities, motor skills, cognitive skills, and social-emotional behaviors (p. 4). While the authors composed this list to select assistive technologies for students with disabilities, reading the factors makes it clear that anyone who intends to write or even assist in writing needs to consider them. The same can be said of the writing process itself. In a discussion about assistive technologies in writing centers, DePaul University blogger Maggie C (2015) cites a study by Raskind and Higgins (2014) that shows text-to-speech software enhanced proofreading for students with learning disabilities. In their analysis, Maggie C observes that the issues “that all writers struggle with (proofreading, catching errors, etc.) [aren’t] unique because the people in this study had learning disabilities” (para. 3). Indeed, this kind of capabilities analysis can apply to the writing center staffers as well. Even if right now we do not treat AI as an assistive technology, framing its adoption in terms of what prepares and allows us to incorporate it reveals areas of interest to influence our eventual policies. So we propose taking stock not just of our capacities but of our collective mood before letting AI take residence in our writing center. The piece represents how we have identified the signals of change, or how we have developed a notion, however tenuous, that a (perhaps paradigmatic) shift is coming. We are conscious that the past and present we will try to articulate are largely fictional—the second artificiality this work hopes to render. Artificial intelligence, and its applications to writing, have been with us for some time now. While students, faculty and staff at Hendrix College work, together and apart, to respond to its challenges and fulfill its opportunities, AI has made its way into our practice. To some extent or another, often inadvertently, we have adopted AI, further complicating our identification of a pre-AI moment. That fiction, however, remains useful because it will allow us to recognize (and perhaps even invent) qualities upon which we may rely to work with AI. Generative speculation represents a significant part of the exercise, as we list skills that both intuitively and counterintuitively empower us to face AI. It will also give us a reference point, a purposefully constructed memory of a period that we might need to revisit moving forward. It will provide a starting place for an approach to understanding the transition. Call it a preemptive act of writing center archaeology. We are building evidence for future excavations. To create a reflective pause, generate a fictional past, and capture a mood during transition, we turn to a multimodal approach combining photographs with voice narration. The process began with four questions: The authors shared still photos that reminded them of their encounters with AI. Then, they recorded spoken descriptions of the photos, explaining their relevance to the questions and the memories they elicit. At times, the question prompted only the recorded reflection. In those cases, the door to our old writing center supplies the background image. The result is organized by the questions but also allows the audience to view and hear it in any order as if browsing through a family album. The choices of modalities follow the ideas of theorists Vilém Flusser and Friedrich Kittler. For Flusser (2004), photography “ has interrupted the stream of history. Photographs are dams placed in the way of the stream of history, jamming historical happenings” (p. 128). It’s this “jamming” that makes still images an appropriate medium for this project, which temporarily and imaginatively arrests time to acquire an advantageous perspective on our history. On a personal level, we might be familiar with the connection between still images and remembrance. The essay is, in part, a picture book of our days before adding AI to our mission statement. The photographs literalize the piece’s title. As for the voice recordings, we recall how Kittler (1999), in his psychoanalytic analysis of media, associated the gramophone and its capacity to mechanically store and reproduce sounds with the Lacanian Real, or the part of the world that exists beyond human signification (p. 37). For Kittler, when we record someone’s voice, we capture words, but also the uninflected, unintentional, unstructured noises that reveal something true about the speaker. Our tone, tics, and silences (those sounds free of signifiers) express the authenticity of our responses to AI and our ideas of how it will alter our writing assistance. Kittler, incidentally, would have something else to say about photography to elaborate on Flusser’s thoughts. As a mechanically constructed image of the world, the photograph belongs to the Imaginary—it creates a double of the world onto which viewers can project their ideals. In short, the affordances of still photographs and voice recordings allow us to weave our imagined past and pair it with the real hopes, mysteries, and anxieties involved in our incorporation of AI. Our goal is to evoke our world before that revolution. Before moving on to the picture book, here are a few words of the Hendrix College Writing Center staff who participated in this project: In the writing center, I begin my sessions away from the page. I start a conversation sparked by questions like What do you want to say? What’s blocking you from that right now? What gets you fired up about this piece? I sprinkle in camaraderie and a touch of humor: Oh yeah that class is ridiculously hard or yeah one time someone came in here twenty minutes before their paper was due! The specifics vary, but the point is to create a space at the intersection of talking, thinking, and human connection. That’s where writing begins. It doesn’t spring magically into existence out of the end of a pen. I’m critical of that sort of “natural” approach to human writing. The idea that writing should “flow.” There’s nothing natural about the act of writing. It’s agonizing. It’s counterintuitive. So, I tend to start with conversation. I ask the writers who visit me to say what they’re trying to communicate. I let them think aloud until something greater than the separate pieces of our conversation emerges. Only then do we shape those thoughts into written form. I suppose I should mention my skepticism about AI. I’m not convinced AI can or will allow something greater to emerge. I’m reminded of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s (2012) description of cliché as “the debris of someone else’s thinking” (p. 45). Might that be an apt description of AI as well? To me, a writing center’s strength lies in its ability to create human connections. Before implementing AI in the writing center, we should ask ourselves how it supports that strength. My general approach to writing assistance is to analyze works for structural issues (how do ideas flow, satisfactory resolutions to concepts set up earlier, etc.) first and foremost and to center any aid around my findings. To me, AI has the downside of cheapening this process by reducing the structure of an essay into a template of what it could be, reducing the potential impact a work could hold. In addition, AI isn’t very good at following along with these threads of ideas when fed a paper, so it doesn’t do me much good to ask ChatGPT or so such about a paper I’m meant to look over. I approach my duties as a writing consultant as if I am helping a friend with their homework without doing it for them. I see myself as the bridge that connects their contemplation of the assignment to their final project. This approach consists of talking to me as if I am a friend, where I listen without judgment. They simply describe what they think the rubric means or, if they’ve already begun writing, what thought they are struggling to put on paper. From there, we work to make the thought clearer and the assignment criteria more reachable. I have seen firsthand how AI is a tool that can make the rubric digestible. It is a tool that can also help with spelling and grammar. This can be helpful because patrons are then able to enter the appointment already understanding the assignment, thus having questions and drafts ready. At the same time, however, AI can interfere as it makes it easier for someone to lapse in their work ethic, comprehension, creativity, and originality. When those lines are crossed, so is academic integrity. During my time as a writing consultant, I was a student majoring in psychology and minoring in biology. I think that my background in science afforded me a unique approach to writing assistance and writing in general, which contributes to my reservations about using AI in spaces of writing assistance. AI, by nature, does not allow that uniqueness or human variability, which can sometimes make all the difference in writing and helping others to write. In my experience, there are times in which the person-to-person conversations and connections create a soundboard that facilitates breakthroughs in a peer’s writing far more than any technical edits. Maybe it is arrogant, but even as AI continues to develop and earn its place as a supplement to writing assistance, I do not think it will ever replicate the peer-to-peer experience. As long as we respect AI’s limitations and honor the value of traditional writing assistance, I believe the two can work together to empower individuals in their writing journeys. If I invoke some clichés about mixed emotions at the arrival of generative AI, it is because they feel true. They also feel appropriate because I believe writing and writing assistance are about mixed emotions. I believe that, to find ways to express thoughts, writers and their readers need to embrace being a bit unsettled. I try to cultivate comfort with uncertainty as a necessary mindset for successful, truly exploratory writing. After advocating for such a double consciousness for years, I feel generative AI is the biggest challenge so far in practicing what I preach. Looking at the pictures we put together for this piece, I find great serenity— a reminder of how we reacted when we first realized how quickly a full-fledged essay could appear on an app’s screen.

Editors' Introduction to Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 8-1.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> This article provides a critical interface analysis of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website to reveal how systemic oppressions embedded in governmental websites create injustice among minoritized communities. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> We situate this research within the existing scholarship about the multilingual user interface, usability studies, and the issues of linguistic social justice as it intersects with technical and professional communication. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How does the USCIS website's content cater to diverse immigrant populations in terms of usability, specifically considering Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for accessible websites? 2. From a user-experience perspective, are the USCIS website navigation tools obtrusive in presenting information? Are there issues of power and privilege through the inclusion/exclusion of certain voices? 3. What ideological and cultural assumptions does its interface design impart to diverse website users through its tools, content organization logic, and visual style? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research method:</b> Working under the critical interface analysis framework and adopting a walkthrough approach, we analyze the official website of the USCIS. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> The USCIS website prioritizes English or Spanish proficiency, potentially excluding users with other diverse language backgrounds. First-time users lack immediate access to essential features, and the site overlooks the needs of its diverse immigrant population, with limited language options, multimedia resources, and occasional discrepancies in content. Using terms like “alien” contradicts the inclusive image the US aims for. The Multilingual Resource Center faces document translation shortages, contributing to a potential digital divide. Inclusive design choices are crucial for creating a welcoming environment and addressing these concerns. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> These findings have implications for understanding the rhetorics of immigration policy, power, identity, and government perceptions.

A lack of cultural intelligence (CQ) creates a lack of trust in global virtual teams (GVTs). Study findings examine how leaders demonstrate CQ, trust in GVTs, and provide strategies for organizations. This qualitative single-case study explores how leaders of US-based GVTs in the financial industry demonstrate CQ and trust and strategies to develop trust. This study applies the social interaction theory, uncovering group identity and behaviors. Participants included GVT members and leaders having at least 1 year of experience on a GVT. The emerging themes were demonstrating CQ, demonstrating trust, and strategies to build trust.

In their 2019 special issue for Technical Communication Quarterly , St. Amant and Graham enjoined science and technical communication researchers to consider more durable and portable methods. Such methods would be considered valid across disciplines and able to move knowledge to various stakeholders to demonstrate the contributions of scientific and technical communication research. We review a framework called knowledge translation to highlight its dependence on technical communication skills and then articulate it with science and technical communication epistemology to meet St. Amant and Graham's criteria for science and technical communication research to become more durable and portable.

This article examines two-year college peer writing tutors’ preparedness for the emotional labor of writing center work. Through stories, this multivocal piece shares the experiences of nine current and former peer tutors from a writing center at a large midwestern technical college and challenges the narrative of two-year colleges as remedial spaces.

This paper draws on Bakhtins notion of heteroglossia to expand theorizations of community translanguaging. Ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods are used to explore the multiple voices that multilingual elementary students adopted and adapted in their digital, translingual texts. Findings illustrate how children drew from multiple voices, including popular media, family collective memories, the school/teacher, peers, and heritage languages, and how they used those voices to recontextualize ideologies about language, literacy, and schooling and to participate in the social and academic work of the classroom. Implications for emerging theorizations of community translanguaging as well as design of more equitable pedagogical practices for multilingual learners are discussed.

This article arose out of a need to better understand what happens in university writing center (WC) appointments that are incentivized or mandated by instructors. While the topic has received attention in WC literature, previous research focuses largely on student attitudes toward mandated WC appointments and only rarely addresses the interpersonal dynamics of these sessions. To address this gap, we conducted an IRB-approved, survey-based study investigating the impact of WC tutorial incentivization on writing tutors’ assessments of sessions’ effectiveness, comparing tutors’ scoring of different session types and conducting statistical queries on some of the larger categories. Our results challenge the widespread assumption that mandatory or incentivized writing center sessions are always an obvious tradeoff of “quality vs. quantity.” Specifically, we found that differences in tutor scores between voluntary and mandatory WC sessions were statistically insignificant and did not present a clear tutor preference for voluntary sessions over mandatory sessions; however, when types of incentivization were compared, tutors showed a subtle preference for sessions that were incentivized through a class-wide mandate over those that offered extra credit or involved individual referrals. In this study, we also discuss common metrics for gauging writing tutorials’ success, suggesting that WC practitioners may be placing an undue weight on “engagement.” We hope, most of all, to encourage further research that examines (and expands) institutional approaches to mandatory sessions and encourages a more welcoming stance toward the writers who visit WCs at the behest of their instructors.

W artykule przedstawiono założenia, przebieg i efekty rozwijających kompetencje retoryczne zajęć skierowanych do studentów dziennikarstwa. Punktem wyjścia był paradygmat narracyjny Waltera Fishera, który może być wykorzystany zarówno w analizie, jak i tworzeniu własnych narracji. Posłużył on jako rama do omówienia zjawiska teorii spiskowych. W ramach zajęć studenci wypełniali ankiety badające ich stosunek do tego typu narracji, tworzyli własne teksty narracyjne, a także analizowali je w oparciu o zaproponowane kryteria. Artykuł przedstawia wnioski z kolejnych etapów tego doświadczenia dydaktycznego, by podkreślić jego zalety, a także potencjalne zastrzeżenia, jako narzędzia rozwijającego umiejętności krytycznego myślenia, twórczego pisania oraz refleksji nad obecnością narracji spiskowych w przestrzeni medialnej.

Przedmiotem artykułu jest refleksja dydaktyczna towarzysząca projektowaniu i realizacji kursu akademickiego skierowanego do młodych badaczy. Celem kursu jest podniesienie kompetencji komunikacyjnych kursantów, szczególnie w zakresie prezentacji wyników badań. W artykule zwraca się uwagę na rolę językowego i wizualnego akcentowania treści, w tym na rolę liczb, a także na istotne czynniki związane z pozycją mówcy i audytorium.

Debata konkursowa stanowi gatunek retoryczny, który charakteryzuje się określoną konwencją, przekonującym przekazem argumentacyjnym, formą rywalizacyjną oraz oceną ekspercką. Debata jest wykorzystywana w edukacji głównie do doskonalenia kompetencji komunikacyjnych. W artykule wskazuje się na propozycję zastosowania debaty konkursowej w dydaktyce akademickiej jako metody wspomagającej rozwój umiejętności i postaw badawczych. Podstawowym odniesieniem historycznym i systemowym dla takiego zastosowania debat jest dialektyka, stanowiąca zbiór zagadnień z zakresu teorii dyskusji i argumentacji. Na tej podstawie postuluje się nadanie debatom rangi sporu naukowego, którego rozstrzygnięcie oparte jest na procedurze symetrycznej dyskusji argumentacyjnej. Wyróżnione w artykule metodyczne sposoby zastosowania debat w edukacji pozwalają na doskonalenie efektów heurystycznego, krytycznego i kreatywnego myślenia.

Self-efficacy is important for maintaining a person’s belief in their capacity to perform desired behaviours and achieve desired goals; without self-efficacy, in the context of academic writing, one may doubt their ability to achieve writing goals. Previous research showed that the Writing Meeting Framework (WMF) can enable desired changes in writing behaviours but did not consider the role of self-efficacy in this behaviour change. This UK-based study aimed to determine if the WMF could improve writing self-efficacy for postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and early career researchers (ECRs). Participants completed a baseline questionnaire to reflect on their writing experiences and then were randomly matched into 35 pairs. Each pair met online four times over eight weeks using the WMF and then completed a post-questionnaire, reflecting on their experiences. Analysis showed significant improvements in self-efficacy using the WMF: participants improved their ability to set realistic and achievable writing goals and increased their confidence in completing writing goals regularly. This study shows the WMF can develop PGRs’ and ECRs’ academic writing self-efficacy and suggests the WMF can develop writing attributes required to produce academic writing regularly and achieve individual writing goals. The WMF offers a mechanism for developing this important component of effective writing behaviour.

Rhetoric about bodies, health, and medicine is conceived at the intersection of multiple discursive systems and social domains. I contend that religion remains an underexplored (and sometimes misrepresented) realm in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM)—a gap this article seeks to address. Here, I present my research on the importance of Protestantism in the invention of the premature infant as a medical figure in the United States. I show that early discourse about premature birth is shot through with Protestant rhetoric and beliefs, and I propose the term “theo-moral physiology” for the religiously informed medical orientation popularized in late 19th century medical literature about premature babies. Ultimately, I challenge RHM scholars to resist the tendency to treat the rise of American biomedicine as a fundamentally secular project by attending to the ways modern medicine has evolved in tandem with contemporary religion.

Introduction to RHM 7.4

This article examines the presence of intensive mothering within incarcerated motherhood and how mothers in jail manage the constraints this ideology imposes on their mothering practices. Analyzing questionnaire data collected from mothers in a Texas county jail through a feminist maternal framework reveals that these mothers have been influenced by the ideology of intensive mothering to serve as their children’s educator. Considering the standard to educate one’s children reinforces the idea that mothers must apply an autonomous model of literacy to childrearing, this article examines the ways in which mothers feel compelled to seek further instruction in order to mother and communicate with their children effectively. This article also examines incarcerated mothers’ simultaneous use of literacy to (re)appropriate intensive mothering and (re)claim agency as mothers. 

In today’s workplace, supervisors often communicate with direct reports using technology that could influence the perceived relationship employees have with their managers. The purpose of this convergent mixed methods study was to describe the perception of how media richness, when using technology to communicate, influences the relationship direct reports have with their supervisors. To address the research question, a survey was used with a sample of 100 direct reports who frequently receive communication from their supervisors in different technology formats. The results from the study suggest that technology media influences the perceived relationship between direct reports and their supervisors. According to the results of this study, technology media may be especially helpful in bolstering the availability of supervisors, which may positively influence other elements of the supervisory relationship. The results further suggest that it may be important for all leaders to choose technology media that is personalized and preferred by the employee while also using the most effective media for the type of message. Finally, leaders should understand the concerns that employees may have around privacy and overuse of technology media.

While Louis Pasteur’s germ theory functions as one of the foundational concepts of modern medicine, resistance to COVID-19 prevention measures reveal a rejection not just of government mandates, but of germ theory as well. Therefore, this article seeks to trace the rhetorical linear of rejections of germ theory denialism through an examination of primary and secondary texts from Pasteur’s contemporaries, through the development of chiropractic, and into the COVID-19 pandemic. The author finds that the denial of viruses offers a peculiar form of biorhetoric that invokes absence and invisibility, rather than presence, as rhetorical grounds for rejecting public health directives.

Rarely are cookbooks simply collections of recipes; frequently, they offer a wealth of additional cultural and historical information. They serve as a medium for sharing ideas and memories; and thus operate rhetorically. Similarly, a recipe is not simply a set of instructions; it is a text embedded within and reflecting cultural, social, and historical contexts. Recipes act as rhetorical tools that foster communal continuity and cohesion. Cookbooks create a rhetorical space, engaging readers through both the main text and supplementary elements, or “paratexts,” as termed by Gérard Genette. This study examines the rhetorical function of Emily Meggett’s bestselling cookbook, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, with a focus on her “Fried Okra” recipe and its accompanying paratexts. Analyzing these elements enhances our understanding of and appreciation for the cultural and rhetorical dimensions embedded within her cookbook.

Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal email writing. Findings reveal the influences of communicative situation, L1 background, and L2 proficiency on pragmatic competence in email writing. First, L2 learners show a significantly lower degree of situational variability compared with ES teachers. Second, L1 backgrounds have a significant impact on L2 writing performance. Third, L2 learners with higher English proficiency tend to use more indirect request strategies, but they have not developed pragmatic competence to adjust their usage across written contexts. Findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications for developing writing competence of L2 learners, which should be attuned to diverse rhetorical expectations and individual needs.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are at the forefront of pedagogical considerations in classrooms across the academy. Many studies have spoken to the technology’s capacity to generate one-off texts in a variety of genres. This study complements those by inquiring into its capacity to generate compelling texts at scale. In this study, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a small corpus of generated texts in two genres and gauge it against novice and published academic writers along known dimensions of linguistic variation. Theoretically, we position and historicize ChatGPT as a writing technology and consider the ways in which generated text may not be congruent with established trajectories of writing development in higher education. Our study found that generated texts are more informationally dense than authored texts and often read as dialogically closed, “empty,” and “fluffy.” We close with a discussion of potentially explanatory linguistic features, as well as relevant pedagogical implications.

Editors' introduction to 7.3.

AbstractIn this paper, we present a model of pathos, delineate its operationalisation, and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of natural language argumentation. We understand pathos as an interactional persuasive process in which speakers are performing pathos appeals and the audience experiences emotional reactions. We analyse two strategies of such appeals in pre-election debates: pathotic Argument Schemes based on the taxonomy proposed by Walton et al. (Argumentation schemes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008), and emotion-eliciting language based on psychological lexicons of emotive words (Wierzba in Behav Res Methods 54:2146–2161, 2021). In order to match the appeals with possible reactions, we collect real-time social media reactions to the debates and apply sentiment analysis (Alswaidan and Menai in Knowl Inf Syst 62:2937–2987, 2020) method to observe emotion expressed in language. The results point to the importance of pathos analysis in modern discourse: speakers in political debates refer to emotions in most of their arguments, and the audience in social media reacts to those appeals using emotion-expressing language. Our results show that pathos is a common strategy in natural language argumentation which can be analysed with the support of computational methods.

This article explores the challenge of implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion literacies in popular buyer persona platforms such as HubSpot and FlowMapp. Drawing on a practitioner interview with a public relations and marketing director, Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr, this article contextualizes Feldman Karr's efforts to revise her design team's internal buyer persona construction process to better engage DEI issues. This article considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham's Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about "the good life" (flourishing) in persona redesign.

This research team sought to gauge potential changes in the composition landscape by replicating, diversifying, and extending Bergmann and Zepernick’s 2007 study. To potentially measure the impact of years of transfer-focused work, we examined participants’ perceptions of first-year writing (FYW) classes at multiple institutions and in multiple fields at four diverse institutions. Gathering data from thirteen focus groups and sixteen interviews, the study included sixty-four total participants at four universities across the United States. Our findings diverged from the original study. The results indicated students felt that FYW was both personal and academic; that FYW taught students how to write; that FYW instructors were experts in their field; that FYW teaches best writing processes and practices; that personally relevant writing is important to writing transfer; and that for writing, there is “no box under the bed.” These findings suggest that transfer curricula may be working in tandem with other approaches, such as Writing about Writing, to shift students’ perceptions of the importance of FYW.

Fourteen years after the special issue on neuroscience and rhetoric in this journal (Neurorhetorics, vol. 40, no. 5), we turn back and look forward. We assess what has been accomplished in neurorhetorics in that time frame, examine what has changed in rhetorical studies and in the neurosciences, and offer suggestions for future research. Eight contributors detail the importance of neurorhetorics for their work and engage a range of topics. Those include neurodiversity, neuropolicy, neurogastronomy, and interdisciplinary collaborations, among others. Ultimately, the forum points toward the need for more critical cultural approaches in neurorhetorics, more policy discussions, new methodologies, and new philosophies that can stretch beyond the “neuro-” prefix and enroll insights from New Materialisms and Global Rhetorics.

Instructors have used Wikipedia to teach information literacy, composition, and as a supplement to the study of a specific topic. This webtext aims to lower the barriers-to-entry for using Wikipedia in advanced editing courses by providing an extensive overview and documentation through examples of the issues involved and a series of educational materials for both instructors and students.

Background: Technologies are increasingly being deployed in facilitating participatory healthcare. Global governments developed a variety of digital platforms, such as mobile contact tracing apps, to help the public navigate risks and uncertainties during the COVID-19 pandemic. Literature review: Contrary to normative approaches to information design (IxD), the global spread of COVID-19 revealed the need for an alternative design framework (i.e., concept-driven design) to help develop mobile health (mHealth) apps that can support a broader portrayal of information value in IxD. Research questions: 1. In response to COVID-19, what affordances are prioritized by the designers of these global mHealth apps? What do these priorities tell us about design intents and information value? 2. What interpretive framework can we use to understand mHealth designers’ intent across different geopolitical contexts? Research methodology: We captured screenshots of the three apps in the US, India, and China, as well as a website in Ghana. Using touchpoints as the unit of analysis, we conducted an inventory and affinity mapping to visualize the architecture of each app and categorize touchpoints based on their affordances. Results: The comparison of apps across countries displays shared and divergent priorities in their touchpoints, affordances, and information depth. We developed an interpretive framework for understanding mHealth design intent across numerous contexts—Common Interpretive Framework for Design Analysis (CIFDA)—incorporating both linear analysis and recursive analysis of touchpoints, affordances, and depth. Conclusions: Touchpoints in mHealth applications can be designed, but they can also be measured and analyzed, and they can in return help us understand the designer's intent and expected user experience.

This article explores the challenge of implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion literacies in popular buyer persona platforms such as HubSpot and FlowMapp. Drawing on a practitioner interview with a public relations and marketing director, Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr, this article contextualizes Feldman Karr's efforts to revise her design team's internal buyer persona construction process to better engage DEI issues. This article considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham's Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about "the good life" (flourishing) in persona redesign.

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language original (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”).

This study investigates infant feeding rhetoric from the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), a World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnership that prioritizes exclusive breastfeeding. The study approaches patient education materials as user documentation and analyzes the materials for kairos and metaphor. The author argued that the materials function as documentation for the birthing parent’s body operating within the system of the BFHI. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and for creating infant feeding resources that provide critical access to the healthcare system by rejecting the body-as-machine metaphor and reflecting families’ diverse situations, not just the situation of the U.S. healthcare system or BFHI.

Introduction to 7.2

College reading instruction warrants recognition as a necessary and actionable means of teaching for social justice. Faculty who teach students how to read course texts—and who guide and support them in doing so—advance social justice and equity via three separate mechanisms of action. These processes preferentially benefit marginalized and underserved students while more broadly fostering conceptual and perspective-taking skills essential for social justice.

In the fall of 2018, the First-Year Composition program at North Central Texas College (NCTC) initiated what informally became known as the Textbook Project. Our goal was to provide our community college students with innovative, imaginative, and inspiring classroom experiences that paralleled the high-impact opportunities their peers were afforded at four-year universities. The Textbook Project encompassed five key features: an NCTC-specific textbook, a campus-wide common read, resources for faculty and students in our college’s LMS, a college-wide lecture series, and funding for faculty professional development. Five years later, the project’s emphasis on continuity through collaboration has revitalized the department through faculty engagement and increased student success.

Recently, formative feedback in writing instruction has been supported by technologies generally referred to as Automated Writing Evaluation tools. However, such tools are limited in their capacity to explore specific disciplinary genres, and they have shown mixed results in student writing improvement. We explore how technology-enhanced writing interventions can positively affect student attitudes toward and beliefs about writing, both reinforcing content knowledge and increasing student motivation. Using a student-facing text-visualization tool called Write & Audit, we hosted revision workshops for students (n = 30) in an introductory-level statistics course at a large North American University. The tool is designed to be flexible: instructors of various courses can create expectations and predefine topics that are genre-specific. In this way, students are offered non-evaluative formative feedback which redirects them to field-specific strategies. To gauge the usefulness of Write & Audit, we used a previously validated survey instrument designed to measure the construct model of student motivation (Ling et al. 2021). Our results show significant increases in student self-efficacy and beliefs about the importance of content in successful writing. We contextualize these findings with data from three student think-aloud interviews, which demonstrate metacognitive awareness while using the tool. Ultimately, this exploratory study is non-experimental, but it contributes a novel approach to automated formative feedback and confirms the promising potential of Write & Audit.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Website adaptation is widely regarded as a strategic priority for successful cross-cultural business communication. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Drawing upon Hofstede's and Schwartz's cultural theories and the standardization/localization paradigm, this study conducts a quantitative analysis on the adaptative strategy performed by Chinese multinational corporations (MNCs) on their US websites and its influencing factors. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. To what extent have Chinese MNCs adapted their US websites to the US culture? 2. Are product, organizational and managerial factors associated with the degree of website adaptation? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> This study first used content analysis to examine the cultural manifestation on Chinese MNCs’ US websites and then quantitatively measured their degree of website adaptation. The association between the adaptation degree and its influencing factors was tested through a regression analysis. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusion:</b> The results indicated that Chinese MNCs have adapted their US websites to the US culture to a large extent. Product type, degree of internationalization, and firm size were significantly correlated with the adaptation degree, yet the association between products’ technological intensity, top management's international experiences, and the adaptation degree was not confirmed. This study extends the website adaptation literature by making an initial attempt to calibrate the degree of cultural adaptation reflected on corporate websites. It also provides fresh insights into how website adaptation can be impacted by a series of company-level factors. In addition, this study contributes to the field of technical and professional communication by suggesting effective ways for firms to make proper strategic decisions on cross-cultural web communication.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Zhihu live talks, as a major online knowledge commodity, enable speakers to provide professional information and interact with the audiences. The use of hedges and boosters has been associated with the realization of such a goal. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Previous research has indicated the relevance of disciplines or genres in the use of hedges and boosters in academic discourse; however, little is known about the use of these metadiscourse markers in Zhihu live talks as a new register for popularizing professional knowledge. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What are the disciplinary variations in the use of hedges and boosters in medical science and health (Med) and education (Edu) live talks? 2. To what extent do speakers’ characteristics (i.e., expertise and community status) have an impact on the use of hedges and boosters in Med and Edu live talks? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methods:</b> We collected the transcripts of 123 Med and 126 Edu live talks, as well as the demographic information of each speaker. Following a framework adapted from Hu and Cao, we conducted an analysis of the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters, and how they associate with speaker characteristics in each category of live talks. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> The two corpora exhibited significant differences in the frequencies and functions of hedges/boosters, and the differences can be attributed to the conventions of knowledge making in medicine and education disciplines. In addition, speaker characteristics have some impact on the use of hedges and boosters, such as speakers’ levels of conformity to disciplinary conventions or their strategic efforts in relational management. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> The findings can guide different speakers to configure metadiscourse to inform, argue, and direct while popularizing professional knowledge of different disciplines.

We analyze diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reports from the top 20 Fortune 500 companies to particularly examine how these companies use visual design and representation to present an aspirational future that valorizes their current DEI efforts. We contend that if large corporations have the ability to affect outcomes among employees, stakeholders, and citizens, then educators have an obligation to prepare students to be well positioned to make change and to participate in conversations about change.

Editors' Introduction to Issue 6.4

This essay discusses the need and the value of explicitly integrating rhetoric within the business classroom setting; introduces basic rhetorical structures that enhance the workplace skill set; identifies the significance of topoi in the business and professional communication classroom pedagogy; and provides an example of the practical application of using topoi as a pedagogical construct in the business and professional communication classroom.

Using interpretive phenomenological analysis of oral history interviews, this study explored poetic experiences of nine US secondary English language arts teachers who participated in a month of online poetry writing during COVID-19. The manuscript explores how poetic relationality created space for these secondary English language arts teachers, mostly in rural school districts, to reflect on their realities during COVID-19. These teachers came to understand themselves not just as teachers but also as poets, an understanding that helped sustain them as they taught in digital contexts, during social distancing and school closures.

This article explores the ethical complexity of inclusion, exclusion, and protection in TPC, drawing upon a historical technical document, The Green Book, which helped Black American travelers in the 1930-60s locate safe leisure spaces in a segregated society. We examine The Green Book through the antiracist thinker Kendi to understand some of the ethical limits of the binary of inclusion/exclusion and identify necessary forms of protection for historically- and multiply-marginalized groups.

In order to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the varied ways multiple language competencies are invoked in scientific communication and publication, this study features a content analysis of a collection of English, French, and Arabic abstracts from 14 articles of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant differences across abstracts in different languages suggests that EN/FR abstracts are tailored to an international specialist audience and Arabic abstracts favor a domestic policymaker audience in several key ways. The textual moves made to address these different audiences are typical of those studied by scholars of science communication, and accordingly this study indicates that plurilingual textual practices in scientific writing are associated with differences in audience and stakeholders. These findings carry implications for trans/pluri/multilingually oriented scholars of scientific communication, as well as for those who prepare future researchers for the demands of publication, suggesting that the flexible use of diverse linguistic resources is important to scientific practice in a globalized world.

The Chilean curriculum for writing education includes five paradigms: cultural, macro-linguistic, micro-linguistic, procedural, and communicative. The implementation of such a poly-paradigmatic curriculum can occur in multiple ways. Therefore, we analyzed classroom practices with two aims: (a) to describe how the paradigms are evident across practices, and (b) to analyze the paradigms’ internal alignment within each practice. We conducted classroom observations with five Spanish language teachers with varied orientations toward writing instruction. A content analysis of teachers’ discourse formed the basis for a narrative case-by-case analysis and a cross-case analysis. This process was guided by data collected during a previous survey study and supported by teachers’ interviews. Findings revealed that the cultural, macro- and micro- linguistic paradigms were implemented most often, while the implementation of procedural and communicative paradigms was rare. Additionally, paradigm alignment was visible in two practices but not in other practices. Possible reasons for this lack of integration and potential solutions to resolve this issue are discussed.

University students can become overwhelmed and hopeless as they pursue their final capstone writing projects. They are also navigating trying times of overlapping crises such as poverty, environmental decay, and war. To address these challenges, our Capstone Writing Groups (CWG) are designed to develop students’ writerly competence and enhance global citizenship traits of wisdom, courage, and compassion by utilizing contemplative and sōka strategies. Our group sessions focus on “good” writing, time management, and self-care strategies. The findings indicate that our writing groups enhanced participants’ writerly identity, writing skills, and critical reflection. They also fostered sōka global citizenship traits. We advocate for contemplative approaches and sōka global citizenship education to provide a human touch to supporting student writing.

In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

Inspired by conversations at the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Institute workshop on Pandemic Rhetoric(s), this dialogue assembles graduate student, early-, mid-career, and established rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and critical health communication scholars to discuss a keyword that has structured political, social, and biomedical thinking about COVID-19: un/precedented. In identifying un/precedented as an organizing temporal rhetoric for the pandemic, we interrogate how recurrent appeals to the pandemic’s novelty both allow for and limit our capacities to meet the pandemic’s tremendous exigencies head-on. Leveraging our unique scholarly and community commitments, we theorize how un/precedentedness 1) becomes complicit in government inaction, 2) (re)asserts conceptual and literal borders, 3) justifies state and national public health mandates, and 4) obscures other historical and contemporary pandemics. We conclude by offering possibilities for interdisciplinary and longitudinal research into the far-reaching effects of contagious disease.

Editors' Introduction to vol. 6 issue 3

This article, based on an interview study with community changemakers working within hostile systems of higher education and legislative politics, builds upon scholarship that names and challenges normative time by offering a cultural rhetorics analysis of activists’ alternative, community-based temporal practices that are centered in relationships and prioritize participant needs over institutional mandates. We theorize community-based temporal practices based on the changemaking stories of our interview participants, especially moments when they encountered time-based obstacles and used community-based knowledges as workarounds. We constellate these stories about the material barriers of time, the way time is wielded by those in power, and how to prioritize relationships, thus illuminating temporal practices that can be used to challenge institutional systems.

In our introduction to this special issue on cultural rhetorics, we as editors recognize that members of the field maintain many different approaches and frameworks. This diversity suggests that the work of prioritizing emplaced stories over universalizing theories brings cultural rhetoricians together, making research and teaching accountable first to communities, rather than the academy, and continuously examining our ethical commitments to O/others. This work, then, requires that scholars situate themselves within networks of places and spaces, cultures and peoples, power and privilege, so that we may practice relationality and accountability, actively seeking to make meaningful connections within and across research sites, and create space for silenced voices while building a more just world and disciplinary community.

Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.

In the past years, comparative assessment approaches have gained ground as a viable method to assess text quality. Instead of providing absolute scores to a text as in holistic or analytic scoring methods, raters in comparative assessments rate text quality by comparing texts either to pre-selected benchmarks representing different levels of writing quality (i.e., benchmark rating method) or by a series of pairwise comparisons to other texts in the sample (i.e., comparative judgement; CJ). In the present study, text quality scores from the benchmarking method and CJ are compared in terms of their reliability, convergent validity and scoring distribution. Results show that benchmark ratings and CJ-ratings were highly consistent and converged to the same construct of text quality. However, the distribution of benchmark ratings showed a central tendency. It is discussed how both methods can be integrated and used such that writing can be assessed reliably, validly, but also efficiently in both writing research and practice.

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The field of children’s literature has been adversely affected by the current alarming resurgence of book banning across the United States. Book banning has become the grandstanding stage for individuals on different political platforms to institute their desire to silence issues and people; most of these banned books share experiences that differ from mainstream white society. In their zest to muzzle others and create a dogmatic uniformity to a majority white mainstream, some parents and their political allies have targeted books they deem inappropriate, books that celebrate the kaleidoscope of races, cultures, and mores that make up the US. This essay examines the current wave of banning children’s books and the reasoning behind this trend. I argue that this trend of reader suppression seeks to silence minoritized voices and prevent critical conversations. Finally, I make a call to action for educators to share diverse stories so young readers, especially Black and Brown children, can see representations of themselves in books and other media.

This web text investigates how student users and nonusers perceive and operate within anonymous social media platforms. Through a survey and a small batch of qualitative interviews, I examine the ways that students are using anonymous applications and the extent to which anonymity influences how they navigate these spaces.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This article examines the role that reformed hiring practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the global industry of ecotourism may (or may not) play in bringing multiply marginalized or underrepresented (MMU) voices to the forefront of environmental risk communication and sustainability efforts worldwide. Ultimately, the article argues that ecotourism companies should promote grace-based hiring practices to include marginalized knowledges of threatened ecosystems (places) in a company’s decisions regarding sustainability.

Artykuł jest opisem realizacji trójkąta retorycznego w komunikacyjnej przestrzeni publicznej. Nadawcy mogą w niej realizować trzy strategie retoryczno-komunikacyjne: komunikację z odbiorcą, komunikację odbiorcy lub komunikację odbiorcą. Charakterystyka tej przestrzeni przez metaforę topograficzną pokazuje, że logos, etos i patos tekstów publicznych zależy od strategii poznawczo-komunikacyjnej nadawców i elastyczności ich języka, co prowadzi albo do perswazji, albo do manipulacji odbiorcami.

Artists are an important, but under-recognized, aspect of rural community growth. This research article details a collaborative project between a statewide arts organization and academic researchers in West Virginia designed to document the needs of under-represented artists across the state. We share our theoretical approach that meshes stakeholder and standpoint theory and our research approach that uses participatory and arts-based methods such as asset-mapping and collage-based listening sessions. Ultimately, we provide a model for others interested in research projects that explicitly prioritize coalition-building throughout a project and demonstrate how cultural (in)equity shapes multiple facets of community life.

In this article, the author theorizes the process that a World Health Organization work group used to update yellow fever risk maps published in the Yellow Book, a handbook created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for international travelers, from a “wicked problems” perspective. She argues that using this model highlights the complexity of nonexperts’ risk assessment practices in this context and that the work group's decision to create vaccination maps demonstrates an increased awareness of the embodied decision-making practices that nonexperts perform, aligning with and contributing to the growing emphasis on creating user-centered risk information that can be seen in some risk communication.

This study tested an instructional design to improve students' synthesis performance in a specific academic subject, Science Orientation, which aimed to teach students how to critically evaluate scientific debates. The design included three components: 1) students construct a task definition via a learning strategy based on comparing and contrasting texts and processes, 2) students comprehend source information via a read-stop-think-note strategy, and 3) students connect source information critically via a semantic-textual transformation strategy. After several design iterations, the instructional design was tested in a quasi-experimental experiment with a pretest-posttest. Seven 10th grade classes participated in the intervention (n=129), four in the control condition (n=86). The design seemed feasible for teachers, students completed most learning tasks as intended and evaluated the course positively. Furthermore, texts written in the experimental condition at posttest were rated significantly higher than those written in the control condition on the instructed aspects: representation of source information, intertextual integration, and critical stance. This instructional design appears to have potential for helping students improve their comprehension of scientific debates and comprehensive writing. In the discussion we propose that the instructional design might be a general format for learning to synthesize domain specific information from contrasting sources.

This essay is one of a series on my mother’s late-age composing, studying a writing project she started at age 70 and worked on for more than 25 years. Her intention was to integrate extensive reading, personal experience, and cultural observations to explain changes in parenting (and, by extension, education and enculturation of the next generation) from her childhood in the 1920s through the 2000s.When she died at 97, she left behind a 75-page draft, but was unable to complete her plans for revisions and an ending. I focus here on identifying the multiple factors in the ecology of her aging literacy that interacted to interrupt, slow down, and ultimately prevent her from finishing the essay. By studying her artifacts and documenting stresses on her literacy system (defined as body/mind/environment), I constructed timelines for her aging literacy and composing, expressed in visualizations. These demonstrate a pattern of persistence and resilience, “bouncing back” from setbacks, but at progressively lower levels until she reaches the limits of her literacy system in late old age.

In this teaching tip, I introduce a hermit crab review activity. In the hermit crab review, students take an unusual form to contain their peer feedback, a form that frames and curates their peer response. This playful form of peer feedback makes peer review more accessible to students who are not proficient in providing feedback.

This qualitative study examined recounted experiences of nine faculty Academic Writing Fellows who participated in a year-long writing initiative that sought to foster productive academic writing practices. The initiative (including weekly writing groups, national writing mentors in each Fellow’s discipline, and two-weekend writing retreats) was designed to encourage habits and attitudes for successful academic writing through a community-based approach. Using Positioning Theory as an analytical lens, this study explored Fellows’ enactment of rights and duties and their evolving identities as academic writers. Our analyses indicate that the program functioned as a displacement space that allowed Fellows to explore their self-positioning as writers and to re-story themselves in productive ways. We argue that both spatial and temporal displacement contributed to participants’ opportunities for meaningful repositioning.

Abstract Christy Tidwell reflects on the shift from teaching in person to teaching online asynchronous classes during COVID-19. This shift involved a combination of labor-based grading and using Discord as a central space for the class, both of which aimed to center and engage students and relationships with students rather than further automate the class. Tidwell concludes by commenting on ways that these tools and techniques remain useful even when returning to the in-person classroom.

In technical and professional communication, the social justice turn calls on us to interrogate sites of positionality, privilege, and power to help foreground strategies that can empower marginalized groups. I propose that mainstream media coverage of the opioid epidemic represents such a site because addiction to these drugs, which initially primarily affected White people, has been positioned as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. I explore the strategies that were used to create this positioning by investigating themes in the visual rhetoric as conveyed through data visualizations and in the text of the articles in which these graphics were published. My results align with two previous studies that confirmed this public health framing. I also observed an emphasis on mortality, which contributes to our understanding of rhetorical strategies that can be used to engender support rather than condemnation for those suffering from drug addiction.

Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live. In this article, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical framework that situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports.

Materiał artykułu stanowią warstwy językowe emitowanych w telewizji polskiej bajek, programów fabularnych i reportaży. Gatunki są dobrane na zasadzie zróżnicowania pod względem struktury, funkcjonalności i stylu, by łatwo dało się wykazać realizacje strategii estetycznych, które mają cel retoryczny. Estetyzacja oraz anestetyzacja i antyestetyzacja powinny się w tych zróżnicowanych tekstach pojawić i być umotywowane. Autorka prowadzi rozważania z perspektywy mediolingwistyki, używa narzędzi stylistyki i posiłkuje się ustaleniami aksjolingwistyki. Analiza stylistyczna wykazała, że kategorie estetyczne mogą służyć jako narzędzie w badaniu multimodalnego tekstu telewizyjnego, który prymarnie nie jest przeznaczony do analizy przeżyć estetycznych.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Presents papers from the International Professional Communication Conference that was held in Limerick, Ireland, 17–20 July 2022. The conferences solicited practical ideas for redressing specific manifestations of injustice rather than theorize or deliberate about the nature of social justice.

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Greig Henderson, University of Toronto Robert V. Wess, Philosophical Turns: Epistemological, Linguistic, and Metaphysical . Parlor Press, 2023. 288 pages. 978-1-64317-370-2 (paperback, $34.99) 978-1-64317-371-9 (hardcover $69.99) 978-1-64317-372-6 (PDF $29.99) 978-1-64317-373-3 (EPUB $29.99) The new wave of contemporary criticism rejects both the depth model and the hermeneutics of suspicion that goes with it. Critique gives way to postcritique, and styles of disenchantment such as symptomatic reading, ideological demystification, and new historicism are seen to be passé. Reparative styles of criticism supplant paranoid styles, and critics like Rita Felski and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick have proposed that literature should be equipment for living rather than equipment for debunking and politicizing. “We know only too well,” Felski writes, “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique, the x-ray gaze of symptomatic reading, the smoothly rehearsed moves that add up to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ideas that seemed revelatory thirty years ago—the decentered subject! the social construction of reality!—have dwindled into shopworn slogans; defamiliarizing has lapsed into dogma.” In a similar vein, Sedgewick maintains that the hermeneutics of suspicion is a “quintessentially paranoid style of critical engagement; it calls for constant vigilance, reading against the grain, assuming the worst-case scenario, and then rediscovering its own gloomy prognosis in every text.” This postcritical turn is connected with surface or distant reading, a way of reading that supposedly supplants deep and close reading. As Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski point out in their introduction to Critique and Postcritique , this way of reading works “against the assumption that the essential meaning of a text resides in a repressed or unconscious content that requires excavation by the critic. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus urge greater attention to what lies on the surface—the open to view, the…

Editors' Introduction to 6.1.

As preparation for the rhetoric and composition job market becomes more readily available through multiple sources, some cover letter writers may find themselves confused by the well-meaning, but perhaps conflicting, responses to writing given by mentors from differing backgrounds, statuses, and epistemes. This article seeks to illuminate the rhetorical situation behind the cover letter with simulated writing responses to a genuine cover letter by five reader archetypes: a supportive reader, a critical reader, an outside reader, a teaching-centric reader, and a research-centric reader. Through this exercise, cover letter writers are shown how to weigh writing advice through the juxtaposition of each reader’s response. Cover letter readers as a secondary audience are also addressed with considerations for preparing future job market participants.

Abstract The article recounts the author's experiences designing an undergraduate business writing course that bridges the long-standing divide between the traditional liberal arts and professionally-oriented forms of education. This course, organized around the television series The Wire, helps students grapple with the interpretive complexities that shape contemporary institutional life.

Abstract An English major chronicles a “day in the life” of a college student during the 2020–21 school year—the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrative begins with stress-related dreams, continues with daily activities (walking through seemingly deserted halls and attending Hyflex classes, facilitating remote writing center sessions and leading campus meetings), and ends with the author settling down for the night, settling being an ironic and apt term to describe the author's sense of his academic year.

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Using a sprinkle of Queer Theory, their on-the-job experiences, and writing center scholarship that challenges disciplinary orthodoxies, two intersectionally queer and contingent writing center researcher-administrators examine the constraints of contingency; discuss the underlife of queer labor; and point to queer labor nuances and possibilities alongside contingent writing center work.

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, w jaki sposób amplifikacja retoryczna wpływa na dyskurs, nadając terminom naukowym wydźwięk emocjonalny. Przedmiotem studium jest polski dyskurs genderowy w jego wariancie politycznym. Artykuł składa się z pięciu części. Po zdefiniowaniu w części wstępnej pojęć gender i dyskurs, zwrócono uwagę na narzędzia amplifikacji retorycznej. Materiał badawczy – polskojęzyczne teksty internetowe prezentujące różne stanowiska w debacie na temat płci – przeanalizowany został pod kątem typologii używanych mechanizmów amplifikacji.

While a great deal is known about instructor response to student writing—from commenting practices to student perceptions—less is known about how feedback impacts students’ writing and writerly development. While we set out to study students’ explicit engagement with written instructor feedback, our initial experimental design was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, we describe the dialogic collaborative process that emerged as we considered both the data we were able to collect and, in turn, feedback anew. This article proposes that feedback on student writing is a boundary object which affords those interacting with it the opportunity for collaboration despite the different languages, meanings, and priorities they bring to it. The results present an initial framework for theorizing feedback as boundary object, which includes 1) a linguistic comparison of the words used by instructors and students to talk about writing and 2) structural trends that we have termed “dialogic infrastructures,” describing the form and orientation of instructor feedback and corresponding student responses. We also share implications of this nascent theory for future feedback research and writing classroom practices.

<roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></roman> Building a reputable network on Twitter is viewed as impactful in several scholarly disciplines, but little is known about the professional and interdisciplinary human-computer interaction (HCI) community. This study combined two approaches from scholarly communication and technical communication to capture the static and dynamic features of the HCI scholar Twitter network. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review:</b></roman> Related studies that described the scholarly reputation built through Twitter and social networking in the field of HCI were reviewed and discussed. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></roman> 1. In which countries are HCI scholars more likely to follow their peers in the same country? 2. What are the characteristics (country, reputation) and actions (reciprocity) of HCI scholars who are more likely to build HCI scholarly network profiles on Twitter? <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research methodology:</b></roman> The network analysis method of the exponential random graph model (ERGM) was adopted to trace and visualize current follower networks on Twitter. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results and discussion:</b></roman> We found that 22.9% of HCI scholars use Twitter and that reciprocity and country of current employment best drive the Twitter connections of scholars. Characteristics of HCI scholars’ tie formation online are also illustrated and discussed. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Implications for practice:</b></roman> This study contributes to field studies of professional networks by identifying the structural properties and factors that influence scholars’ search for professional development on Twitter. The empirical findings should be a helpful reference for HCI professional societies and individual scholars in operating online professional networks.

In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett encourages her readers to slow down the internal thoughts of human superiority over "intrinsically inanimate matter" --- thoughts that prevent them from "detecting...a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies" and their political systems (p. ix). Some readers of CDQ may wonder why a book from 2010 is worth our attention in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on women's reproductive autonomy, and the restrictions placed on the EPA's control over carbon emissions all suggest a clear resurgence of what Bennett calls the oft-repeated "vitalism-materialism debate" (p. 90)---the debate over how far affect, agency, animacy, and vitality extend. Bennett resolves the tensions of that debate by fusing traditional ideas of mechanistic materialism with the notions of an unknowable agency in all matter (not just humans), an agency that lacks representation in current political thought. If technical communicators and designers dedicated to crisis/risk communication as well as those studying and producing political technologies (Cheek, 2021, 2022) didn't see the application of Bennett's "vital materialism" at the end of the Bush era's heated debates over stem cell research and the war in Iraq as well as the North American power blackout of 2003, then perhaps, given the current political climate, I can persuade them to find merit in revisiting Bennett's arguments.

These remarks have been edited lightly for publication here.

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Jason Maxwell Jason Maxwell University at Buffalo, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 415–417. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jason Maxwell; Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 415–417. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

W artykule przedstawiono wyniki analizy ponad 300 polskich memów dotyczących pandemii SARS-CoV-2 z lat 2020-2021. Celem badania było określenie, w jaki sposób memy – traktowane jako nośniki perswazji – narzucają odbiorcom interpretację faktów. Wyróżnienie czterech typów bohaterów: Ofiary, Prześladowcy, Wybawcy i Głupca pozwoliło określić, jakie grupy społeczne obsadzane są w poszczególnych rolach. Role te wraz z odpowiadającymi im typowymi scenariuszami ewokowały narracje, które mogły wywoływać określone opinie i emocje na temat pandemii i związanych z nią zachowań czy decyzji.

W artykule przedstawiono analizę wywiadu zatytułowanego Dziennikarz przerywa milczenie! Rozmowa z Kamilem Durczokiem zamieszczonego na kanale „Czyż tak!” 21 sierpnia 2020 roku. Wywiad nagrany został w katowickim teatrze Korez, a jego tematyka dotyczy kryzysu egzystencjalnego i wizerunkowego, z jakim zmaga się znany dziennikarz i wieloletni redaktor naczelny serwisu informacyjnego TVN „Fakty”. Analiza retoryki wypowiedzi uczestników dialogu, przywołanych symboli kulturowych oraz znaczeń tkwiących w przedstawionej przestrzeni pozwoliła na rozpoznanie skomplikowanej gry, jaką Durczok oraz Czyż podejmują z sytuacją wyznania – z przymusem mówienia prawdy, któremu w społeczeństwie medialnego spektaklu towarzyszy potrzeba kształtowania własnego wizerunku.

In this article, I argue that local disasters are a global concern and that various transnational assemblages emerge during a disaster that support the suffering communities and help in addressing the issues of social justice in post-disaster situations. The transnational assemblages that emerge on social media create innovative practices (via non-western and decolonial ways) of creating communities across the world via crisis communication and distributed work to address social injustices during the disaster.

Partisan rhetoric surrounding COVID-era face-masking has reshuffled traditional stasis hierarchy, allowing the middle stases of definition and quality, which emphasize epideictic motives of cultural affirmation, to supersede conjectural questions of medical efficacy. Viral images positioning masks as metonymic approximations of “authoritarianicity” and government overreach illustrate how right-wing masking rhetoric circumvents scientific concerns, instead rooting discourse in questions of cultural essence. Science communicators, in response, must embrace the inherently tropological and epideictic dimensions of the mask and work to recode the symbol as a metonym for citizenship and personal responsibility.

This article rethinks digital access and community literacy by sharing aspects of intentional engagement informed by social justice frameworks to establish community partnerships that empower communities both local and global with digital literacy. The article explores access, privileges, and positionalities that the author strategically utilizes to support the communities within her current locality and in her hometown Nepal. By showcasing multiple intentional and equitable partnerships informed via social justice frameworks, the article argues that we require a transnational context to redefine digital literacy and our students need to understand these contexts better given the demands of the current workplace.

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

Background: This article reports on survey-based research of technical and professional communication (TPC) teachers and administrators, illustrating how these participants implement social justice and intercultural communication pedagogies in service learning (SL). Literature review: We situate this research in relation to existing scholarship about SL in TPC, SL and social justice, and SL as it intersects with intercultural communication. Research question: How do technical and professional communication teachers and administrators across the US infuse their SL pedagogies with social justice and intercultural communication theories in practice? Research methodology: Using purposive sampling, we surveyed 55 TPC teachers and administrators about their experiences with and attitudes toward social justice and intercultural communication in SL. Results/discussion: We identify what courses are reported as sites of SL projects as well as participants’ self-reported perceptions about social justice in SL. In addition, we outline four themes related to the application of social justice and intercultural communication theories to SL: activities, constraints, points of resistance, and goals and outcomes. Conclusion: We conclude with recommendations for TPC administrators and programs, and by briefly discussing implications for TPC practitioners and future directions for research.

Background: Communication is the backbone of effective collaboration, enabling project success; yet, engineering projects often fail due to poor communication. Specifically, engineering teams may benefit from reflexivity interventions to improve decision making, problem solving, innovation, and performance. In this study, we focus on team reflexivity in direct application to engineering project management to identify reflexivity processes that facilitate effective communication. Literature review: Although research has shown that team reflexivity interventions—elicited through communication—can improve team interaction and performance, little empirical evidence exists into the temporal dimensions across the action and transition phases of team reflexivity processes. Research questions: 1. How is team reflexivity expressed through text-based communication? 2. How and when do team members shift between reflexivity processes over time, especially across and between transition and action phases? Research methodology: We analyzed collaborative activity among 62 four-person teams in a computer-simulated microworld across two scenarios. The reflexivity processes exhibited during interaction were identified and analyzed using statistical and content analysis. Results and discussion: Analyses indicated that team reflection promoted discussions about key issues, facilitated frequent process shifts among transition and action phases, and resulted in overall better performance. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate the importance of team reflexivity interventions in engineering project teams to strategically guide members to improve planning, responding, and quality of attention devoted to long-term outcomes. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate the importance of deep structured team reflexivity through process shifts to help members understand strategies and goals, and develop shared objectives in complex environments.

Reviewed by: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886 by Amy J. Lueck Jason Maxwell Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Historians of composition have long understood their work as a necessary corrective to reductive accounts of English Studies that focus solely on literary studies and critical theory. In their efforts to provide a more capacious understanding of the discipline, however, compositionists have themselves produced significant exclusions, offering a rather limited understanding of the history of college writing. As Amy J. Lueck explains, the field of Rhetoric and Composition, perhaps in an effort to fortify its standing within the research university, has tended to overlook the role that high schools have played in shaping college writing pedagogy. In A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, Lueck does not merely seek to document points of overlap and contestation between high school and college writing curriculum. Instead, her work aims to call into question the very boundaries between designations like “high school” and “college.” These boundaries, Lueck maintains, are responsible for producing a standardized academic hierarchy that limits the range of pedagogical possibilities within any given level of the system. For instance, high school becomes conceived as little more than a preparatory vehicle for college, and its curriculum becomes defined negatively—that is, high school is understood as not providing college-level instruction. History has shown that this reification and subordination proves detrimental for both high schools and colleges. While we take these distinctions for granted today, Lueck turns to the nineteenth century, a point when the current academic system had not yet solidified (in this regard, her work shares much with Laurence Veysey’s [End Page 415] landmark The Emergence of the American University [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965], which similarly documents a period of intense fluidity and contestation). Prior to the establishment of research universities, which precipitated the creation of our broader contemporary hierarchy, the middle of the century boasted a landscape populated by a wide array of educational institutions whose relations to one another were anything but clear. Consider the name “high school.” While the term might suggest an institution that serves as a capstone to the “lower” primary schools, it just as easily might be read as belonging under the banner of “higher learning” that we usually reserve for colleges and universities. Much of the ambiguity surrounding various schools’ status and function can be attributed to the larger conversation about the role of education in American life during this time. For example, many were calling into question the hegemony of the traditional college’s “classical curriculum,” which privileged learning languages like Greek and Latin in order to produce distinguished gentlemen. Critics of this curriculum suggested replacing it with a “modem curriculum” that would better prepare students for the practical concerns of work and citizenship. Because the transition to this modern curriculum was uneven at best, many high schools adopted it long before their college counterparts, making them an attractive option for many in the community. Indeed, practically-oriented high schools were not merely viable alternatives to classically-minded colleges. They also constituted sites of pedagogical innovation that colleges and universities would later draw upon in their own reform efforts. Lueck grounds her analysis in A Shared History by studying the developments of a number of schools in Louisville, Kentucky during the second half of the 1800s. She dives into the archival record and finds a range of institutions, instructors, and students that challenge long-held assumptions about the educational system and the kinds of work students are expected to produce at any given site within that system. Admitting that it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive account of the changes unfolding during this time, Lueck argues that the city nevertheless engaged meaningfully with almost every larger educational trend of the era, and several educators who worked in Louisville went on to have an impact shaping educational policy at the national level. Moreover, her...

Through the reflections of professionals occupying a variety of corporate communication roles, our aim was to understand what the corporate communication profession looks like in the current marketplace and the career pathways professionals take. We find that roles and functions are “broad and blurred” and “evolving and escalating,” while pathways and job titles are “varied and vacillating” and “tentative and time bound.” Our article offers theoretical and practical implications for industry and academic professionals looking to bridge the gap between the classroom and the marketplace. We end with pedagogical and curricular implications for corporate communication educators.

This article contributes to a growing research area in writing studies that examines how documents perform infrastructure functions. The article uses document analysis and interviews to examine the ecology of documents necessary to establish oyster aquaculture in the state of Alabama. The results show that performative infrastructural documents exist in a larger ecology of documents and that they can embed themselves in natural environments and living creatures. This analysis extends the analytical framework of infrastructure-based writing studies by connecting writing and infrastructure with the natural world.

This assignment, designed for a graduate certificate program in rhetoric and composition, asks students to create a writing prompt for an audience of their choice and to accompany it with a reflective letter written to a stakeholder of their choice. To prepare, students first read scholarship on college writing assignments: what kinds students perceive as meaningful, what kinds are most typical, and what kinds are encouraged in a writing-across-the-curriculum approach. They then consider what elements of this research they can bring into their own context, both in terms of teaching (via the prompt) and in terms of sharing their learning with a relevant stakeholder (via the reflective letter, usually written to an administrator, a colleague, or a student). By allowing students to expressly connect course content to their own contexts in two genres, this assignment enacts features of the scholarship students read. While personalizing learning is valuable in any context, it is especially so in a graduate certificate program, because this increasingly common site of instruction serves students with diverse educational and professional histories and future goals.

This article interrogates the complexities of immigration encountered by international scholars working in higher education. Drawing on life history and lived experience, the article examines issues of marginalization, inequality, and discrimination. It draws from Black Feminist Care ethics to channel ideas for how to build resilience in the face of unrelenting restrictive policies that shape the daily lives of international scholars in the academy and jeopardizes their ability to succeed.

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest analiza destrukcji wizerunku osoby w dyskursie na przykładzie użycia argumentu ad hominem w komentarzach internautów dotyczących nagrody Nobla 2018 przyznanej w dziedzinie literatury polskiej pisarce i intelektualistce Oldze Tokarczuk. Wybrane do analizy komentarze zostały opublikowane na stronach polskich portali informacyjnych: „Dorzeczy”, „Gość Niedzielny”, „Wprost”, „Niezależna”, „Fronda”, „wPolityce” i „Salon24”. Badanie przeprowadzono w okresie od października 2019 do stycznia 2020 na 104 komentarzach, które stanowią materiał badawczy. Został on poddany analizie argumentacyjnej zaproponowanej przez szkoły francuską, szczegółowo wykorzystano opracowania dotyczące pojęcia etosu i argumentu ad hominem (Amossy, Charaudeau, Druetta i Paissa, Maingueneau). Badanie wykazało, iż argument ad hominem może odegrać istotną rolę w dekonstrukcji wizerunku publicznego. W komentarzach dotyczących Olgi Tokarczuk dominujący okazał się argument ad hominem personalny, który przybiera formę ataku osobowego (argument ad personam), oraz argument ad hominem okolicznościowy w różnych formach.

In the summer of 1881, a group of Black women formed The Washing Society of Atlanta by deploying extraorganizational technical communication to collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages. In this article, we illuminate the ways that Black women operated in a world dominated by an established order of racial hierarchy. We argue that the Washerwomen manifested a particular form of Black technical communication rooted in agency and advocacy.

Building sustainable infrastructure is a core principle of Constructive Distributed Work (CDW), an integrated approach to project management and team building. In this article, we explain the origins of CDW and describe the theory of sustainable infrastructure that underpins our approach to training, supporting, and coordinating work across a diverse and distributed team. We illustrate how mapping strategies can help us make infrastructure more visible, and therefore more available for reflection and iteration, and demonstrate how a participatory approach to developing and sustaining infrastructure helps our team maintain its commitment to more ethical and inclusive research practices.

Editors' Introduction to 5.4.

Editors' Intro

<roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Introduction:</b></roman> Social media have been widely used for corporation-generated narratives. Corporate communication entails a “storytelling process” and a narrative perspective. Corporate narrative has taken on new forms with the emergence of social media, which is the object of this study and called corporations’ owned social media narrative (COSMN). To our knowledge, however, no research has systematically investigated studies on COSMN. Our study provides a synthesized review on the strategies and functions of COSMN. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></roman> 1. What are the general characteristics of studies on COSMN? 2. What strategies are usually adopted by corporations via their social media narrative? 3. What functions do corporations intend to achieve by their social media narrative? <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Methodology:</b></roman> We conducted an integrative literature review of studies on corporations’ owned social media narrative based on journal articles from the database of the Web of Science Core Collection. After retrieving 25 articles in accordance with our research purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis to describe general characteristics of the literature and identify narrative strategies and functions. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results and conclusions:</b></roman> When corporations undertake advertising, branding, and social networking activities (among others) on social media, they tend to use form-based narrative strategies (technical strategy and formality strategy), content-based narrative strategies (broadcasting strategy, reacting strategy, engaging strategy, and emotional strategy), and medium-based narrative strategy (transmedia strategy) to achieve functions of market communication, technical communication, and public relations work (identity construction, impression management, stakeholder endorsement, corporate social responsibility communication, and crisis communication). This integrative literature review provides theoretical implications for corporate social media research and practical implications for digital marketing practitioners.

This multi-institutional study surveyed undergraduate students (n=669) about how and what they learned in hybrid and online first-year composition (FYC) classes, employing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework to analyze their responses. The data illustrated a significant difference in hybrid versus online students’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship.

In response to growing neoliberal pressures and austerity measures, two-year English teacher-scholars have embraced Sullivan’s call to activism, but this work is made challenging as aspiring teacher-scholar-activists struggle to balance activism with the other heavy demands of their professional practice. After expanding teacher-scholar-activism as a theoretical framework, we explore activism through cross-case analysis of three developmental literacy professionals’ actions, mindsets, and training. We then provide a pragmatic how-to manual for aspiring teacher-scholar-activists.

Editors' introduction to 5.1

Our article uses case studies of two civilian emergency response mHealth apps—PulsePoint and OD Help—to theorize the ways the mobile mapping functionality embedded in these tools, which is integrated with the Google Maps platform, enables yet also constrains users’ agential practices. Using an interface rhetoric approach, we unpack assumptions related to the embodied contexts of use facilitated by this functionality within the unique scenario of civilian emergency response. We argue that interactions between and among humans and these apps’ mapping interfaces involve complex, negotiated, contextually situated enactments, which align with a posthumanist perspective toward agency. At the same time, these interactions may also inadvertently amplify the precarity of vulnerable groups. Better understanding the ways that mobile mapping technologies shape agential enactments, particularly in ways that affect precarious and dispossessed populations, has important implications for the design of mHealth technologies—and the users who rely on them—moving forward.

This article examines how scientists, classroom teachers, poetry educators, and youth negotiated the domains of science through their engagement in a two-year Massive Open Online Collaboration (MOOC) funded by the National Science Foundation. To make sense of learners' unconventional and interdisciplinary writing and the cultural and disciplinary conflicts that emerged around it, I offer a reframing of science literacy as a series of crash encounters. Such a reframing prompts literacy practitioners to anticipate fallout when diverse bodies, objects, and rhetorics collide and, therefore, to better design and participate in interdisciplinary networks to create more dynamic and vibrant approaches to science literacy.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> The linguistic framing strategies used in media reporting on illegal drugs have been extensively documented, but less attention has been directed toward visuals, particularly data visualizations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Positioning illegal drug use as a criminal justice problem or a public health issue are types of frameworks that use specific rhetorical strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What are the rhetorical strategies used in data visualizations published during the crack and opioid drug epidemics, respectively? 2. Do these strategies advance dominant media narratives that crack addiction should be criminalized but opioid addiction should be treated like a public health issue? And if so, how is this accomplished? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> Drawing from the media studies approach previously employed in a study in technical and professional communication (TPC) on information design trends, I apply the concept of “scripto-visual” rhetoric to select data visualizations published by mainstream news media during both drug epidemics. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> I argue these graphics escalated the perceived threat during both drug epidemics but different scripto-visual rhetorical strategies were used. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Attending to ethical considerations in the creation of data visualizations has long been important in TPC, while scholarship has integrated social justice as a core component of the discipline. In the last section of this article, I bring these themes together by arguing that a social justice ethic is needed in data design work. I then propose a critical heuristic constructed from Jones et al.’s positionality, privilege, and power framework that can be used analytically or as an inventional tool to tease out the ways particular scripto-visual rhetorical decisions may be promoting inequities.

Examining the interaction of neurodivergence with course policies and assignment specifics can help instructors avoid common discriminatory practices that cause otherwise successful students to fail.

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In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy skills of women and young girls. By reflecting on our partnership, we argue that international engagements, premised on equity as a goal and conducted digitally, will help in creating opportunities for the students as well as the communities in tackling the digital divide via writing and designing conducted in the pursuit of enhancing the digital literacy of the rural communities in need.

This study aimed to provide evidence for continuing the innovation of writing instruction in Grades 7-12 of Chilean public schools. Teachers' beliefs influence their curricular interpretations; therefore, these beliefs play a key role when aiming for educational innovation. Hence, we investigated the relations between Language teachers’ current practices of implementing the national curriculum and their beliefs regarding five paradigms of Language instruction. While beliefs on writing instruction are possibly embedded in beliefs on the broader topic of Language instruction, we took this broader category into account. We obtained 182 completed surveys from teachers of all Chilean regions (response rate: 47%). Teachers reported a rather strong adherence to four curricular paradigms both in terms of practices and beliefs, while the fifth, the communicative paradigm, demonstrated a low level of adherence. The strength of the implementation of teachers´ practices of writing instruction seemed to be related to teachers´ beliefs, about writing and more general aspects as well. The results suggest that policymakers must focus public efforts on reinforcing teachers’ beliefs regarding writing instruction, especially regarding communicative writing and on the connections between the five paradigms. In addition, we recommend that public efforts prioritize improvements in Grades 9-12 over Grades 7-8.

Data from a study of graduate instructors in a composition teaching practicum show that the neglect of declarative knowledgeaboutlanguage is something that they were conscious of and wished to remedy. This finding supports arguments calling for reinstating a focus on linguistic knowledge in composition and writing studies programs.

How do material and discursive arrangements, technologies and rhetoric, shape the subjects and objects of medical discourse (Scott & Melonçon, 2017; Selzer & Crowley, 1999)? How are the affordances of material and discursive arrangements seized by political actors? Tackling these and similar questions has been a growing preoccupation in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, where researchers have sought better ways of understanding the entanglements of the symbolic and material (Booher & Jung, 2018; Graham, 2009; Jack, 2019; Propen, 2018). A perspicuous case for this research is the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (UICA), an amendment to the Public Health Service Act mandating that women receive an ultrasound and have its images described to them before having abortions. Three US states have a version of this law, with over twenty others having laws similar to the UICA (Guttmacher Institute, 2019, n.d.). Through this law, antiabortionists are able to construct a kairotic situation through the mediating capacity of ultrasound where they can use the actual state of affairs (a woman seeking an abortion) to argue through images for a possible future (a woman foregoing abortion). This article analyzes the UICA to understand how the political speech of antiabortionists enrolls the moralizing capacity of ultrasound to construct a kairotic situation to intervene in women’s pregnancies. Starting from studies of actor-networks (Latour, 1983;1999a) and technological mediation (Verbeek, 2011; 2015), and departing to feminist rhetorical science studies (Booher & Jung, 2018; Frost & Haas, 2017) and rhetorical approaches to imagery and visualization (Propen, 2018; Roby, 2016; Webb, 2009), I argue that not only do translation processes and technical mediation distribute agencies; they construct the very situations where agencies are constituted. This study can widen our understanding of how political entities appropriate the rhetorical capacities of technology and discourse to translate their politics into legislature.

In this assignment, students learn to critique the frequently stereotypical and problematic depiction of Muslims in media sources. Based on their own linguistic analyses of TV shows, movies, or political speeches, students build arguments about the messaging and judgment of Muslims in the United States. Close linguistic analysis is a powerful method to practice critical-thinking skills as students select and analyze evidence in order to construct original arguments. I select sources that challenge students to question and critique not just Orientalist and racist stereotypes of Muslims but also representations that seem to be positive on the surface but subtly reinforce inequitable expectations of Muslims. This assignment allows students to explore some of the social justice issues facing Muslims in the U.S., such as the reinforcement of Islamophobia, the expectations to prove their allegiance to the nation, and the demand to conform to “good Muslim” expectations. Based on an exploration of their thesis statements, my analysis demonstrates that students used evidence from their sources to build arguments that condemn the perpetuation of stigma associated with Islam and Muslims. Additionally, many students critiqued media sources for subtly encouraging expectations that Muslims need to continually demonstrate patriotism and particular kinds of assimilation in order to be deemed “good” Muslims. Through this and similar assignments, students practice more critical perspectives on media and explore the challenges of representation through the perspectives of marginalized populations.

Social justice goals are usually sought in civic or community settings in which stakeholders represent competing frameworks about what is just, good, and true. Modeling for students a way to identify these competing frameworks, and then intervene in deliberations to achieve just ends, is the focus of our assignment sequence. We examine civic deliberations over removing racist public symbols in this assignment for first-year students enrolled in linked rhetoric and philosophy courses. We read broadly in theories of public memory and civic identity, examine in depth one community’s deliberation, and reflect on public symbols in our home communities. The final joint assignment asks students to identify the principles that should guide deliberations about contested public symbols. We found that the assemblage of ideas that the students select from these pre-drafting activities shapes what they think is possible in the work of social justice; in other words, their own standpoint enables and limits what they see in the assemblage of ideas, sometimes limiting the arc of social justice insights and solutions, and sometimes unleashing it. For this reason, reflective writing is a necessary entwined process, one that can develop better awareness of how students’ epistemic norms shape their ability to imagine social justice ends. To most fully realize social justice knowledge, students must not stay bound within the contours of particular deliberations, or inward reflection. Instead, assignments must enlarge the context, asking students to make bigger inquiries into history, context, and relations of domination.

The public’s declining trust in health advice from traditional outlets has long been noted by scholars. But what makes alternative sources for health information appear more trustworthy to some audiences? In this analysis, the author traces the use of expertise and experience as forms of multivocality in the textual artifacts of Gwyneth Paltrow and her enterprise, Goop—specifically those that promote clean eating and detox diets. The analysis illustrates how Goop creates a superficially neutral platform for different voices that make the texts seem polyphonic and by extension more trustworthy given that readers can choose which health plan is right for them. But upon further analysis the author illustrates that Goop blends each voice so that they “move in step” as a choir, combining with Paltrow’s own voice, and ultimately creating an illusion of polyphony and masking a dominant homophonic message that ties together mandates to “ask questions,” empower ourselves, and embrace the assumption that young, slender bodies are signifiers of health and wellness.

Abstract This article discusses how the concept of undergraduate research has evolved from an artificial academic exercise, typically introduced in first-year composition courses, to an authentic activity that engages students in primary research. Through these authentic experiences, students have opportunities to learn why research is valued in colleges and universities, to see themselves as makers of knowledge, and often to contribute to their communities.

Rhetorical theory has frequently relied on metaphors of place and positioning as heuristics to build better arguments. This article utilizes one such metaphor, that of stasis theory, as a method by which we might change the terrain of the conversation surrounding the climate crisis. As an example, the author does a rhetorical analysis of a recent agricultural report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment and finds that, rather than using traditional questions of conjecture and quality, the authors of the report focus on questions of procedure and definition to reframe the discussion surrounding the climate crisis. Drawing from the rhetoric in this report, the author suggests that technical communicators might similarly produce more fruitful conversations around the climate crisis if they focus on what to do (procedure) and redefining the crisis as a local issue (definition).

To investigate the generic features of firm-generated advertisements (FGAs) in cross-cultural contexts, this study analyzed 327 FGAs by Dell Technologies and the Lenovo Group on Twitter and Sina Weibo. Integrating affordances and multimodality into genre analysis, the study showed that the FGAs were characterized by (a) flexible move structure, (b) persuasive language, (c) visual illustration, and (d) hyperlinks, hashtagging (#), and mentioning (@) functions. The FGAs on Sina Weibo, compared with those on Twitter, tended to use more language play, emojis, and contextual product pictures and show more emphasis on the niche of products, incentives, and celebrity endorsement.

Tutoring represents a necessary service for students enrolled in open-admission institutions such as our regional campus which serves a diverse group of students, many of them in developmental writing courses. As the COVID-19 pandemic caused many universities to transition to fully remote instruction in March 2020, academic services were also asked to find innovative ways to assist these students remotely. For two English tutors, this meant improving the existing OWL, while also implementing a remote synchronous option to help students with their writing. The article reports on the two tutors’ efforts as they prepared for fall 2020 and on the multiple challenges they faced throughout the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters. As their end-of-semester reflections show, the campus took a while to respond to the new remote Learning Center offerings, and some offerings were more popular than others. The two tutors attempted to establish a new remote normal while also trying to balance their personal and professional lives. Working from home, however, left them feeling drained as technology limited them during synchronous sessions, and their Learning Center duties began to take precedence over their education and personal lives, impacting their mental well-being. The only positive aspect of the experience came from their collaboration, as the bond they had built from sharing the Learning Center space for years provided them with the strength needed to fulfill their duties. As the campus contemplates the move back to in-person instruction, the two tutors must now consider what their duties will be in fall 2021. Keywords : COVID-19 pandemic, remote synchronous tutoring, work-life balance, burnout

This study includes interviews with 70 undergraduate students enrolled in online or hybrid first-year composition (FYC) classes at one of four universities in the United States and analyzes students’ perceptions of digital peer review. Arguing that the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework is a logical heuristic for examining writing studies research, this study finds that synchronicity might be more significant than modality with respect to the ways that peer review is able to achieve social, teaching, and cognitive presence. Overall, this study suggests that synchronicity is a common thread woven throughout each of the CoI presences as a potential way of alleviating negative evaluations of and achieving a learning community through peer review. Data further suggest that hybrid and online students conceptualize relationships as creating a sense of community that is work-based rather than friendship-based, that students might not be aware of or able to foresee ways that peer review applies to other writing contexts or classes, and that instructors could better prepare students for peer review in classrooms and beyond.

This study explores the relationship between the dispositions toward research that writing teachers convey through their assignments and those that their students express in their reflective writing. We applied the term problem-exploring to a set of dispositions described by the ACRL Framework and coded each clause of instructor assignment text and student reflective writing from six FYW sections, half of which were working with a librarian to incorporate core concepts from the Framework. We found a strong correlation between the proportion of instructors’ problem-exploring assignment language and students’ expressions of problem-exploring at end of term. The rates of problem-exploring were significantly higher for instructors and students in sections working with the Framework. Our results offer a new lens through which to view research-assignment design, provide evidence of how assignments can foster problem-exploring, and support the value of pedagogical collaboration with librarians.

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.

Writing centers seek to expand their services beyond tutoring and develop evidence-based practices. Continuing and expanding the existing practices, the authors have adopted graduate writing groups (GWGs) to support graduate writers, especially those working on independent writing projects like a dissertation or article for publication. This article provides an effective model on how to develop and assess virtual graduate writing groups (VGWGs). This replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research applied a mixed-methods design with pre- and postsurveys over the three semesters of running the VGWG. It found that the VGWG offered a full range of writing support that met graduate writers’ needs for time-based, skill-based, draft-based, and emotion-based support. Specifically, the VGWG significantly improved students’ approaches to writing in five key areas—goal setting, focusing on dissertation writing, generating plans for writing sessions, writing productivity, and writing progress. Therefore, this study contributes robust empirical validation of this model, suggesting that VGWG is an effective method to sup-port graduate writers and expand writing center services. Also, the authors provide a useful model on how writing centers can effectively assess through pre- and postsurveys in a straightforward manner, an assessment model that has both internal and external benefits.

Writing center literature often notes the stress and anxiety of students as a special concern for peer writing tutors, and tutor training manuals offer advice for tutors on how to manage student writers’ anxiety and stress in sessions. Few writing center sources, however, examine the stress/anxiety tutors may experience as a result of their work in the writing center, despite increasing interest in emotions and emotional labor in writing centers. This multi-institutional study examines whether peer writing tutors experience increased stress/anxiety while tutoring. Using a mixed-methods approach combining both surveys and physiological data (salivary cortisol levels controlled against days when they did not tutor), this study investigates the stress/anxiety of 21 tutors across 63 tutoring appointments. The data suggest that peer tutors who enter tutoring sessions in stressed or anxious states are potentially prone to increased stress or anxiety from tutoring. Moreover, they exhibited an inhibited awareness of both student writers’ stress and the potential impact of that stress on tutoring sessions. Results suggest that writing centers should increase their focus on tutor well-being, most crucially on emotional labor and its impacts for peer writing tutors.

This article presents findings from an IRB-approved study about tutors’ online information on writing center websites, scheduling systems, and social media. The study used surveys to investigate students’ responses to tutors’ online information and focus groups to investigate tutors’ rationale for the information they shared. While many researchers have studied how writing centers are presented online, little research considers how tutors are represented. The authors argue that such representation merits attention, as tutor profiles can affect students’ comfort with the writing center staff and their microdecisions about who to see and how to interact with them (Salem, 2016). The authors share advice for making decisions about how tutors are presented online and for using the process of creating meet the staff and similar pages to study and improve their centers.

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

Artykuł stanowi próbę rekonstrukcji głównych podejść stosowanych w marketingu w odniesieniu do sugerowanego stopnia innowacyjności/konwencjonalności komunikacji perswazyjnej. Po zaprezentowaniu stanowisk skrajnych – uznających, że skuteczna komunikacja powinna być innowacyjna lub konwencjonalna – przedstawione zostały stanowiska pośrednie (wprowadzające koncept fluent innovation/płynnej innowacji oraz podział na punkty upodabniające oraz punkty różnicujące), a także możliwości ich teoretycznego i praktycznego rozwinięcia.

We analyze the self-rated writing skills of graduating business majors and perceptions on how much these skills changed during college. Subjective skill measures may be good proxies of objective skills, and affect outcomes such as career goals, job applications, and graduate school enrollment. The sample includes 436,370 students from 619 different institutions. On average and all else equal, business majors are estimated to be 17.6% less likely to report high writing skills at graduation when compared with other students and 11.5% less likely to report high gains in these skills during college. Average differences across disciplines are often large.

Writing in history places high demands on students and is a skill that requires explicit instruction. Therefore, teachers need to be able to teach this in an effective way. In this study, the writing-instruction was designed by a teacher, instead of researchers, as part of a professional development program in the Netherlands. The lessons combined writing and historical reasoning instruction, based on principles of effective writing instruction, including strategy-instruction, modeling, prewriting, and peer-interaction. The effects of these lessons were investigated in a small-scale pilot study, which consisted of a pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design, in which eighty-nine 11th grade students participated (39 in the treatment condition and 50 in the comparison condition). Dependent measures included text quality, writing process measures, students' knowledge of writing and their self-efficacy. Students in the treatment condition wrote longer and higher quality texts, spent more time writing, paused more while writing and their knowledge of writing was higher at post-test than for students in the comparison condition. No effects were found for self-efficacy. Furthermore, significant correlations were found between text quality and writing process measures, but not for knowledge of writing and self-efficacy. Overall, the effectiveness of this teacher-designed intervention seemed satisfactory, as it resulted in greater knowledge of writing and better-quality writing in his history classes.

A midst an increasingly globalized world, abetted by COVID-19 pandemic and its necessitation of online interaction, feminist scholars, activists, and community organizers alike have faced increasing pressures to return their collective focus to more localized struggles.We see this forced movement to the local occur within issues such as reproductive rights in Texas, United States in 2021.Despite this and parallel movements throughout the world, digitally cultivated spaces, as seen in social media platforms, have deepened the possibility for transnational collaboration across borders and boundaries. is collaboration is particularly visible within social justice e orts such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has become a central cry amongst anti-racist movements across the globe.is paradoxical contemporary context created the exigence for Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating eory and Activist Practice.Composed for a predominantly academic audience, Transnational Feminist Itineraries o ers extensive discussions of our contemporary context and how collaborative, feminist practices are being taken up not only within, but across nations.Transnational Feminist Itineraries is a collaborative collection of essays which aims to contribute to the development of feminist theory and practice through a vepart approach: (1) positing that the global socio-political context requires the tools and methods of transnational feminism; (2) positioning transnational feminism as running parallel, and not in opposition, to other feminist approaches; (3) exploring a historical context rich with cross-border activism; (4) arguing for both the "scaling out" in addition to the "scaling up" of feminist methods; (5) o ering critiques of transnational feminism to further complicate the conversation surrounding its place amongst alternative feminisms.Transnational Feminist Itineraries consists predominantly of case studies.Each chapter takes a unique approach to discussing the a ordances of transnational fem-

User experience (UX) researchers in technical communication (TC) and beyond still need a clear picture of the methods used to measure and evaluate UX. This article charts current UX methods through a systematic literature review of recent publications (2016–2018) and a survey of 52 UX practitioners in academia and industry. Our results indicate that contemporary UX research favors mixed methods, and that usability testing is especially popular in both published research and our survey results. This article presents these findings as a snapshot of contemporary research methods for UX.

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceives of and teaches both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

In this teaching experience report, we describe a research experience for undergraduates (REUs) designed to cognitively support the work of two student research assistants (RAs) from a two-year college (2YC) on a funded project that involved analyzing user-generated content for an mHealth app. First, we suggest partnerships between two- and four-year institutions as a move toward REU equity because students from 2YCs are not typically afforded these opportunities. We then review the role of research in undergraduate learning and posit the importance of scaffolding to sequence cognitive leaps. Finally, we present the cognitive scaffolding we created and connect it to our hybrid card sorting-affinity diagramming content analysis method.

This article is the first of a two-part thematic analysis of interviews reporting on the professional identity enactment of developmental literacy practitioners; we argue for intentional, explicit inclusion of developmental literacy disciplinary perspectives as essential for further expanding the two-year college English community of practice.

Our “common sense” interpretive frames help us make sense of things, but cultural criticism has revealed how they also and often marginalize other people. Yet how do we go beyond this critical awareness to change—particularly when those frames are our own? This study explores how students in socially engaged courses can use writing to turn reflection into a theory-guided metacognitive analysis of their own interpretive frames and develop a working theory for change.

Culture in second language (L2) writing has been researched extensively, though mostly under the purview of contrastive rhetoric and focused on text and contrastive genre analysis (Connor, 1996, 2004, 2008; Kaplan, 2005). Research has also focused on problematizing culture in reference to L2 writing (Atkinson, 1999, 2003; Kubota, 1999). These foci indicate reader-instructor rather than student perspectives: how L2 writers themselves perceive cultural impacts on writing. This study undertakes to fill this gap, investigating L2 student perceptions of such impacts. Study participants (n = 36), students in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing course at a Canadian university, took part in semistructured interviews and reflective writing. Data analysis identified six broad categories of cultural factors affecting student writing: (1) organizational structure as a fixed method; (2) supporting and writing arguments; (3) creating a stronger voice in writing; (4) adjusting to a new academic culture; (5) understanding clarity in academic writing in English; and (6) developing content: quality versus quantity. Findings underscore student perceptions of a monolithic, essentialist view of culture in academic writing. This is an important consideration when designing a student-centred L2 writing pedagogy that addresses student needs. Based on the findings, the article further explores implications for L2 writing instruction.

Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 William P. Weaver William P. Weaver Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 350–353. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William P. Weaver; Review: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 350–353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article describes a major assignment in an undergraduate editing course in the Writing and Rhetoric major at St. Edward’s University. The DEE-CR (Describe, Evaluate, Edit, Communicate, Reflect) project assignment is an individual assignment that asks students to find a particular non-fiction text that would benefit from the attention of an adept editor, to describe and contextualize it, to evaluate it, to edit it, to practice communicating edits to an author, and finally to reflect on lessons learned. I will describe the assignment’s design and purposes, reflect on some outcomes and challenges, and close by offering advice to readers of Prompt who might consider adapting the assignment for their courses.

Western mathematics functions as a technology of violence when it enlists computational algorithms to underwrite racial neoliberalism. Theorizing algorithmic abstraction as a racial neoliberal technique, this article dramatizes the concept’s methodological affordances through a case study of 23andMe, which deploys algorithmic abstraction to affectively secure and sell Whiteness.

As technical genres continue to grow and morph in promising new directions, we attempt an analysis of what are typically viewed as mundane genres. We use the term gray genres, which we find useful for interrogating texts that tend to fall in categories that tend toward a blandness that is invariably difficult to quantify. We use hedonism, along with a historical accounting for this value from its classical rhetorical lineage and run it up to contemporary applications. We posit that playful stylistic choices---while typically discouraged in more technical spaces---actually improves the rhetorical canon of delivery for informative documents. We close with case studies that offer close readings of a few attempts at employing hedonistic tactics within typical gray genres.

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.

The article examines the narrative strategies of two documentary films that give insight into the direct-action campaigns of two radical environmental groups; Jerry Rothwell’s How to Change the World (2015) recounts the birth of Greenpeace and its development of “mindbomb” communication strategies. Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls (2011) chronicles the rise and fall of the Earth Liberation Front and its tactics of ecotage. Situating both films in the larger history of radical environmentalism in the United States, the article explores the affective side of their rhetoric on two levels: on the level of the activists’ own communication strategies and on the level of the films made about these activists and their strategies. It argues that making a documentary film about radical environmentalist groups raises moral questions for the filmmaker and that, each in his way, Rothwell and Curry have both made films that straddle the line between ostensible objectivity and sympathetic advocacy for the individuals they portray.

Background: Communication is critical to engineering work, and despite its emphasis within engineering education, it is still noted as a gap in new engineers' preparedness for work. Literature review: Prior research points to communication gaps among new engineers. Few studies have extensively examined transitions between academic and professional engineering contexts. Work remains for understanding how new engineers transfer communication skills. Research questions: 1. In what ways do new engineers transfer communication practices from school to work? 2. What challenges do new engineers experience in moving from communication as practiced at school to communication as practiced at work? Research methodology: This study presents a thematic analysis of data from weekly reflections and regular semistructured interviews conducted during new engineers' first year of work. Results and conclusions: Despite relying heavily on academic experiences involving both documenting and presenting technical work, new engineers report experiencing communication-related challenges. While further attention to communication activities can be given within engineering curricula, the complexity and situated nature of communication in the workplace cannot be fully replicated in the classroom. As new engineers move between school and work, they experience challenges adapting to a new environment including communication activities embedded within unique sociocultural contexts. While the classroom cannot fully replicate these professional settings and all of their nuances, students can be made more fully aware of the embedded nature of communication activities. Moreover, engineering educators can simulate aspects of the workplace in capstone courses, and companies can provide guidance to help mentor new engineers through the inevitable context gaps.

Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.

Background: Communication is fundamental to the success of engineered systems, enabling interactions between the system's stakeholders. Systems engineering, an integrative discipline on which the contributions of many disciplines are evaluated against each other, may particularly benefit from research in communication methods. Specifically, storytelling may be beneficial to engineers because it enables sense-making. Research into storytelling is conducted to identify storytelling metrics that could be useful in engineering communication, specifically engineering case studies. Literature review: Although storytelling has been identified in past research as possibly useful to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and software requirement writing, a rigorous study of the use of storytelling elements in systems engineering communication has not been performed. Research question: How are storytelling elements currently being applied in engineering case studies? Research methodology: Twelve interdisciplinary metrics from storytelling, content analysis, and engineering are identified from the literature and used to characterize a collection of 48 NASA case studies. The values of the metrics for each case study are determined and analyzed using statistical and content analyses. Results and discussion: Analysis of the 12 metrics indicates that the case study design region with a historical backstory structure, climactic plot structure, and early points of attack is most frequently used by designers. Conclusions: The analysis indicates that certain storytelling elements applied in engineering case studies are used more frequently. Further work is needed to leverage the metrics as design variables in engineering case study writing.

AbstractIn response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the (alleged) implicature (“Those are your words, not mine!”). In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning (e.g. “I was being ironic!”) and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory (distinguishing between denial, redefinition, an appeal to ‘external circumstances’ or to a ‘wrong judge’). In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not.

Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...

This article provides precedent for publication expectations at a wide range of institutions and explores how more structure may mitigate the occupational stress that arises from role ambiguity. Clearer tenure guidelines and nuanced performance appraisals offer several benefits: reducing affective/emotional labor, improving work conditions, and providing consistent arguments to retain valuable faculty.

Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 M. Elizabeth Weiser M. Elizabeth Weiser The Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 242–244. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation M. Elizabeth Weiser; Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 242–244. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This paper studies the language of job descriptions in rhetoric and technical and professional communication to explore how this language might be exclusionary of international scholars. Through critical discourse analysis, we reviewed current U.S. labor and immigration laws and contrasted those laws with the language of hiring documents. We found that hiring documents do not always align with U.S. labor and immigration laws and consequently hinder the hiring prospects of international scholars.

This profile details the ethos and emergent growth of Writers Warehouse, a collective project founded in 2016 with a focus on creation, craft, collaboration, and community. Based in Colorado, Writers Warehouse now aims to position itself as a mutual care collective through curating inclusive, non-hierarchical spaces, developing open access resources, and establishing a microgrant program for local writers.

This article examines a targeted drought awareness campaign by the city of Cape Town in South Africa to prevent a looming water crisis dubbed Day Zero. Using rhetorical criticism and commonplaces, the article analyzes the design and (rhetorical)circulation of artifacts that heightened public awareness of the crisis, helped shape the public mindset, and galvanized collective action to prevent Day Zero. For one city in Africa to avert a water crisis through a rhetorically orchestrated set of technological, scientific, and civic interventions is significant for (among others) technical communicators who need to know not simply that it was done, but how rhetoric helped avert Day Zero.

The standards and practices in journalism that best serve democratic deliberation remain a matter of intense scrutiny in the digital age. The United States has a long history of journalists exposing self-interested behaviors of political or corporate elites with investigative journalism. With online media, journalistic practices encompass fact-checking against a variety of sources, and countering the claims of other journalists from competing outlets. This article aims at delimiting the rhetorical properties of an emerging genre of YouTube counter-journalism. The study reports on a rhetorical and eristic analysis of the main patterns of countering in a sample of videos posted on YouTube on the subject of the US presidential campaign in spring 2020. The analysis reveals some ways in which YouTube journalists break down the dominant media narratives and present counterclaims and critiques, which is usually accompanied by fact-checking, showcasing evidence and providing alternative explanations or counterarguments. However, counter-journalism is not free from eristic devices that may misrepresent political issues for the subscribers.

This essay applies Craig Rood’s concept of rhetorical closure to the specific case study of the creation of feminist discourse communities to discuss sexuality. It looks at the editorial policies of two feminist discourse communities in order to more broadly analyze the ways that rhetorical closure operates constitutively along with invitational rhetoric. It connects these issues to past and current debates about censorship, echo chambers, safe spaces, and trigger warnings in order to show when and how rhetorical closure is intended to prevent harm. Like Rood, I do not resolve questions on distinguishing the effectiveness or ethics of rhetorical closure. Examining a radical feminist periodical of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere shows how invitational rhetoric works with and as rhetorical closure.

Research problem: Discourse bridges between the speakers and the audience in product launches. However, how the verbals and the visuals work together in the construction of interpersonal meanings in such communication remains largely underexplored. Research question: How were interpersonal meanings constructed via verbal and visual semiotics in the iPhone 1 product launch presentation?. Literature review: Despite the recognized importance of innovation communication, communication at the launch phase is underexplored. Moreover, communication and management studies have generally neglected the role of grammar-based discourse in promoting innovation, while linguistic studies have paid inadequate attention to language's implications for innovation communication and management. Thus, we address the discursive building of interpersonal meanings in product launch presentations to fill such gaps. Methodology: Integrating Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen's Systemic Visual Grammar, we conduct both verbal and visual analyses to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Steve Jobs' iPhone 1 launch presentation. Results: Analysis of the verbal strategies suggests that Jobs built different interactive roles as an authority innovation leader and as a close “friend” willing to engage with the audience. Moreover, by combining verbal semiotics with the delicate arrangement of image act, size of frame, and angle, the presentation video was carefully planned to create offer contact, produce close social distance, and present equal and objective attitudes to further enhance the construction of interpersonal meanings, thus contributing to the audience's understanding and recognition of the innovative product. Conclusions: This article offers insights into innovation discourse and communication by investigating the semiotic features of the iPhone 1 product launch presentation, thus adding to the extant literature on professional communication and innovation management.

Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...

The foreword, written by Judy Z. Segal, begins with a brief dialogue between a patient and a nurse that illustrates the effects of discursive actions on health and medicine. It is a dialogue between a patient and a nurse, reminiscent of stories of ancient cartographers who mapped their changing and uncertain worlds through stories, discovering ever new riches in a world that wasn't flat. In the same way, contemporary thinkers in health and medicine are discovering the treasure in exploring rhetoric and technical communication across traditional boundaries. These authors move through previously uncharted territory with story and new questions that extend the boundaries of our individual bodies. They explore important questions of individual human agency and how that intersects with social and rhetorical theory. Critical questions new to medicine in the twenty-first century, such as resistance, power of representation, and where advocacy for health justice lies, are topics explored through a variety of lenses in this collection.

In Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace (2019), Elizabeth L. Angeli explores the unpredictable workplaces which are the locations of emergency medical services provided by first responders, the EMS personnel who receive 911 calls but may have little idea about what to expect once they arrive at the site of the emergency. While rhetoric of health medicine (RHM) is not a new area of rhetoric, Angeli found little research about EMS professional rhetoric, leaving a void in understanding the modes of communication in these ever-changing, life-altering workplaces. Her text began as part of her dissertation project but morphed into a rhetorical analysis/EMS rhetorical training pedagogy for Technical Professional Communication (TPC) and RHM as well as EMS trainers and trainees.

In fall 2019, the Two-Year College English Association distributed a survey to two-year college English faculty across the United States through professional listservs, regional distribution lists, and social media platforms. This report summarizes the key data derived from 1,062 responses to close-ended questions about workload related to teaching, service, leadership, and professional development. The report discusses the demographic profile, employment status, and contractual obligations in course assignments of the two-year college English faculty who responded. It also summarizes Information about respondents’ overload teaching, their autonomy within their teaching responsibilities, and the kinds of service and professional development activities in which they engaged.

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” and we are proud to share these curated and annotated citations once again. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year that may be of interest to RTE readers. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2019 and June 2020. The bibliography is divided into nine subject area sections. A three-person team of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading empirical journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that addressed the current research questions and concerns in their topic area.

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In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

We argue that by using existing data and sharing research in a databank, RHM scholars can practice a research habit that conserves and optimizes intellectual and institutional resources. When possible, by using existing datasets, scholars avoid data waste, that is ignoring or bypassing existing data. The data distinctions that we call attention to—derived, compiled, and designed—account for various ethical and rhetorical concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality, expected context, and consent. Equally important to the aforementioned data deliberations we explore, collecting and managing shared RHM data in a databank, while possible, are not without ethical, logistical, and rhetorical difficulties.

This study examined the relationships between writing anxiety, writing self-efficacy, and perceived use of revision strategies in high school students with different achievement goals as they learned argumentative writing in English Language Arts classrooms. Three achievement goal orientation profiles emerged from a sample of 307 American high school students on the basis of their mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goal orientations: Low on All, Average on All, and High on All. These three profiles of students significantly differed with respect to their writing anxiety and their perceived use of revision strategies. Writing self-efficacy mediated the effect of writing anxiety on the perceived use of revision strategies for students in the Average on All profile only. The findings suggest that students are diverse in their motivational and affective experiences with respect to argumentative writing, and caution against using a one-size-fits-all approach for teaching argumentative writing to students.

How should we teach a class on family in the twenty-first century, when the meaning and makeup of “family” are under attack from all political angles? This article relates an attempt to rethink the family course as interdisciplinary, thematically arranged, heavily dependent on student engagement, and collaborative. From course conception to pitfalls and retrospection, this article provides an overview of a course implemented by the authors and their students as part of the honors program at the University of Portland. At the center of the course was a common curiosity for the material that emerged in hallway conversations at the intersection of different disciplines, at the intersection of ecocriticism and feminist theory, and at the intersection of popular media and personal life. The authors argue that collaborative teaching and intersectionality led to more productive classroom discussions and destabilized assumptions for all the course participants, instructors included.

Upon declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) orchestrated a global risk-communication outreach. The WHO’s objective was to persuade the public to upend and alter their lives so as to contain the disease and minimize its spread and infection. The WHO found a simple and efficient medium to communicate glocally through the social media application WhatsApp, through which individuals could access information without gatekeeping by governments and local agencies.

This article addresses how social media platforms can better highlight expert voices through design choices. Misinformation, after all, has exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, and platforms have struggled to address the issue. The authors examine this critical gap in validation mechanisms in the current social media platforms and suggest possible solutions for this urgent problem with third-party partnerships.

This paper describes the design and establishment of the first peer-staffed writing center in Thailand, including its inspiration, its planning, the tutor-training process, and its implementation up to and through the COVID-19 pandemic. As writing centers are relatively unknown in Southeast Asia, the writing center in focus was a fortunate confluence of factors: a motivated faculty dean, a visiting English Language Fellow, and a writing center specialist. These combined to provide the framework for collaboration with university faculty. The process involved exploring writing center methodology, training peer tutors, and progressing a community of practice. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed some of the writing center’s activities, it continues to be a model for other universities in the region and beyond.

This article showcases interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) writing center directors about their administrative work. In it, findings reveal that participant work distinctly departs from recent empirical writing center research about labor (Geller & Denny, 2013; Caswell, Grutsch McKinney, & Jackson, 2016), particularly in ways that practitioners’ invisible administrative work is informed and complicated by their LGBTQ identities. Across 20 interviews, participants communicated that their work extends to making queer activist space through their writing centers; to supporting tutors, students, and colleagues of all orientations with issues central to queer communities and mental health; and to navigating tense interpersonal terrain, especially bullying. In closing, the article calls for disciplinary responses and resources to make for more equitable labor landscapes for LGBTQ writing center practitioners.

In the UK, HE practical writing support has not kept pace with advances in our understanding of how students learn to write in their disciplines or greater comprehension of the nature of these discourses they are acquiring. Current institutional provision can be still be characterized as fragmented offering generic, deficit focused, skills-based instruction, despite such approaches being theoretically discredited. One alternative means to develop academic literacies in more inclusive and nuanced ways is to embed this work at a disciplinary level; while long recommended this model is unusual in the UK. This paper reviews approaches to embedding academic literacies work and reports on our attempts to embed writing development work within a social science department through an extended action research project which aimed to increase student mastery of academic literacies within one department. We focused on building opportunities for engagement using Writing Exemplars, Retreats and Writing Circles. Key features of our work are identified that appear transferable and may further facilitate successful interdisciplinary collaborations.

Background: As all sorts of communications have substantially moved to the internet, volumes of literature on internet-mediated communication have emerged in professional and technical communication in different research paradigms, including studies on internet-mediated genres, which often have generic features beyond traditional conception and thus require updated understanding. This study systematically explores the emerging body of internet-mediated genre studies and identifies the specific genres that researchers have studied, the analytical components and research methods used, and conclusions reached to characterize the current state of the research. Research questions: 1. Which internet-mediated genres have been studied in existing literature (2005-2019)? 2. What affordances have been considered in existing studies on internet-mediated genres? 3. Which research methods have been used to study internet-mediated genres? Literature review: Major issues affecting prior studies of internet-mediated genres include inconsistent terminology used by researchers, the ways that affordances are considered, and the inadequacies of current genre analysis methods to explain features arising from those affordances. Methodology: Employing an integrative literature review, we conducted a systematic search resulting in 35 qualified studies published in journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index between 2005 and 2019. Each was systematically analyzed to identify the genre addressed, communicative goal, medium, affordances addressed, and research methods used. Results/discussion: Three main types of internet-mediated genres-including email, website, and social media, and several subtypes-were identified, each distinguished by their medium and communicative goal. The affordances were either treated monomodally, mentioned as contextual information, or integrated into the analytical framework. Researchers relied on a variety of methods to study internet-mediated genres, with mixed methods most commonly used. Conclusions and further research: The data show that both the genres of interest and methods used to study them vary with time, suggesting that this area of research continues to evolve. Future studies could probe into a larger variety of internet-mediated genres with more diverse analytical components and methods.

This essay argues for a redefinition of disciplinary activity and examines disciplinary identity development beyond traditional academic/nonacademic binaries. Through analysis of interviews with twenty-seven retired members of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, this essay provides a closer look at retirement as an active but overlooked phase of the disciplinary lifecycle.

Framed in three guiding claims about relationships between Writing Across the Curriculum and queer theories, this article offers Jasbir Puar’s theory of “queer assemblage” as a model for rearticulating WAC administration.

Weight-inclusive approaches such as Health at Every SizeÒ (HAESÒ) that once were used primarily by scientists or other health experts are more frequently being taken up by lay audiences. Most notably, popular members of online communities known as social media influencers rely on principles of HAESÒ to spread weight-neutral rhetoric across platforms like Instagram. Analyzing how influencers domesticate, or make their own, the specific science-based principles of HAESÒ warrants exploration. In this study, I draw from an analysis of 20 Instagram accounts run by influencers to explicate how domestication occurs within the body positive and weight-inclusive community. The findings suggest three primary patterns through which domestication occurs: anecdotal narratives and personalization, science and education, and social justice. I argue these influential users domesticate HAESÒ by drawing on their own education, life experience, and personal identity while upholding the core norms of the influencer industry: authenticity and credibility.

Artykuł dotyczy zastosowania przenośni w artykułach prasowych o charakterze polemicznym, w których ten środek stylistyczny użyty jest do sparafrazowania poglądów, będących przedmiotem polemiki. Metaforyczne sformułowania prowadzą do interpretacji, w której osoba głosząca dany pogląd jawi się jako niekompetentna lub ograniczona, przez co stanowią one naruszenie „twarzy” tej osoby i wprowadzają do argumentacji element nacechowany negatywnie. W pracy przedstawiono pogląd, iż pośredni i implicytny charakter komunikatu ma kluczowe znaczenie w spełnieniu tej funkcji.

Building connections with professionals in subject matter disciplines—practitioners and/or academics—is a growing area of interest for many scholars working in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). However, strategies for creating and building meaningful, productive interdisciplinary relationships has not been a central theme in RHM-focused scholarship. This entry endeavors to address this gap by using RHM’s emerging version of the “dialogue” genre to describe the author’s experience co-chairing the communications track for an international public health conference. The author weaves in commentary from contributors who participated in the conference and discusses and reflects upon two key challenges that emerged: 1) differences in language choice/terminology, and 2) epistemic conflict. Through this reflective discussion, this dialogue proposes several strategies that RHM scholars might draw from in building their own interdisciplinary relationships moving forward: 1) negotiate shared meanings and goals, 2) find commonalities, and 3) normalize rhetorical inquiry.  Featured Contributors: Nicholas Bustamante, MFA; Alina Deshpande, PhD; Amy Ising, MS; Jamie Newman, PhD; Kirk St.Amant, PhD

Theoretical models of early writing support the importance of discourse knowledge to writing (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Berninger & Winn, 2006). However, there is limited research on the relationship between discourse knowledge and writing among beginning writers. This study explored whether fall, spring, and change in discourse knowledge predicted first-graders' end-of-year writing. Three hundred eighty first-graders were given a discourse knowledge interview in the fall and spring assessing knowledge of writing production procedures, substantive processes, story elements, and writing motivation. Additional fall assessments included handwriting fluency, spelling, reading, and vocabulary. Students' narrative and descriptive writing was assessed at the end of the year. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that fall discourse knowledge and knowledge gain variables were not consistent predictors for writing outcomes. However, a more consistent relation was found between spring discourse knowledge and writing achievement, where production procedures predicted writing in both genres while substantive processes and story elements only predicted narrative writing. This study extended findings from earlier research by examining the discourse knowledge and writing achievement of young students.

Since 2010, efforts have been made in Chile to support students' writing skills development, in order to better prepare them for participation in modern society. However, more knowledge about current practices of writing instruction in Grades 7-12 is needed to guide future improvements in these educational levels. We aimed to provide a context-based picture of paradigms of writing instruction which are currently being implemented in Grades 7-12 of Chilean public schools. With this goal, we surveyed teachers of Spanish (n= 182) from all Chilean regions.

This study examines the extent to which TOEIC Writing test scores relate to an external criterion: evaluations by linguistic laypersons of the functional adequacy of writing in the international workplace. Test-taker responses to two representative tasks from the TOEIC Writing test (e-mail requests, opinion surveys) were adapted for workplace role-play scenarios that laypersons read and evaluated in an online survey. After reading each role-play scenario, laypersons evaluated the text produced by their imagined interlocutor using functional adequacy scale items (comprehensibility, content adequacy, effectiveness, support and coherence). Overall functional adequacy evaluations were obtained by averaging the ratings for each of the two tasks. Layperson ratings of functional adequacy were strongly correlated with TOEIC Writing test scores (r = 0.76). Results suggested that test-takers’ writing performance is likely to be perceived as functionally adequate for test scores at which important decisions are typically made. Study results are discussed in terms of their implications for claims about the generalizability of TOEIC Writing test score interpretations with respect to those made in the international workplace, as well as the potential benefits, challenges, and limitations involved in this approach to validation.

Circulation is about flow, movement, dissemination. It averts the gaze from the physical (as in books, magazines) to the intangible (as in algorithms). Laurie E. Gries credits circulation with deve...

This article shares findings from a CCCC-funded grant that focuses on a dual enrollment program in Washington State called Running Start. This model invites high schoolers to take college courses on a college campus. Instructors are frequently advised to treat Running Start participants “as if they were any other college students,” yet as our large-scale survey suggests, these students have complex hybrid identities that warrant greater consideration. Without diluting academic rigor, we call for an enhanced understanding of the “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, and Amanti) that high schoolers bring to First-Year Composition in the spirit of congruous inclusivity.

To date, research into dynamic descriptions of text has focused mainly on the spoken mode; and while writing process research has examined language structures, it has largely ignored the functionality (meaning) inherent in them. Therefore, drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and keystroke logging software, this article takes a further step toward an interdisciplinary dialogue by outlining a new schematic for coding and analyzing revisions. More specifically, we show how revision activity can be tracked within functional components, across functional components, and across clauses in terms of forward and backward movements. By exploring three digitally constructed texts, which were produced and observed unobtrusively in a natural setting, we have attempted to illustrate how one writer’s revising process can be operationalized in terms of (a) chronological movement (sequence) and (b) spatial movement (location). Findings showed how activity was relatively consistent across datasets with regard to session management, revision frequency, and distribution of revision types. Moreover, results also showed how most revision activity occurred at, or ahead of, the point of inscription, particularly with regard to revising the end of clauses. However, findings also indicated that revising the start of clauses was equally important when considering the size of functional components.

Background: The ability to create a context is essential in writing the introduction of a research article (RA). This study explores the experience of engineering Ph.D. students in Australia, for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL), in using a problem-solution-based writing model to develop context-creating skills in writing RA introductions. Research question: What is the experience of engineering Ph.D. students in creating contexts through explicit learning of a problem-solution-based model for writing RA introductions? Literature review: Genre-based teaching is a common approach in the second language classroom. Recently, a genre-based approach for writing the introduction of engineering RAs has been proposed. The descriptive values of the model, PSP-CaRS, have been shown in corpus studies of published engineering RAs. However, its applicability has not been explored pedagogically. Methodology: Twenty-nine Ph.D. students were asked to respond to a questionnaire nine months after learning the model and reflect on their experience using it. The findings were then corroborated with data obtained from interviews, researcher observation, and writing samples. Results: The findings showed that the participants perceived PSP-CaRS to be useful and they continued using it after nine months despite some difficulties encountered in the writing process. Participants' responses showed that explicit teaching of PSP-CaRS formed the foundation upon which more competent skills to create contexts were developed through practice and integration of subject knowledge. Discussion: Explicit teaching using a model can impart the basics of genre awareness to students. Once students gained an in-depth understanding of the model by working through their difficulties, they developed better genre awareness, and used the model adaptively to visualize and write their RA introductions. Conclusion: The results confirm the usefulness of the proposed model and reveal how a continuing process of learning and practicing using the model helps students develop their skills to create contexts and enhance their genre awareness.

AbstractThe Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

Book Review| May 01 2020 The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell Peter A.O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Universite dé Lille ruth.webb@univ-lille.fr Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 227–229. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ruth Webb; The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 227–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

W artykule poddano analizie polskie dzienniki i tygodniki traktujące o śmierci prezydenta Gdańska Pawła Adamowicza i wydarzeniach z nią związanych. Oglądu materiału prasowego dokonano z perspektywy miejsc strategicznych w tekście prasowym, co pozwoliło ustalić strategie przedstawiania wydarzeń przez różne tytuły, sposób portretowania zmarłego, stopień emocjonalności oraz wskazać elementy retoryki nienawiści w przekazach prasowych. Właściwe analizy zostały poprzedzone obserwacjami dotyczącymi języka agresji i śmierci w mediach.

The paper examines man’s involvement in the communication process. While elucidating communication one needs to take into account the subjective factors which condition its existence. The article particularly highlights the personal dimension of human existence and an integrated action of his powers thanks to which man constitutes the subject and motive for all forms of communication activity. The basic types of communication are affected by virtue of a relation to human powers: intellective-cognitive and volitive-emotive. Yet, it is persuasive communication that, methodologically ordered within the framework of rhetoric, seems to fully recognize the communication determinants characteristic of man’s nature. The progressing technicization of the media also needs to be perceived through an integrated personalistic perspective accepting the subjective determinants of man participating in the communication process.

Bruno Latour advocates for portrayals of science in the making but does not explain how the public can access these portrayals. This article addresses that gap by analyzing how 199 press releases from NASA’s Curiosity mission depict science. Results indicate that the releases often cover Curiosity’s tools and activities, occasionally feature scientists at work, and rarely mention controversies. Ultimately, these press releases provide the public an engaging but partial perspective on science in the making.

Part of learning a discipline’s genres is learning how one’s work must be presented. Students confronting this economy of genre sometimes chafe at its restrictions, and their apprehension reveals unsuspected stakes for technical communication. In interviews, students discuss how their final presentations fail to capture the sophistication and the nuances of their designs, suggesting that learning genres is not just about participation but also about letting go of competing ways of conceiving practice.

This essay recounts the origins of Reflections and considers the first seven years of the journal’s publication from the perspective of its first editor. Arguing that Reflections serves as a barometer of changes in our field, the academy, and the production of knowledge over the past two decades, it recounts the journal’s initial mandate to provide a forum for communication and inquiry and characterizes the unique ethos of the journal. It assesses the generative role of special issues in using a community organizing approach to publication to connect scholars, practitioners, and participants around a theme, developing many of the now-thriving subfields of community-engaged writing. The journal, it concludes, thanks to its inclusive, experimental, and multigenerational approach and deep roots in communities where we have built lasting relationships, provides a mirror in which we can see our field deepen our questions and extend our reach. It celebrates Reflections for cultivating the brave space we continue to need to collaboratively and critically craft our crucial places within and beyond the university.

As the reach of community engaged writing has expanded, it has come to offer a uniquely powerful contribution to a college education, well beyond service. We have the opportunity to make a visible, cross-disciplinary case that embraces this remarkable diversity in a compelling public argument—one that can link vision with new evidence of genuine educational consequences for students. This paper sketches a framework for both articulating that social, ethical, and intellectual contribution and supporting it with theory-driven and data-based evidence of shared, valued outcomes.

Background: The lab report is a commonly assigned genre in engineering lab courses; however, students often have difficulties meeting the expectations of writing in engineering labs. At the same time, it is challenging for engineering faculty to instruct lab report writing because they are often under-supported in writing pedagogies and usually unfamiliar with the extent of students' prior writing knowledge. Literature review: Literature on technical communication in engineering addresses the importance of a rhetorical approach to writing instruction, as well as an emphasis on genre. Extending this literature, research into writing transfer provides valuable insight for better understanding how undergraduates negotiate the engineering lab report as a new genre within this distinct rhetorical context. Research questions: 1. How effective is a transfer-focused writing pedagogy in supporting students' understanding of the genre conventions of engineering lab reports? 2. How does the transfer-focused writing pedagogy impact students' writing quality in five categories (rhetorical knowledge, organization, evidence, critical thinking, and disciplinary conventions)? 3. What are the rhetorical features that engineering students improve or struggle with the most with lab report writing? Research methodology: Four engineering instructors and two English instructors participated in this study to design and develop the lab report writing instructional module, and implemented the module materials into their engineering lab courses. The module, consisting of lab report writing instruction and assessment resources, shares a rhetorical approach and foundational writing terms with first-year composition courses to emphasize a writing-transfer pedagogy. We collected and analyzed undergraduates' lab report samples to evaluate the impact of the module on students' writing performance. Two sets of lab reports were collected for analysis: the sample sets before (control), during the 2015-2016 academic year; and after (experimental) implementation of the module, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results and conclusions: Data collected via pre- and post-implementation writing artifacts show that a rhetorical approach to teaching lab reports helped students better understand the expectations of the lab report as a discipline-specific genre, and it developed students' understanding of the rhetorical features of engineering writing. The pilot module positively impacted the quality of students' lab reports, a finding that suggests that using a transfer-focused writing pedagogy can successfully support the transfer and adaptation of writing knowledge into gateway or entry-level engineering laboratory courses.

Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta­ blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser­ tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis­ tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple­ mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti­ cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per­ formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis­ temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan­ guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...

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"Analyzing a Memoir of Disability" is a semester-long project that promotes learning about disability and culture through group reading and writing about a single memoir. Students in an Introduction to Rehabilitation and Human Services course completed a textual analysis by using a memoir and course textbook to contextualize one another. Writing was framed as a collaborative, multi-step process that cycles through writing, discussing, and writing again. Students were required to regularly integrate course concepts with their assigned memoir readings to prepare for their in-class book club meetings. The project culminated in a formal group paper of 5-7 pages. Despite some logistical challenges, the project was well received, highlighted by many students as their favorite part of the course, and appeared to ignite a passion for reading, writing, and the material under study in many students.

This article expands composition research on response by examining how Dweck’s theory of mindsets impacts graduate writers’ ability to process critical and praise-oriented teacher response, apply critical and praise-oriented teacher response in revision, and ultimately, develop as learners and transfer knowledge from these experiences. We conducted this examination through in-depth case studies of two writers over a six-year period that spanned undergraduate and graduate education. The case studies included interviews, teacher response, and writing to develop thick descriptions of graduate writers’ experiences. We demonstrate how students’ mindsets intersect with processing and applying both critical and praise-oriented response throughout their academic careers, which ultimately helps or hinders opportunities for learning transfer and writing development. The implications of this work apply to how teachers respond to writing and how they teach graduate students about processing and applying teacher comments.

Writing center studies has sought to move towards research methods that are replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) as a means to scholarly legitimacy. While a number of RAD research methods have been identified (surveys, qualitative analysis, observation, case studies, experimentation, discourse analysis, teacher research, action research, and ethnography), one important source of information has been largely overlooked: the scheduling metadata that writing centers routinely collect in the course of normal operations. The present research seeks to demonstrate the validity of metadata-driven research by interrogating an area of writing center scholarship that has been predominantly studied through theoretical or small group means: the impact of gender on writing consultations. It investigates whether the gender of the writing consultant significantly affects a student’s choice in scheduling appointments.

This introduction frames this special issue on ideological transparency by contextualizing the original call for papers within our sociopolitical moment and outlining how various themes emerged — or did not — from the articles included. The editors posit that more nuance is needed in the justifications for how, why, and whether or not teachers of writing and literature inflect their own politics in class.

This article emphasizes time’s effects on student resistance. Drawing on kairos and chronos, the authors argue that when teachers perform ideological neutrality is at least as significant as whether or how they do so. They explore their own temporal approaches to two pedagogical ecologies: first-year composition and an upper-level feminist rhetorics course.

Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre knowledge. While showing that both simplistic and nuanced genre knowledge promote writing development, our findings suggest that nuanced genre knowledge correlates with writing development over the course of a semester. Based on these findings, we propose an expanded view of Tardy’s four genre knowledge components and argue for their explanatory power. We recognize these genre components can be cultivated by using three particular strategies: writing for nonclassroom audiences, using source texts explicitly to join existing disciplinary conversations, and cultivating two types of metacognitive awareness (awareness of the writing strategies used to complete specific tasks and awareness of one’s levels of proficiency in particular types of writing knowledge). Findings can be used to enrich first-year or upper-division writing curricula in the areas of genre knowledge, audience awareness, and source use.

In this article, I propose a social process for digital forgetting (or promoting forgetfulness of media traces that should be relatively inconsequential) using one successful example from Twitter. One example is of course not exhaustive, but it was chosen as a representative model of the ways users are learning to forget. If our systems are not built to forget, we might consider how we can do so not (only) by combating technological functions, but by working with them.

This webtext pursues pluralities by exploring how text, video, and images can be braided to evoke sovereign relationships. Indigenous sovereignty is a significant premise of this work, animated through weaving and yarning – both a practice of Indigenous sovereignty and a graceful methodology that invites non-Indigenous and Indigenous sovereignties to strengthen and maintain sovereign relationships.

Open Pedagogy relies on tools and collaboration to facilitate public discourse. Student projects are linked throughout the narrative, which were also collaboratively composed. As we will demonstrate, the inclusion of digital tools enabled students to engage with the rhetoric on a level appropriate for the times, creating our own kairotic moment.

As more writing centers move to include synchronous chat as a writing center consultation option, writing center researchers and practitioners must continue examining the affordances and constraints of the medium. In this article, we analyze four synchronous online consultation transcripts from one writing center’s pilot program to evaluate consultation patterns and arcs, approaches to teaching and tutoring, and the role of digital language, or netspeak (Crystal 19), in tutors’ feedback. We use this preliminary analysis to argue that writing center tutors can effectively use synchronous tutoring to meet the needs of diverse student populations, but these consultations might be more effective if tutors thoughtfully utilize some of the best practices of face-to-face tutoring. One finding suggests that tutors might engage student writers in online consultations more effectively by employing soliciting and reacting techniques more often than unintentionally using directive structuring practices, which can serve to limit dialogue with student writers (Fanselow 21; Davis et al. 29). Additionally, although netspeak can potentially establish common linguistic ground with writers, tutors should be aware of the disadvantages of using an informal tone and non-academic language in chat consultations; in fact, student writers might benefit from reading tutors’ chat feedback in Edited Academic Discourse. By employing the positive elements of face-to-face consultations in chat sessions, this medium has the potential for effective tutoring in a space where many students feel most comfortable. Our analysis may serve as a heuristic for others to use in assessing chat consultations, developing tutor training, and initiating future research on this consultation option.

In this program profile, we detail the design and implementation phases of an interdisciplinary first-year experience curriculum for multilingual students in the Creando Raíces learning community model at Humboldt State University. Our profile describes how we worked together as a professional learning community to integrate theories of writing development and transfer with culturally sustaining pedagogies. The coursework and academic structural supports of our model, such as its writing fellows program, supported student engagement in critical work that asked them to consider what it means to transfer one’s emerging and existing knowledges about language, literacy, discourse, schooling, and identity into and out of systems, institutions, and communities. In reflecting on our work across three semesters, our profile reveals ways that instructors, administrators and students can enact a multilingual, decolonial praxis as an approach to facilitating writing knowledge transfer.

As the number of multilingual students increases at small campuses in rural areas that lack multilingual composition programming, there is a need to explore pedagogical and institutional strategies that help to pool limited or emerging resources to promote language justice for multilingual students. This narrative case study looks at two small regional campuses’ efforts to advocate for and facilitate supports such as instructor training and tutoring programs for a growing multilingual population in Northeast Ohio.

This multimedia article shares five short video-recorded stories that highlight specific moments of struggling to practice antiracist and linguistic justice values within different disciplinary situations: giving feedback on student writing, training tutors in the writing center, working with pre-service teachers, debating learning objectives in department committees, and responding to prescriptivist attitudes from colleagues. This praxis-driven work responds to Inoue’s 2019 CCCC Chair’s Address and his calls to confront white language supremacy by providing vulnerable accounts of the intellectual, interpersonal, emotional and pedagogical labors and challenges involved in fighting for raciolinguistic justice. Teachers and administrators may find the video stories and accompanying reflections useful when developing pedagogical approaches, designing professional development workshops, or reimagining departmental policy-making and curriculum development.

This essay introduces the archive created by the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA)’s Oral History Initiative. The archive consists of 21 audio interviews recorded at the 2018 RSA conference, transcripts of those interviews, and miscellaneous supplementary materials. Recorded on the occasion of RSA’s fiftieth anniversary, the interviews feature long-time RSA members, past and present officers and board members, and those who were otherwise a part of key moments in the society’s history. The essay’s authors explore the contents of the interviews, emphasizing three key terms frequently invoked by the interviewees themselves: interdisciplinarity, intimacy, and inclusivity. The authors also provide instructions for accessing the archival materials and invite readers to make use of them.

The literature review presents the work of Kees Dorst as a framework for design thinking. The review covers three areas: Dorst’s conception of design problems and how it differs from traditional design paradigms, Dorst’s approach to design thinking and his problem-framing method, and the availability of Dorst’s method for technical communication work.

Research background: Using enterprise social media (ESM) in the workplace has become an important channel for initiating communication activities for employees in the organization. However, some organizations reported that they did not obtain expected returns from their ESM investments. This outcome may be attributed to employee underutilization of ESM. Thus, exploring how employees use ESM is vital to improving communication efficiency. Research questions: 1. How does ESM support for contextualization affect employees' dependency relations with ESM? 2. How do dependency relations affect ESM use? Literature review: For professional communicators and other workers, dependency relations can enhance their media use behavior by channeling more useful information. In studying how professional communicators use a medium, researchers indicated that users' continuance intention rarely occurs without users' dependency on the medium, thus making media system dependency (MSD) relations critical for media use. Based on the MSD theory, we investigate how ESM support for cognitive and affective contextualization affects employees' understanding, orientation, and play dependency relations with ESM, and consequently affect work-related and social ESM uses. Methodology: We surveyed 258 employees of a large software development firm in China. Results and conclusions: Our findings suggest that technical and professional communicators who have not yet used ESM in their work may take the following steps: 1. explore ESM and their specific use by employees; 2. manage and control different information sharing among employees on ESM so as to satisfy employees' different goals; and 3. design and develop different ESM functionalities.

This article presents findings of an interview study with twenty rhetoric and composition scholars. Findings focus on the responsibilities of reviewers, editors, and writers in scholarly peer review. The authors make several recommendations for improving peer review practices and call for a field-wide discussion of and research about the topic.

This article analyzes how public policymakers responded to CCCC’s 1988 National Language Policy. While many treated CCCC as a leading critic of English-only policies, others interpreted the organization to be more of a hesitant critic, or even an outright ally of the English-only movement. Rather than cede rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies, policies, and movements, I argue for language policies that place less emphasis on English and more on language as a right and a translingual practice.

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

IntroductionA Copyleft ManifestoIn Memory of Ty Herrington

W okresie Polski Ludowej (oraz Polskiej Rzeczpospolitej Ludowej) sposób komentowania aktualnych zdarzeń przez czasopisma społeczno-kulturalne był sprawdzianem politycznej poprawności, do której były one zmuszane przez ówczesne władze. Świadectwem tego są numery specjalne związane z kultem Józefa Stalina wydane przez wiele czasopism, między innymi „Odrodzenie” (1944–1950), „Kuźnicę” (1945–1950) czy „Odrę” (1945–1950). Z powodu ingerencji cenzorskich teksty ukazujące się w druku nierzadko, jak w przypadku katowickiej „Odry” były diametralnie różne w stosunku do wersji pierwotnych. W artykule przedstawiono strategię redaktorów próbujących ominąć cenzurę, przede wszystkim na przykładzie tego czasopisma. Z perspektywy retorycznej można zaobserwować między innymi rozpaczliwe próby utrzymania wiarygodności redakcji, poprzez działania w obszarze inwencji, między innymi wybór elementów sygnalizujących czytelnikowi nieprzezroczystość i obcość dyskursu władzy.

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Introduction: ABET has approved changes to the EAC's Criterion 3 that will take effect for the 2019-2020 accreditation cycle. Among many changes and rearrangements is the introduction of the term “engineering judgment” as one of the competencies that students must develop to prepare for professional engineering. Literature review: However, engineering judgment is not defined in the criterion, and although it is a ubiquitous concept in the philosophy of engineering and engineering education, little empirical investigation has been undertaken into the practice of engineering judgment. And there is even less conceptual or empirical investigation into communication's role in the practice of engineering judgment. Research questions: 1. What does engineering judgment look like in practice? 2. How does the sociotechnical situation affect engineering judgment? 3. What role does rhetoric have, not only in communicating judgments, but informing them as well? 4. How can teachers and practitioners in engineering and technical communication use these findings to facilitate better judgment in the classroom and at work? Methods: Using videotape and fieldnotes, the author examines the two sequences of decision-making from a student engineering design project. An ethnomethodologically inspired framework is used to exhibit the phenomenal details of “doing” engineering judgment. Discussion/conclusion: Data reveal that engineering judgment may be fruitfully understood by educators as not just a cognitive and individual ability to apply technical knowledge, but instead a capacity of participants to rhetorically establish common cause to interrogate and reflect on the relations between technical data and situations.

Over the past decade, compositionists have made a number of claims about opportunities presented by Wikipedia for teaching writing. The encyclopedia allows for transparent observation of concepts and skills related to process, research, collaboration, and rhetoric. Beyond observation, Wikipedia allows for public writing with an authentic audience, which often results in increased motivation. Much of this early research has dealt in opportunities and possibilities: speculation about how Wikipedia sponsors particular pedagogies and learning outcomes, and there remains a need for more empirical evidence. This article presents select data from a recent large-scale study conducted by the Wiki Education Foundation that begins to meet this need, and that confirms and extends research from the computers and writing community. Key findings from this research include positive evaluations of Wikipedia-based assignments in general, as well as positive evaluations concerning the capacity of Wikipedia-based assignments to teach critical thinking skills, source evaluation and research, public writing, literature review and synthesis, and peer review. This study also adds significantly to our field's knowledge of how contextual factors related to the course and assignment affect students’ evaluation of a Wikipedia-based assignment. Finally, this article suggests key recommendations for teaching with Wikipedia based on these findings.

“We wonder where the rhetorical theory is for unsettling this resting place when it turns out to be a place of oppression for others?” —Sutton and Mifsud, A Revolution in Tropes, p. xiii.In a time ...

This article positions the progymnasmata, an ancient sequence of rhetorical exercises, as a rich resource for contemporary scholarship on rhetoric and sound. Drawing on work at the intersection of rhetoric and sound studies as well as scholarship that repurposes ancient rhetorical concepts to study digital media, I argue that refiguring the progymnasmata can significantly expand rhetorical studies of digital sound. I ground my argument in podcasts, a popular sonic medium that has garnered attention in rhetoric and writing scholarship, ending with a series of six exercises designed to help students learn to make podcasts.

"This workshop is our connection to the outside world. A chance for us to be heard, something that teaches us how to connect through our writing.' —SpeakOut writer "Miami inmates are what becomes of the chicken before I fry it up." —Thant T. Lallamont, Exchange for Change writer

A proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and activism in the field of rhetoric and composition attends to prison writing, as an ethical imperative to combat mass incarceration and its dire consequences (Jacobi, Hinshaw, Berry, Rogers, etc.). However, parole board writing— arguably the genre of writing within prison most closely tied to material liberation—remains largely unexamined, both in legal studies and rhetoric and composition. The authors of this article have been working together for the past three years in a weekly writing workshop for former “lifers”—individuals sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; in this setting, parole board writing comes up often in free writes, discussions, and formal compositions. In fact, some participants have brought the pieces they read to the parole board to workshop for discussion and even continued revision. The article analyzes this prison-writing genre with participants of the workshop who coauthor the piece. We argue that the writing and rhetorical performance required of prisoners when they face parole boards enacts institutional and rhetorical constraints while simultaneously carving out new spaces for freedom and resistance. We examine how the parole board has shifted to a standard based on evaluating an inmate’s “insight” into their crimes (as opposed to being evaluated solely on their originary crimes), and we show the ways that this shift engenders new tensions between 1) writings that affirm existing power dynamics and narratives of responsibility, accountability, repentance, and transformation and 2) writings that subvert and resist dominant discourses and challenge existing power dynamics. Thus, this carceral writing process is at once coercive and subversive, oppressive and empowering, restraining and liberating for those who participate in it.

This study examined the relationship between stress and social media usage, whether stress was an indicator of social media use, and tested moderators of the relationship between stress and social media use. Participants ( n = 201) were randomly assigned to a stress-inducing recall activity or a control task via an online survey. Next, they completed measures of stress, social media usage, social support, and habitual behavior. We found that seeking social support contributed to an increased usage of social media. In addition, increased usage of social media was related to greater frequency and strength of evoking habitual behavior.

The field of writing studies has highlighted the limitations of a monolingual orientation towards language, particularly in the context of English-only language policies, but there have been fewer accounts of how people actively navigate and advocate for alternatives. Drawing on a recent ethnographic, discourse analytic study of how writers reshaped a local language policy, I argue that there are advantages to cultivating and combining multilingual, raciolinguistic, and translingual approaches to language advocacy, yet at the same time, arguments for multilingualism risk eclipsing, and ultimately undermining, these other approaches.

Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle open Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things by positing that “In disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, the first decade of the twenty-first century has been...

In a journal entry of March 1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, “why has never the poorest country college offered me a professorship of rhetoric? I think I could have taught an orator, though I am...

Background- With communication skills deemed increasingly important for engineering graduates, we wanted to understand how writing is currently included in engineering classes, what challenges are caused by including writing in such classes, and what resources would be most useful to help engineering instructors more easily include writing in engineering classes. Literature review- Writing is a necessary skill for engineering graduates and has received increased attention in engineering classes. However, despite many instructors' beliefs that writing is an important skill for engineers, it is not typically taught in a systematic and comprehensive way across the engineering curriculum. Research questions- 1. What perceptions of writing, and specifically writing in engineering, do engineering instructors hold? 2. To what extent do engineering instructors report incorporation of writing activities and assignments in their classes? 3. What barriers do engineering instructors perceive as inhibiting the inclusion of more writing in engineering courses? 4. What resources do engineering instructors desire to expand and improve the inclusion of writing in engineering courses? Research methods: A survey was completed by engineering instructional staff (n = 190 respondents, 10.7% response rate) from seven institutions as well as by some members of the Big10+ Engineering Deans Mailing List. Instructors were asked about their general perceptions about writing in engineering and were also asked to consider the most recent engineering course that they taught and reflect on how they included (or did not include) writing in their course. Findings and conclusions- As expected, we found that most engineering instructional staff agree that writing skills are very important in engineering. Yet, we found that constraints on time and resources kept instructors from including more writing in their courses. This paper concludes with a discussion of our efforts to develop resources, such as rubrics, graded writing examples, and strategies for developing writing prompts, to help instructors include more writing in their engineering courses.

Those of us who work at universities are accustomed to the way diversity and inclusion initiatives become institutionalized. Internal grant applications ask how the proposed research is relevant to a university's mission in relation to diversity; required online surveys are distributed to assure that faculty and staff understand accessibility guidelines; task forces, committees, and planning groups articulate goals related to diversity and inclusion. The application of these rhetorical acts in daily academic life undulates, sometimes visible and meaningful, other times fading into the scenery, becoming background to seemingly more pressing matters. We address these questions as they relate to scholarly publishing in rhetoric and composition journals, questions that affect editors and authors as well as those who teach and study in the field. As editorial team members of Composition Studies, a biannual independent print journal, we detail strategies for creating a home for diversity in our field.

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This study aims to explore effective ways in which students can learn to write synthesis texts. First, through a systematic literature search we found 16 (quasi-)experimental studies from 6th grade to undergraduate level in the field of learning to write source-based synthesis texts, that met our inclusion criteria. Second, we formulated a general instructional design principle, that included three main processes: (a) selecting relevant/important information from sources, (b) organizing, and (c) connecting that information. Bottom-up analyses of the six most effective studies yielded a set of learning activities that contribute to the improvement of students’ performance on writing synthesis texts. Subsequently, we supplemented our general design principle with relevant learning activities obtained from these effective interventions. One effective intervention differed considerably from the others due to its divergent nature, but its content was considered valuable enough to warrant the inclusion of an additional design principle. The design principles formulated in this study can be used as guidelines for future interventions in synthesis writing or as a means of support for teachers who want to develop educational materials for teaching synthesis writing.

To date, research into functional descriptions of unfolding language has been almost entirely focused on speech. And whilst writing research has examined the revision of language units, it has backgrounded how these revisions contribute to the unfolding of a text’s meanings. Therefore, using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an underlying framework, and keystroke logging software (Inputlog) as a data collection tool, this paper takes a first step toward a dynamic description of written text in terms of the language structures, functions, and systemic choices found in the written revisions of two 2nd year UK undergraduates. More specifically, in detailed textual analysis of four unfolding, digitally composed text, whose end products totalled approximately 1700 words, this paper focuses on the revisions made during consecutive writing sessions, which lasted anything from 8mins to 8hrs 37mins and totalled 56hrs 18mins of recordings. The findings suggest that certain language choices may play a key role when it comes to shaping academic essays, and it is proposed that this new model of analysis can provide an additional perspective on writing behaviour in terms of how meaning-making practices unfold in real time.

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.

This essay describes a prison-university writing exchange that culminated in the collection of audio and written essays “Why I Write” (http://www.whyi- write.com) and offers “writing to listen” as a strategy for communicating and listening across institutional and social boundaries. I argue that sound reveals the material conditions of speaking and writing; in our writing exchange, it reduced the anonymity at the heart of the project while also revealing the places and sounds that shape us as writers. I suggest that writing to listen also provides a framework for community listening that is inclusive of the many additional, intentional actions involved in making sure all participants in a partnership are being heard.

This article explores how contemplative writing pedagogy that integrates the practice of mindfulness, or moment-to-moment attention, into writing instruction can help students consciously and adeptly deploy their attention and construct a more responsible ethos. Mindful writers develop awareness of their own and others’ materiality and become more reflective digital citizens.

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.

Dissertation boot camp (DBC) programs have been adopted at many postsecondary institutions across North America over the last decade. Responding to Simpson's (2013) call for writing centers to do more than simply share anecdotal information about the effects of their DBC programs, the authors of this mixed-methods study assess the benefits of these programs for doctoral students. The study evaluates three DBC delivery models-online, sustained, and retreat-in order to determine each model's effect on doctoral students' writing behaviors, confidence levels, and anxiety. By conducting a more robust statistical analysis than has been possible in other preliminary work on DBC programming, the paper corroborates Busl, Donnelly, & Capdevielle's (2015) finding that "Writing Process" DBCs are more beneficial to doctoral students than "Just Write" DBCs. The authors ultimately find that doctoral students experience positive outcomes from all three DBC models and are likely to self-select based on the model that best suits their individual needs. The results of this study indicate that postsecondary institutions ought to consider offering a variety of DBC programming in order to meet the needs of diverse graduate-student populations.

This article profiles three new graduate instructors in a PhD program in literature who are teaching composition for the first time while enrolled in a teaching methods course. I argue that understanding graduate instructors’ prior beliefs about literacy has the potential to make practica instructors more sympathetic to the complex identity-based and ideological negotiations new graduate instructors must undertake in their first year of teaching while also pointing to ways to facilitate this work.

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Research Article| December 01 2018 Truth in Politics: Newman and Newman’s Evidence Michael Weiler Michael Weiler Michael Weiler is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 695–706. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0695 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Weiler; Truth in Politics: Newman and Newman’s Evidence. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 695–706. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0695 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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and by representations of the self. In sharing the work included in this special issue, Suzy and I hope to exemplify the importance of including later life in the literacy and composition research agenda, and urge literacy and composition scholars to consider how literate activity shapes, and is shaped by, ideologies of aging.

Afterword

In a student-centered classroom, learners have to be actively involved both in learning and assessment, which in itself needs to become a learning tool. Therefore, students need to understand and be given the opportunity to apply assessment criteria themselves. Through self-assessment of their writing, they enhance their self-awareness and become autonomous learners capable of self-improvement and meta-cognition (Liang 2014, Nielsen 2012).Self- and peer assessment are helpful tools that have been discussed in the literature, but the reliability of self-assessment is still debated (see for example Birjandi and Tamjid 2012, Matsuno 2009, Poehner 2012). The present study adds to the existing research by offering data that is not based on observation, but stems from a comparison of self- and instructor assessment where both parties used the same specific assessment rubrics. Assigning numerical values to the rubrics allowed for quantitative results. The data was collected in four classes of students in a course called ‘Introduction to Academic Writing’ at Deree - The American College of Greece. The outcome of the study did not confirm expectations with regard to reliability of self-assessment, and recommendations for future rubric-based studies are included. Self-assessment should be used as a formative and diagnostic learning tool, especially for weaker students, to foster development of learner autonomy.

Within the Learning Development community there are few professional development opportunities or resources for new entrants to the profession, particularly with regard to conducting individual academic writing tutorials. The current study seeks to address this by analysing the talk of individual academic writing tutorials in order to better understand how tutorials are organised and conducted, how identities and relationships are established and how learning is developed. We analysed the audio recordings of one-to-one academic writing tutorials and used conversation analysis methodology to identify features of effective practice. The analysis revealed an overarching three-part sequential structure to the tutorials and identified several features of effective practice in the middle phase where advice-giving occurs. The key finding was that indirect and complex processes of highlighting problems and arriving at solutions are useful to develop learners’ skills and autonomy. The application of these insights has the potential to contribute to a more evidence-informed reflective community of Learning Development practitioners.

This article is an introduction to the special issue on how to report writing interventions in research publications. The six contributions included in this special issue systematically describe a broad range of writing interventions aimed at learning to write in primary, secondary, and higher education. Based on these contributions and on earlier recommendations of scholars in the field of writing intervention research, we established a set of recommendations for reporting key elements of writing interventions. These elements include characteristics of the context of the intervention, theories and/or empirical studies of writing, learning to write, and teaching writing, and design principles of the intervention at both a macro and micro level. These recommendations can be considered as a checklist for authors, reviewers, and editors when reporting or reviewing intervention studies.

To enable a proper evaluation of the results of writing interventions for scientific replication and theory building, it is of vital importance that the design principles underlying an intervention and operationalization thereof are clearly described. A detailed description of a writing intervention is also important from a practical point of view, to foster dissemination and successful implementation of the intervention into practice. In this paper we propose a framework for reporting on the design principles of multifaceted intervention programs in a systematic manner. Unique features of this framework are that we (1) separate the design principles for the focus and mode of instruction, (2) systematically describe how these principles are integrated and operationalized into learning and teaching activities, (3) systematically describe the professional development teachers need to be able to execute the teaching activities. We demonstrate how this framework can be applied, with a worked example of an intervention that we designed, implemented and tested in elementary schools in the Netherlands. The framework provided in this paper makes core features of writing interventions transparent to reviewers, other scholars, and educational practitioners, and warrants that an intervention includes all necessary elements in the most optimal way. Moreover, this type of framework facilitates the comparison of interventions across contexts and countries.

Skinner, K., & Merholz, P. (2016). Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams. O'Reilly Media. In Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams , Kristin Skinner and Peter Merholz lay out a practical guide for "creating and leading design teams" within the context of design as "part of strategic planning" (Appendix B). A practical guide, the book is divided into ten chapters, each dealing with a component of working with design teams. The book aims to bridge the gap left out by texts that focus on methods, tools, and outcomes, but leave out the practical elements of setting up design teams. It shows how design teams can operate with a design culture that successfully interacts with other departments within an organization in the digital and connected age.

This article provides a critical narrative of a flipped professional development program for experienced graduate teaching associates teaching a second-year writing course. We use a narrative approach to demonstrate that decisions about how and what to flip in a professional development program are intimately linked to the local exigencies—material, cultural, and pedagogical—that constitute administrative, teaching, and learning contexts. Furthermore, we theorize that our decision to flip professional development aligns with feminist ethics of power distribution and collaboration, raises questions about how this also changes the visibility of faculty's administrative labor, and may contribute to misperceptions about the intellectual work and expertise required for service and writing program administration. We close by proposing design as a critical and defining feature of WPA work.

The author reports findings from two iterations of a formative experiment focusing on improving students' conventional and digital, multimodal arguments. The first iteration of this experiment occurred in a rural school district in the United Sates with an eleventh-grade English/language arts teacher, and the second iteration was implemented in the same school district, but in a different high school with both a ninth- and tenth-grade English/language arts teacher. The findings focus upon obstacles the teachers encountered while implementing an intervention that entailed elements of argument; digital, multimodal tools; and the writing process. These obstacles led the author to make six recommendations for the future professional development of rural teachers integrating digital, multimodal tools into conventional writing curriculum.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Teaching problem:</b> The comparative/contrastive approach to teaching intercultural communication is based on the premise that global rhetorical practices are not mere indicators of the cultural proclivities of a people, but are also a framework for developing a working knowledge about how members of a culture communicate. However, this approach predisposes learners to contrasting those cultures against their own and reinforces their preconceptions about national cultural characteristics. Augmenting that approach with transliteracies—emphasizing the benefits of knowledge sourcing not limited to scholarly/academic sources—offers a multidimensional perspective to intercultural communication. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research question:</b> How can transliteracy inquiry be applied in teaching and learning global rhetorics? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case: </b> The approaches described here draw on the work of literacy researchers who delineate ways in which transliteracy broadens the scope of learning materials, including texts that are cultural and social (as opposed to linguistic) and that can be studied for what they convey about those cultures. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">How the case was studied:</b> This paper describes the experience of using transliteracies to teach intercultural professional communication. The material was collected informally over the course of two years of teaching the course through observation, student completed research reports, and reflections. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> The shortcomings of contrastive and comparative rhetoric pedagogy in intercultural communication may be due in part to instructional materials selection and prioritization of what teachers deem to be scholarly. Reasoning that the basic architecture of a global rhetorics lies in its surrounding culture, artifacts, and communication systems, I designed an assignment that required students to describe how one culture's heritage, history, governmental systems, and value systems contribute to the development of persuasion and uses of rhetoric. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Transliteracies opened up spaces that allowed students to gain an in-depth understanding of others’ rhetorical practices without contrasting them against their own and by approaching them as ethnographic objects of study. Students engaged the object of their scholarship more expansively. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Transliteracies in intercultural professional communication served to move students toward a more immersive and empathetic understanding of referent cultures, a stance that enriches professional communication. Students displayed a more altruistic value system in representing their objects of study and were careful to recognize that their work might be accessed by a wider audience. Transliteracies offer a practical toolkit for comprehending and fashioning understandable and compelling arguments about other cultures.

Librarians and academic staff suggest a relationship between the quality of references which students use in academic assignments and the marks received. This study tested that assertion by using a citation analysis methodology to assess the quality of bibliographies written by undergraduate nursing students at the University of York.Bibliographies from sixty essays across three modules were analysed, noting the types and quantities of references used and whether references were sourced independently or included in the module’s reading list. Each bibliography was given an overall quality rating: ‘Poor’, ‘Average’ or ‘Good’. This rating was compared with the mark the student was awarded for the essay.Results showed that, whilst students demonstrated the ability to locate items independently, the quality of those items was often poor. Generally, quality of selected sources and bibliographies improved as students progressed through the programme. There was an association between higher quality bibliographies and higher assignment marks.The study concludes that critical thinking skills are vital for nursing students to develop academically, as these skills will be tested within a clinical environment once students have completed their degree. A benefit for students is the conclusion that using higher quality sources results in higher marks.

The authors, an instructor and students, describe our practice of user-centered design on three levels: in the design and structure of an advanced undergraduate course in which we all participated, in student projects designed during the course, and in our reflections on the course presented here. We argue that principles of user-centered design can and should be more than course concepts and assignments; they can be core practices of the course that hold both students and teachers accountable for the impacts of their rhetorical choices. We offer a model for other teacher-scholars looking to involve students in the design of their courses and in writing together about their work.

Acknowledging students’ and instructors’ desires for grades as affective carriers of achievement, belonging, and identity can move us beyond ideals of socially just assessment, making space for decolonizing action and explorations of how the classroom community and the field grapple with the dissonance between being a writer and being a student.

Threshold concept theory can identify transformative concepts in disciplinary communities of practice, making it a useful framework pedagogically for scholars of academic literacies. Although researchers have studied how to teach thres hold concepts and how students have taken up theseconcepts in learning to write, few have looked at two aspects that are particularly important for students placed into basic writing: threshold concepts of reading and questions of learning transfer.Taking an epistemological approach to disciplinary literacies, I used case study research to trace the changing reading and writing practices of Bruce, a basic writing and first-generation college student, during his first year of college as he moved from a basic reading course into biochemis-try. Bruce leveraged audience awareness to write rhetorically and to comprehend difficult texts written for professional biochemistry researchers. Findings show that audience awareness is a threshold concept of reading, one that transforms academic literacy practices and that furthersidentity in disciplinary communities of practice. These findings support the teaching of audience awareness in secondary and postsecondary classrooms, but they also demand that we recognize the additional work basic writing students, like Bruce, must do to establish agency in a system that has labeled them underprepared.

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Background: In Taiwan, the insurance industry has the highest willingness and the largest budgets to implement mobile technology. Companies must continuously monitor, evaluate, and redesign the mobile IT infrastructure during implementation because when employees gain more experience with using mobile IT to support work tasks, they present their preferences and progressive needs. Therefore, exploration of how mobile technology can support the diverse job roles and task characteristics in insurance companies that have implemented mobile IT is vital to improving the efficiency of mobile IT implementation and organizational capacity. Research questions: In insurance companies: 1. How are different mobile devices used differently by salespeople and office staff? 2. What are the differences in the attitudes of salespeople and office staff toward using mobile technology? Literature review: Previous studies that explored employees' usage of mobile technology suggested that those in different job roles have different mobile technology needs and usage behaviors. These studies support further comparison and investigation of the mobile technology requirements of salespeople and office staff in insurance companies. Methodology: A survey collected empirical data from 177 employees from insurance companies in Taiwan. The participants' demographic information, attitudes toward applications, perceived advantages, and willingness to use mobile technology were collected and analyzed. Results and conclusions: The results showed that the most important tasks supported by mobile technology were instant communication and information access; developing an organizational culture that supports using mobile technology in job-related tasks can increase employees' adoption of mobile devices; and smartphones are thought to have better mobility and more functions to support main job tasks than tablets. Based on the findings, this study proposes suggestions for practice and implications for future research.

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

Background: Swales's Create a Research Space (CaRS) is a popular model for writing research article (RA) introductions. CaRS prescribes three broad moves-establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and presenting the present work. This study assesses the applicability of a problem-solution patterns (PSP) approach to facilitate Move 1 in CaRS by analyzing RAs in materials science and engineering. Research questions: 1. Is structuring an RA introduction using problem-solution patterns a common approach in published RAs in materials science and engineering? 2. How does PSP facilitate the setting of boundaries between territory and niche in these RAs? Literature review: Variants of CaRS have been widely applied to study RA introductions. Even though the 2004 version of CaRS has been deemed effective in describing the structure of RA introductions in a number of disciplines, its prescription of Move 1 may not be easily operationalized in teaching engineering research writing. For problem- or application-based RAs, the territory can be established with PSP while preserving other CaRS moves. Methodology: This exploratory study employs a text analysis approach to assess 30 RA introductions from three materials science and engineering journals. Results and discussion: PSP is found in most RA introductions. By integrating PSP into CaRS, the proposed model can capture problem-solution cyclicity as a build-up move for territory and niche establishment. Conclusion: Because problem-solving is central to engineering research, RA introductions can be structured using naturally-occurring problem-solution patterns. PSP-CaRS may serve as an effective writing model for RA introductions in engineering-related fields.

This preliminary study examines the rating behavior of five composition and five ESL writing teachers while evaluating a text from a university-level non-native (L2) English speaking student. Using an eye tracker, we measured raters’ dwell times and reading behaviors across four areas of interest—rhetoric, organization, vocabulary, and grammar. Results indicate that raters with differing disciplinary backgrounds read the text differently. L2 writing teachers tended to spend more time on and re-read the rhetorical, lexical, and grammatical features of the text while skipping over more of the grammar errors, while composition teachers read the text more deliberately. The findings suggest L2 writing teachers were more prone to skim and scan for information on which to base a grade while composition teachers delayed rating decisions until after reviewing the entire text, which is corroborated in previous research. These findings can expand our understanding of how disciplinary background can influence rating processes, which can inform rater training procedures, especially in disciplinary writing contexts where L2 writing is judged by individuals with and without expertise in composition or second language writing. Moreover, it demonstrates the utility of eye-tracking methods to examine the cognitive processes associated with reading and scoring student writing.

A current rise in so-called “caveman” diets, books, exercise regimes and other trends demonstrates a cultural attempt to reclaim idealized prehistoric conditions for the modern human. In a rhetorical analysis of texts from this modern paleo culture, we identify what we call a “paleomyth” and illustrate how such lifestyle trends not only offer truncated understandings of evolutionary science, but more importantly how they offer a mythological narrative for paleo believers.

Call for papers for Reflections Special Issue: Prison Writing, Literacies and Communities, coedited by Wendy Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi.

Drawing on research in systems theory and their own programmatic efforts to recognize, value, and integrate language differences in first-year composition, the authors argue for a multilevel approach for sustainable and systemic change to occur. Multilevel work functions to identify points of leverage for enacting language rights in institutional settings.

This article proposes a heuristic that teachers and students can use together to create a vocabulary for discussing the aesthetic aspects of color and typography in document design work. By using this framework, teachers and students can generate a collection of shared visual topoi or commonplaces for describing the aesthetic value of color and typography that they can then draw from to inform visual analysis and production work.

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.

Rethinking UX requires mapping trends in empirical research to find out how the field has developed. This study addresses that need by analyzing over 400 academic empirical studies published between 2000--2016. Our research questions are, "How have the artifacts, analysis, and methods of UX research changed since the year 2000?" and "Do scholars use research questions and hypotheses to ground their research in UX?" Our research found that services, websites, and imagined objects/prototypes were among the most frequently studied artifacts, while usability studies, surveys, and interviews were the most commonly used methods. We found a significant increase in quantitative and mixed methods studies since 2010. This study showed that only 1 out of every 5 publications employed research questions to guide inquiry. We hope that these findings help UX as a field more accurately and broadly conceive of its identity with clear standards for evaluating existing research and rethinking future research opportunities as a discipline.

As fitness trackers have proliferated, many now collect information about both physical and mental health indicators. Arguably, such capabilities promote the notion that achieving and maintaining health is holistic, pushing back against the mind/body divide that has long characterized how we tend to perceive health and disease in Western cultures (see Segal, 2005). In this article, the author argues that the visual (photographs and data visualizations) and language-based communication strategies used on Bellabeat Leaf's website, a smart jewelry device for women, employ a narrative of holisticism. Further, this narrative functions as a rhetorical trope that reinforces power relationships that align with a dominant underlying ideology of Western medicine---the notion that disease and illness can be controlled. The author proposes that future designs of the Leaf's smartphone application might allow users to visualize quantitative and select user-contributed qualitative, sensorial-based feedback to potentially provide a more balanced perspective of health.

To forge collaborative ties among the rhetoric of health and medicine, the medical humanities, and medicine itself, scholars need shared terms. We argue that techne can unite researchers from across these disciplines. To demonstrate, we discuss our interdisciplinary research study, Writing Diabetes. By learning about the techne of rhetoric and writing about diabetes, participants became more attentive to the techne of their health experience—or “health techne”—enabling them to invent new ways of “doing” diabetes.

This article reports on a study focused on understanding the relationship between teachers’ emotional responses and the larger contextual factors that shape response practices. Drawing from response and emotion scholarship, this article proposes affective tensions as a way for understanding the tug and pull that teachers experience between what they feel they should do (mostly driven from a pedagogical perspective) and what they are expected to do (mostly driven by an institutional perspective) in a contextual moment. The case study of Kim, a community college instructor, offers an analysis of two affective tensions that emerged from her think-aloud protocol (TAP): responding to grammar/sentence errors over content and responding critically to students she likes. Kim’s case reveals the underlying affective tensions between individual emotions, cultural constructions, and institutional contexts that are negotiated while she responds to student writing. This article concludes with suggestions for identifying emotions and affective tensions that both influence and paralyze writing teachers’ response practices.

The Writing Mentor TM (WM) application is a Google Docs add-on designed to help students improve their writing in a principled manner and to promote their writing success in postsecondary settings. WM provides automated writing evaluation (AWE) feedback using natural language processing (NLP) methods and linguistic resources. AWE features in WM have been informed by research about postsecondary student writers often classified as developmental (Burstein et al., 2016b), and these features address a breadth of writing sub-constructs (including use of sources, claims, and evidence; topic development; coherence; and knowledge of English conventions). Through an optional entry survey, WM collects self-efficacy data about writing and English language status from users. Tool perceptions are collected from users through an optional exit survey. Informed by language arts models consistent with the Common Core State Standards Initiative and valued by the writing studies community, WM takes initial steps to integrate the reading and writing process by offering a range of textual features, including vocabulary support, intended to help users to understand unfamiliar vocabulary in coursework reading texts. This paper describes WM and provides discussion of descriptive evaluations from an Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) usability task situated in WM and from users-in-the-wild data. The paper concludes with a framework for developing writing feedback and analytics technology.

Aim:  The use of validated measures of writing motivation is imperative to improving our understanding and development of interventions to improve student writing utilizing motivation as a mechanism.  One of the most important malleable factors involved in improving student writing is motivation, particularly for secondary school students.  This research note systematically examines the measures of writing motivation for students in grades 4–12 used by researchers over the last ten years and summarizes their psychometric and measurement properties to the extent provided in the underlying literature. This collection of measures and their properties and features is designed to make researchers more aware of the various options and to point out the need for additional measures. Problem Formation:  Writing is crucial to college and career readiness, but adolescents are inadequately prepared to be proficient writers.  Grades 4–12, once students have generally learned the basics of writing, are when students begin to develop more fluent and sophisticated writing abilities.  They turn from learning to write to writing to learn, and writing is increasingly done across content areas and in multiple genres.  Unfortunately, writing is a difficult skill to master, and students in middle and high school suffer from declining motivation.  The ability to measure changes in writing motivation at this developmental stage will allow researchers to more effectively design and assess writing interventions.  What are the current, validated measures of writing motivation available for researchers working with adolescents?  Motivation research has grown significantly in the last ten years, and a variety of motivation constructs (e.g., self-efficacy, expectancy-value) and related measures are used across the field. In addition to the variety of motivation constructs used in research today, researchers require domain- or context-specific measures of motivation (e.g., science motivation) to enable an accurate understanding of the role of motivation in achievement. Despite increased developments in both motivation and writing research over the past few decades, the intersection of these two fields remains relatively unexplored (Boscolo & Hidi, 2007; Troia, Harbaugh, Shankland, Wolbers, & Lawrence, 2013).Information Collection:  A thorough literature search was done to find measures of writing motivation used for this age group within the last 10 years.  Psychometric properties, to the extent available in the underlying articles, of each measure are described.Conclusions:  Ultimately, seven discrete measures of adolescent writing motivation were found, but only limited psychometric details were available for many of the measures.  No “gold standard” measure was found; indeed, the measures utilized varied motivational constructs and rarely reported more than the Cronbach’s alpha of the underlying instrument. Researchers need to carefully parse through the related motivation literature to understand the most likely constructs to be implicated in their intervention. They need to consider factors specifically related to their study, such as how stable the construct being targeted is developmentally, whether the term and type of intervention will be sufficient to make an impact on the students’ motivation as suggested by the underlying motivational literature, and what the target of the intervention is. Appropriate motivational constructs to be measured will vary depending on the intervention and its anticipated theory of change.Directions for Further Research: Several underlying motivation constructs have been used in the measures described in this review, particularly self-efficacy. However, a number of important motivation constructs, such as interest and self-determination theory, were not captured by the measures found.  This review of currently available measures will give researchers options when wanting to include validated measures of writing motivation in their studies and suggests that additional, validated measures are needed to adequately cover the relevant motivational constructs.

This article considers how graduate educators can best prepare their students for writing and publishing academic scholarship, drawing on interviews performed by the coauthors with twenty published scholars from rhetoric and composition. The article also includes specific, practical strategies for academic publishing drawn from the interviews.

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Health literacy is an embodied, multisensory experience that is invariably mediated by healthcare technologies. We illustrate this concept through three case studies that describe scenarios in which non-experts and lay experts engage in non-discursive literacy practices: parents caring for an infant in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) self-managing their treatment, and public audiences reporting symptoms to a crowd-sourced flu-tracking program.

Symposium response.

Because social media skills are increasingly viewed as essential for professionals, social media is incorporated frequently in business communication courses. When students are asked to consider professional uses of social media, however, they are often unwilling to critically engage these technologies. This article continues discussions of students’ reticence due largely to negative cultural narratives that label social media as unprofessional, or that link social media only with reputation management. Using student interviews and writing from a social media writing course, I discuss challenges posed by students’ adherence to these narratives and conclude with five suggestions for implementing social media successfully.

This essay reports on a writing-based formative assessment of a university-wide initiative to enhance students’ global learning. Our mixed (and unanticipated) results show the need for enhanced expertise in writing assessment as well as for sustained partnerships among diverse institutional stakeholders so that public programming—from events linked to classroom-level learning to broader cross unit mandates like accreditation—can yield more rigorous, responsive, and mixed method assessments.

This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

This article presents a case study using ethnographic and visual methods to investigate the framing activity of engineering students. Findings suggest students use the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis to produce the vivid images needed to frame engineering constraints. Data reveal students multimodally inducing collaboration between group members to construct images as ways to configure engineering constraints. The author argues for the usefulness of hypotyposis for understanding the framing of engineers, technical communicators, and other designers.

Meta G. CarstarphenFigure 1: Screenshot of YouTube video depicting an image of Obama grinning with a gold dental grill and gold chain necklace (Downs).University of OklahomaKathleen E. WelchUnivers...

This study examined the effects of an innovative comprehensive writing program in upper primary education on students’ writing performance and on teachers´ classroom practices, beliefs and skills. The program focused on the communicative nature of writing, on writing as a process, and on explicit teaching of five genre-specific writing strategies. It was implemented by 43 teachers in their regular classrooms (Grades 4 to 6, N = 1052), with three conditions: (1) a writing program condition, (2) the same program complemented by professional development sessions and coaching, and (3) a control condition in which teachers taught their usual writing lessons. Students’ writing performance was measured three times with multiple writing tasks. Data on teachers’ practices, beliefs and skills were collected through lesson observations, interviews, questionnaires, teacher logs, and a text assessment task. The comprehensive writing program had a beneficial effect on students’ writing performance and the extent to which teachers taught writing strategies. The complementary professional development and coaching had a direct effect on the number of lessons implemented, and an indirect effect on students' performance. Overall, the innovation proved to be effective for improving students’ writing performance in the upper grades of primary schools.

The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.

ABSTRACT In Book III of the Rhetoric, Aristotle focuses at length on the effect of lexical energeia. Scholarship on energeia in this passage almost always associates it with with analysis of enargeia in later texts. However, it is not clear that these two are used as equivalents in Aristotle. Here I survey Aristotle’s conceptions of energeia across the corpus in order to understand Aristotle’s use of energeia in the Rhetoric more precisely. I argue that Aristotle’s model of energeia has a consistent fundamental meaning, even as it crosses many topoi, and that Aristotle’s rhetorical energeia cannot be conflated with enargeia.

This article explores the dynamic practice of inviting community members to grade college students on their work in community-engaged partnerships. The authors articulate theories of writing assessment with theories of reciprocity to argue that community-based student evaluations can be a valid and ethical form of assessment, and discuss a case study in which local youth graded college students to offer eight best practices for implementing community-based assessment. As reciprocity is often underemphasized in practice, community evaluations provide a strategy for shifting power toward community members, potentially reinvigorating applications of reciprocity to make them more substantial and meaningful.

Research problem: The purpose of the study was to fill gaps in our knowledge about technical editors' work practices and perceptions, knowledge that might be useful for teachers and practitioners, as well as current and prospective students. Research questions: (1) What work activities do technical editors engage in? (2) How do people become and progress in careers as technical editors? (3) What do technical editors perceive about the complexity of their work and its value to themselves and others? Literature review: The literature review focuses on previous surveys of technical editors, which have tended to focus on technology-related issues and been largely limited to samples obtained from the Society for Technical Communication.Methodology: A link to an online survey was sent to 32 professional organizations for technical and other professional, nonliterary, and nonjournalism editors. The leadership of each organization was asked to forward the link to its members; 12 complied, with a resulting 253 respondents. Responses to closed-ended questions were tabulated, while responses to the open-ended questions were analyzed thematically.Results and conclusions:The results revealed a broad range of job titles, disciplinary and professional fields, genres and media, editing-related tasks, and extent and type of collaboration. Respondents perceived as useful several forms of academic preparation, personality traits, and attitudes. About half the respondents had become editors through deliberate preparation during college (direct route) and half had not (indirect route). Thus, one implication of the results is that college students majoring in the sciences and other technical fields (indirect route) might be attracted to complementary minors and certificate programs in technical communication/editing. The sample was obtained from among a broader range of technical editors than samples used in previous surveys but was relatively small and, therefore, nongeneralizable. Future surveys should strive for a larger sample size and include questions about a wide range of demographic variables that can be correlated with the independent variables.

Proponents of reframing argue that prophetic pragmatism entails redirecting contemporary education reforms. While this judgment may defend our professional standing, it overlooks the consequences of redirecting reform's appeals to global competition, which preclude public participation in defining the goals and measures of literacy education. This article forwards an alternate pragmatism for attending to the public consequences of reform discourse.

In this article, the author proposes that the emergence of digital, disease-tracking applications over the past ten years like HealthMap (healthmap.org) and Flu Near You (flunearyou.org) that allow non-experts to contribute information about emergent public health threats have facilitated a "do-it-yourself (DIY)" risk assessment ethic. Focusing in particular on Flu Near You (FNY), a crowdsourced, flu-tracking program, the author argues that some participants use the mapping feature to curate their own risk information experience in determining the preventative behaviors they may want to engage in (if any) to prevent flu. As outbreaks of infectious diseases increase (Smith et al., 2014), mHealth technologies like disease-tracking apps are evolving as an important risk assessment tool for both public health experts as well as non-expert, public audiences. Better understanding how non-experts use such information can inform not only the design of these apps but visual risk communication strategies more generally speaking.

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.

Book Review| June 01 2017 Old Rhetoric and New Media Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. By Douglas Eyman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 162. $75.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. By John Durham Peters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 409. $30.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. By Damien Smith Pfister. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014; pp. ix + 272. $69.95 cloth.Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Edited by Jim Rodolfo and William Hart-Davidson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. v + 330. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. Katie P. Bruner; Katie P. Bruner Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Paul R. McKean; Paul R. McKean Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ned O’Gorman; Ned O’Gorman Ned O’Gorman is Associate Professor of Communication at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Matthew C. Pitchford; Matthew C. Pitchford Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nikki R. Weickum Nikki R. Weickum Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 339–356. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Katie P. Bruner, Paul R. McKean, Ned O’Gorman, Matthew C. Pitchford, Nikki R. Weickum; Old Rhetoric and New Media. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 339–356. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In this article, I argue that new media is defined and situated within two distinct scholarly conversations (composing in contemporary society and composing in academia) and has varied definitions supporting arguments made within these overarching conversations. Discussions of new media contribute to rhetoric and composition’s twenty-first-century composing frameworks.

Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts.These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.

Our article examines the challenges that “outsiders” face as academic leaders in higher education, with a special emphasis on the specific complications prevailing in the rhetoric and composition fields within English studies. We survey descriptive statistics and historical evidence to locate several of the problems confronting women and others newly and provisionally admitted to—and more often, still excluded from—the highest levels of academic leadership. Then, we bring together feminist-revisionist advocacy tools and Ernest Boyer’s alternative vision for “engaged scholarship” to suggest ways that leadership work formerly categorized as simply administrative duty or mere service be recognized for its broad-ranging impact both on campuses and the public domain.

On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

Communication design specialists have many challenges in the twenty-first century global, online world. Geographically distributed teams must work together efficiently and effectively. People may need to interact across cultures and languages or using a common language like English or Spanish. In order to complete coherent design projects, they often need to negotiate varied communications software. Most important, both to communicate within teams and to clients with widely varied communication skills of their own, engineers and other communication design professionals must be able to engage the basic literacies of reading, writing, and digital (i.e., multiple media like images, audio, or video)---often called multimodal ---composition as a holistic skill set, and they must be able to use them well in online environments. These literacies comprise communication skills learned in school and honed in business settings; they are required for clear communicating whether through alphabetic texts or multimodal compositions.

Yik Yak is an anonymous, location-based social networking application that is extremely popular on college campuses across the United States. Because it is known mainly for the controversies it breeds, both scholars and professionals have largely overlooked Yik Yak's complexities and have instead focused on its more negative traits. This article discusses Yik Yak as a site for critical research, especially in the field of technical and professional communication. Yik Yak fuses physical and virtual space, places an emphasis on interactivity, and subverts traditional user hierarchies. By examining these characteristics and the posts that users generate, this article explores how Yik Yak serves as an impetus for the formation of knowledge communities---communities in which individuals work together to create and maintain collective knowledge. This article also advocates further critical study of Yik Yak communities and posits Yik Yak communication patterns have important implications for communication designers.

Research problem: Advisory boards provide an opportunity for technical communication programs to connect consistently with industry practitioners and on-campus stakeholders, and yet few recent studies examine best practices for advisory boards in technical communication programs. Research questions: (1) What is the typical makeup of a technical communication program advisory board? (2) What function do these advisory boards serve? (3) What are the typical successes and challenges of starting and maintaining a technical communication advisory board? (4) What are best practices for starting and maintaining a successful advisory board? (5) What are the similarities and differences in how program administrators and board members perceive the benefits and functions of the board? Literature review: Literature on advisory boards in technical and business communication-and in related fields such as communication, journalism, and marketing-reports that advisory boards are beneficial and effective, though many include caveats or recommendations about ways to improve board function. Methodology: To provide perspectives from both sides of the academy-industry relationship, we conducted 18 semistructured phone, Skype, and in-person interviews with program administrators (n = 10) from a host of nationwide programs and with board members (n = 8) from a single advisory board. Results and discussion: The study finds that the typical advisory board involves a mix of industry, faculty, and student members, with an emphasis on industry members. They advise the program about its curricular concerns, often foster students' academic and professional maturation, and support the program in conflicts with university administration. The typical successes of advisory boards included positive curricular amendment and the recruitment of students for jobs and internships, while characteristic challenges included meeting logistics and board members' concerns regarding the program's response to their advice. Program administrators and board members both perceive a board as useful, but some members expressed concern about the uncertainty of their role and influence. The results suggest that all technical communication programs should seriously consider forming an advisory board based on disciplinary best practices, that existing advisory boards should ensure that they have clarified the board's role for their program, and that stakeholders are aware of and attend to their board members' concerns.

Abstract This essay examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the speech addressed the contentious racial politics that permeated the post–Voting Rights landscape. I argue that the speech constituted King’s call for the SCLC to reinvent its ethos—both its “character” and its “dwelling place.” In issuing this call, King cultivated new possibilities for the conceptualization and practice of social justice activism.

Mathematics standards in the United States describe communication as an essential part of mathematics. One outlet for communication is writing. To understand the mathematics writing of students, we conducted a synthesis to evaluate empirical research about mathematics writing. We identified 29 studies that included a mathematics-writing assessment, intervention, or survey for students in 1st through 12th grade. All studies were published between 1991 and 2015. The majority of assessments required students to write explanations to mathematical problems, and fewer than half scored student responses according to a rubric. Approximately half of the interventions involved the use of mathematics journals as an outlet for mathematics writing. Few intervention studies provided explicit direction on how to write in mathematics, and a small number of investigations provided statistical evidence of intervention efficacy. From the surveys, the majority of students expressed enjoyment when writing in mathematics settings but teachers reported using mathematics writing rarely. Across studies, findings indicate mathematics writing is used for a variety of purposes, but the quality of the studies is variable and more empirical research is needed.

Studies on writing development have grown in diversity and depth in recent decades, but remain fragmented along lines of theory, method, and age ranges or populations studied. Meaningful, competent writing performances that meet the demands of the moment rely on many kinds of well-practiced and deeply understood capacities working together; however, these capacities’ realization and developmental trajectories can vary from one individual to another. Without an integrated framework to understand lifespan development of writing abilities in its variation, high-stakes decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment are often made in unsystematic ways that may fail to support the development they are intended to facilitate; further, research may not consider the range of issues at stake in studying writing in any particular moment.To address this need and synthesize what is known about the various dimensions of writing development at different ages, the coauthors of this essay have engaged in sustained discussion, drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Drawing on research from different disciplinary perspectives, they propose eight principles upon which an account of writing development consistent with research findings could be founded. These principles are proposed as a basis for further lines of inquiry into how writing develops across the lifespan.

Tactical technical communication research suggests its application to social justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to material symbolic communication in analyzing rhetoric of the body, focusing primarily on the linguistic or on nonsymbolic materiality. Yet the body communicates via a range of material symbolic practices. Delivery offers an analytical framework for understanding the ways that performing bodies communicate in multiple symbolic codes. Through analysis of neo-burlesque, the essay argues that delivery as a critical method for embodied rhetoric highlights the complex interplay between spaces and bodies and audiences that construct particular genres, providing a wider rhetorical vocabulary to critiques of neo-burlesque and other contested sites of women’s erotic performance.

Substantive and ongoing critique of the quality of one’s writing is necessary if students are to experience writing as a recursive process. However, students’ willingness to critique their texts and those of others is dependent upon the creation of a trusting and mutually supportive learning environment. Using the naturalistic setting of an elementary school writing classroom, attention is drawn to the ways in which two teachers nurtured competence and communication trust (Reina & Reina, 2006) between themselves and students, and among students. Consideration is also paid to teachers’ creation and use of public and private spaces to promote interactions that helped writers revise and recraft substantive aspects of their writing in an ongoing and iterative manner.

Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism Through Literacy Education, which makes a hopeful yet nuanced case for how networked efforts within institutions might create change. The book combines deep illustrations from the civil rights era with contemporary efforts in community literacy, layering perspectives as it moves forward and backward in time, to explore how different practices of literacy education shape notions of citizenship and how activists in literacy education go about pursuing social change. Laying out a parable to ground a key idea in his book, Feigenbaum retells the traditional story of the starfish savior: a man walking along a beach notices thousands of starfish washed up on the shore, and he sees another man throwing the starfish back into the sea, one by one. He tells the man throwing the starfish that this is a waste of time, as there are thousands of starfish-he cannot make a difference. The man throws another starfish into the sea and replies, "I made a difference to that one. " This story is meant to be inspirational, but Feigenbaum, drawing on Buzz Alexander's Freirean interpretation of the parable, points out that this story is an individualistic myth that limits the potential for activism: rather than running into to town to gather others to help, or researching the cause for why the starfish are being washed up along the shore, the man exemplifies the idea that good citizens act alone. As Feigenbaum writes, "The starfish savior's willingness to sacrifice time and energy toward a good cause makes him appear to be morally righteous, but in failing to enlist aid in resolving the macroproblem, he ensures that the vast majority of starfish will perish" (9). Acting out of a starfish savior mentality-or, as my students termed it, starfishing-means blending romantic naivet and individualism in ways that are ultimately ineffective in forwarding activism.

Abstract From fall 2013 through spring 2016, 1,301 students were enrolled in composition courses on our regional campus, with 349 of these enrolled in developmental courses. Our writing center serves approximately 14% of the campus population every year, a number we have seen increase since two professors in 2013-2014 began requiring students in their developmental courses to attend a minimum number of writing sessions each semester. The D-F-withdrawal rates for developmental writing courses on our campus have averaged 32.7% over the past six semesters, an improvement over previous years. Analysis of data from a study of student outcomes during this period demonstrates that requiring frequent visits to the writing center in early semesters results in a statistically significant, positive relationship with increased passing rates and voluntary usage of the writing center.

Researching writing-related dispositions is of critical concern for understanding writing transfer and writing development. However, as a field we need better tools and methods for identifying, tracking, and analyzing dispositions. This article describes a failed attempt to code for five key dispositions (attribution, self-efficacy, persistence, value, and self-regulation) in a longitudinal, mixed methods, multi-institutional study that otherwise successfully coded for other writing transfer factors. We present a “study of a study” that examines our coders’ attempts to identify and code dispositions and describes broader understandings from those findings. Our findings suggest that each disposition presents a distinct challenge for coding and that dispositions, as a group, involve not only conceptual complexity but also cultural, psychological, and temporal complexity. For example, academic literacy learning and dispositions intersect with systems of socio-economic, political, and cultural inequity and exploitation; this entwining presents substantial problems for coders. Methodological considerations for understanding the complexity of codes, effectively and accurately coding for dispositions, considering the four complexities, and understanding the interplay between the individual and the social are explored. We describe how concepts from literacy studies scholarship may help shape writing transfer scholarship concerning dispositions and transfer research more broadly.

Of the 40% of internet users who have faced harassment online, young adults, women, and racial minorities are especially vulnerable, experiencing more severe harassment and experiencing it more often. This article attempts to reconcile the increasingly urgent calls for students to compose in public spaces online with the reality of potential harassment. Compositionists should avoid relying on a Habermasian understanding of the public sphere and instead embrace a political, ecological approach to public writing that recognizes publics as the result of the interactions between multiple texts and actors, and that attends to the ways in which power relations alternately shape, constrain, and enable those texts and actors. This model equips students with a more sophisticated framework for understanding internet publics, and will ultimately empower them to make informed rhetorical choices about which public networks to enter, ensuring not just more effective rhetorical action but safer online experiences.

One of the typical challenges facing a mathematics student when writing a proof is the need to understand the interplay of details and broader concepts. I describe a multi-step proof-writing assignment used in a mid-level course for mathematics majors that is designed to help with this challenge by forcing students to incrementally increase their engagement with the various conceptual levels of the material at hand.

Book Review| December 01 2016 Voting Deliberatively: FDR and the 1936 Presidential Campaign Voting Deliberatively: FDR and the 1936 Presidential Campaign. By Mary E. Stuckey. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; pp. vii + 154. $64.95 cloth. Amos Kiewe Amos Kiewe Syracuse University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (4): 696–699. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.4.0696 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Amos Kiewe; Voting Deliberatively: FDR and the 1936 Presidential Campaign. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2016; 19 (4): 696–699. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.4.0696 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Stephanie West-Puckett argues for open badging as an alternative born-digital assessment paradigm that can, when attendant to critical validity inquiry, promote full participation and more equitable outcomes for students of color and lower income students. Her case study of digital badging in first-year composition demonstrates how students and teachers can negotiate “good writing,” interrupting bias through the co-creation of digital badges that demystify disciplinary knowledge and serve as portable assessment objects that build social capital across contexts.

Traditionally, the role of metaphor in rhetoric has been seen as recasting the unknown into the realm of the known. Metaphor as explication has been well documented in scholarship of the rhetoric of science. This article argues that scholars interested in the rhetoric of technology should view metaphor as akin to “black boxes.” Relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “conceptual metaphor,” it analyzes one episode in the so-called “Smart Phone Patent Wars,” focusing on two metaphors: “ecosystem” and “patent war.” Ultimately, the article finds that as black boxes, these metaphors constrain the possible options that people see for their relationships with technology.

This article explores rhetorical implications of extending the audience of written physician notes in hospital settings to include patients and/or family members (the OpenNotes program). Interviews of participating hospital patients and family members (n = 16) underscored the need for more complex understandings of audience beyond “universal” and “particular” explanations. Interviews were organized around the aspects of comprehension, affect/emotion, and likes/dislikes about receiving notes. Results from these interviews indicated that participants understood the notes overall but had questions about abbreviations and technical terms. Many participants felt reassured about the care they were receiving, and many liked having the notes as a reference and springboard for further discussion with health care staff. A more detailed content analysis of the interview data yielded themes of document use, readability, involvement, and physician care. Findings from this study reveal an expansion of audience in this case to include both universal and particular audiences. Also, findings point to the possibility of audience involvement among patients and family members through activities such as asking questions about the physician notes. This study has implications for other forms of written communication that may extend readership in novel ways.

Environmentalist David Orr lamented some twenty years ago that universities “still educate the young for the most part as if there were no planetary emergency” (27). This emergency, as Reflections readers are well aware, refers to the shifting and collapse of massive ecosystems and agricultural systems because of human-caused pollution and climate change coupled with exponential population growth. The planetary shifts call on us to reconceive our positions as activists, scholars, and teachers in relation to our communities, to the earth, and to one another. These shifts provide an opportunity for us to rethink the stark and often arbitrary distinctions between our research, teaching, and service or between our colleges and universities and our communities. Students and fellow community members need to be prepared for, and feel agency in, our changing world. In many ways, higher education has heeded Orr’s call.

Background: Teams are a basic way of organizing work in many professional and personal settings. However, misunderstandings among team members can lead to poor performance, hurt feelings, and lack of motivation to attack subsequent tasks. A common source of such misunderstandings is miscommunication caused by differences in how people interpret everyday words and phrases. Team members might interpret these differences as a natural occurrence of group work, if they notice them at all. Research questions: We seek to answer two research questions regarding miscommunication within teams: (1) Can a communication exercise create awareness among team members of the danger of miscommunication? (2) What benefits do team members gain from the exercise? Situating the case: We describe a classroom exercise that relies on an integrative model for improving communication within teams. We also present evidence of the exercise's effectiveness in raising awareness and fostering accommodation and social learning among team members. Our approach is similar to that used in other cases. How this case was studied: We used 13 teams from three classes during the course of a regular semester. A communication exercise we have used for many years was conducted as part of team formation activities early in the semester. Team discussions regarding exercise results formed the basis for team members to analyze their communication during the semester. About the case: A significant variance of understanding among people as to the meaning of several of the focal terms can lead to suboptimal outcomes for any given work the team is tasked to achieve. In this case, we describe a study designed to improve communication among team members and, thus, lessen the likelihood of such a negative outcome. Results: Team members reported better awareness of communication issues and improved team functioning as a result of having completed the exercise. Conclusion: We find that a shared understanding of terminology is an important part of training leaders and managers to help teams reduce common miscommunication problems in the workplace.

When Hawthorne traveled north to Niagara Falls, he was on a journey of self-discovery as much as he was on a writer’s journey to see America and sketch its beauty. In June, 2016, I journeyed 740+ miles roundtrip to see Niagara Falls for one brief day. My journey was both similar to, and monumentally different from, Hawthorne’s.As many have said, the Horseshoe Falls of Canada—undoubtedly more splendid than the American Falls, which are stunning in themselves—are nearly indescribable. When Hawthorne went to Niagara in search of the sublime and the grand in America, he dramatically restrained himself from immediately viewing the falls, worried they would not meet the expectations set by numerous authors’ tour books he had read or that his experience would be tainted by that of others who had not yet seen the falls for themselves. He first listened to their roar. Then, when he allowed himself to see the falls, he spent days and nights trying to apprehend them for himself. His final view of the falls was from the famed Table Rock on the Canadian side. While Hawthorne struggled with tasteful tourism and criticized tourists who viewed the falls through others’ eyes (ah, he would have had a few problems with me thinking about him and his trip), or who consider manmade feats more admirable, he seemed to most want to just be with the falls—sitting alone, contemplating, and communing with them. By the end of his visit, Hawthorne was able to meditate deeply on the falls despite the presence of other people. He simply “got it,” as we might say.The Niagara Falls that both Hawthorne and I saw are majestic and amazing. What words really can describe them? I spent hours simply looking: snapping some photos (while Hawthorne could only sketch with words), sitting and staring, or closing my eyes to muse by its roar. For nearly two hours, I watched the late afternoon sun-bow shift with my position and perspective, coloring the scene through the mist.Nonetheless, the Niagara Falls that I viewed are vastly different from those Hawthorne experienced. For example, only in the eighteenth century had Table Rock, on which he and other nineteenth century tourists sat, emerged from the water itself—part of the erosive power natural to waterfalls. In 1818, 1828, and 1829, parts of Table Rock broke off in minor rock falls. Hawthorne sat upon their remnant. In 1850, nearly a third of Table Rock collapsed, thundering into the gorge (“Table Rock, Niagara Falls”). Today, after other rock falls and a dynamite blast in 1939, there remains only a bronze tablet marking the mid-point of Table Rock, pointing visitors to its remains—and Hawthorne’s seat—below (see Photo 1). Photo 1.The author at Table Rock.The falls themselves also changed. In the early nineteenth century, both the American and the Horseshoe Falls were much closer to Table Rock, which their water flow had shaped over tens of thousands of years. For example, according to “Online Niagara,” the Horseshoe Falls eroded approximately 3.8 feet annually from 1842 (the first year of official study) to 1905. The erosion changed to 2.3 feet annually until 1927, after which the diversion of water through hydroelectric power stations diminished the erosion to approximately 1 foot annually. (By contrast, the American Falls now are eroding at a mere 3–4 inches annually, although their erosion rate was once much higher.) Today, one must walk over one hundred yards further in approaching the threshold of the falls. When Hawthorne watched the falls from Table Rock, unencumbered by the railings and fences that marked my journey, he sat at the edge of the falls themselves. Did his feet kick stones to the mist below?Water treaties between America and Canada were instituted in 1909 and 1950 (“A River Diversion”). They continue to regulate boundaries and the sharing of water for power; sanitary and domestic means; water navigation; and, of course, to preserve the natural wonder of the falls. Hence, the waterfalls continue to thunder, but their intensity has been diminished—not that we would see or feel that diminishment, never having experienced them differently—as hydroelectric power companies on both the American and Canadian sides divert some of the water that used to rush over the falls. At nighttime, the flow over the Horseshoe Falls is cut by half. The daytime flow of approximately 600,000 gallons per second is left higher for tourists, yet it is still not equal to the brute power Hawthorne witnessed in 1832 (“Facts about Niagara Falls”). Indeed, the powerful water with which Hawthorne communed was likely more than twice that which I experienced in 2016.Today, people can view the combined Niagara Falls from the air by a touring helicopter or from the water by one of four boats—two from each side—that leave from their docks every quarter hour in a carefully orchestrated dance. On the American side, one can either take an elevator up to an observation tower to look over the falls, or take an elevator down to experience the “Cave of the Winds,” in the process becoming soaked with splashing water and experiencing some of the falls’ true power. On the Canadian side, although one can no longer climb down to the base behind the Horseshoe Falls, the “Journey Behind the Falls” uses an elevator set deep in the rock to deposit tourists to a different viewpoint at the base of the falls. Thus, by air, river, elevator, and stairs, the falls are accessible in ways Hawthorne could not have dreamed. He had never seen an airplane, let alone a helicopter. Hawthorne cautiously climbed up and down rocks to his views. I imagined him using the curled maple staff with carved fish and snake images, the craft of a Tuscarora Native American, to steady his feet on the slippery rocks (Hawthorne 56–57). What boats in his time would risk the trip into the mist of the thundering water, and, indeed, why would they? He had never imagined the ubiquitous tourists, taking selfies at every view of the falls; yet, with Hawthorne’s devotion to experiencing the falls for himself turning over in my mind, I could picture him shaking his head, penning critiques of their shortsighted, sightseeing eyes—eyes that failed to perceive what he had spent days attempting to apprehend.Despite all the wonders I have experienced that Hawthorne had not—from traveling by jet to scuba diving to gazing at the Hubble’s views of the cosmos—the falls held me: beautiful, amazing, awesome. I was mute. Almost two centuries ago, Hawthorne used words to describe the same-yet-different falls that I viewed. I have only a few words to add. Not one drop of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that falls per second will pass through the falls again in the same exact form. Every drop of water that falls is in exactly the right place at the right time of its existence. As was Hawthorne. As was I.

ABSTRACT Historical study of teachers and students reveals how rhetorical theories influence writers (McClish 2015). This case study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose considers the nineteenth-century rhetorical teachings of Samuel Phillips Newman, Hawthorne’s professor at Bowdoin College, a student of Blair, and a proponent of rhetorical taste. Using Newman’s 1827 A Practical System of Rhetoric and Hawthorne’s 1832 travel sketches, we analyze Newman’s influences on Hawthorne—particularly taste and the sublime and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne as a writer in the travel sketch genre. We consider Newman’s influences on Hawthorne as evidenced by writing practices that Newman had recommended or disapproved. In particular, we examine Newman’s explanation of taste and its complementary construct of sublimity and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne. We argue that Hawthorne both wrote within the paradigm of rhetorical taste as Newman taught it and struggled against its constraints to find his own perceptions. Furthermore, we see this struggle happening within the context of Hawthorne’s exposure to Newman’s American-inflected belletrism that emphasized both a discriminatory principle of taste and the growing body of American literature.

This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

Local publics open a distinctively generative space for deliberation, one that can actually use difference, based on race, status, or discourse, as a resource—but only if such marginalized perspectives can gain standing and be heard. For difference to gain a voice may depend on a discourse that can delay consensus, acknowledge conflict, and provoke a difference-driven inquiry. Drawing on a study of a deliberative process triggered by issues of diversity within a university, this essay sketches a working theory of community engagement supported by the rhetorical scaffold of a Community Think Tank. The essay explores the theoretical potential of conflict in local publics while asking how rhetorical activists and educators might support a difference-driven deliberation in practice.

This phenomenological case study explores the disconnect that high school readers labeled as struggling perceived between their reading identities and experiences in traditional English classes. It analyzes how participation in a young adult literature (YAL) elective provided participants space in which to enact identities and exhibit agency in ways that were different from those afforded in their English classes. This paper contributes uniquely to the larger research conversation by examining two different spaces (traditional English classes and a YAL class) and demonstrating how students’ identities as readers manifested in different ways across two contexts. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) theory of identity as a lens of analysis across student-generated oral reflections gathered through Seidman’s (2006) interview protocol, the study reveals how student participants were supported in their attempts to deconstruct their experiences in traditional classroom spaces, build new conceptions of their reading selves in a unique classroom setting, and, in the process, assume greater agency in shaping their individual reader identities, advancing the argument that differing classroom contexts can provide students with varying levels of opportunity to reject and/or accept ascribed reading identities. This work is significant in the way it emphasizes the importance of classroom and school contexts, the possibilities that come with inviting students to engage as readers in school rather than engage in school reading, the benefits and risks of reimagined relationships between students and teachers and students and peers, and the possibility that young adult literature in and of itself offers implications for reader agency.

Grounded in a series of local accounts, this webtext examines complex issues facing pre-tenure writing program administrators as they enter the professoriate while negotiating hybrid identities as teachers, researchers, and administrators. Developed out of a roundtable at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication, the project also emphasizes contemporary alternatives to roundtable design that regard openness, accessibility, and persistence as priorities for delivery and circulation.

Research problem: This study investigates the factors influencing students' intentions to use emergency notification services to receive news about campus emergencies through short-message systems (SMS) and social network sites (SNS). Research questions: (1) What are the critical factors that influence students' intention to use SMS to receive emergency notifications? (2) What are the critical factors that influence students' intention to use SNS to receive emergency notifications? Literature review: By adapting Media Richness theory and prior research on emergency notifications, we propose that perceived media richness, perceived trust in information, perceived risk, perceived benefit, and perceived social influence impact the intention to use SMS and SNS to receive emergency notifications. Methodology: We conducted a quantitative, survey-based study that tested our model in five different scenarios, using logistic regression to test the research hypotheses with 574 students of a large research university in the northeastern US. Results and discussion: Results suggest that students' intention to use SNS is impacted by media richness, perceived benefit, and social influence, while students' intention to use SMS is influenced by trust and perceived benefit. Implications to emergency managers suggest how to more effectively manage and market the service through both channels. The results also suggest using SNS as an additional means of providing emergency notifications at academic institutions.