Computers and Composition

This study examines how design thinking (DT) can function as a conceptual and analytical framework for supporting students’ critical AI literacy practices in writing and technical communication classrooms. Drawing on focus group interviews, individual reflection essays, and design artifacts from undergraduate technical writing students who collaboratively designed and customized AI chatbots using Poe, the study explores how students enacted responsible and user-centered design practices through each stage of the DT process. Findings reveal that 1) the empathize and define stages helped students identify algorithmic biases and frame inclusivity as part of user-centered design; 2) the ideate and prototype stages translated critical awareness into design decisions around prompt engineering, knowledge base curation, and visual accessibility; and 3) the test stage allowed students to revise their chatbot design through iterative usability testing and user feedback. Collectively, the DT process positioned students as human-in-the-loop co-creators who exercised rhetorical agency through prompt design, knowledge curation, and bias mitigation while designing customized chatbots. The article ends with pedagogical implications for integrating DT into critical AI pedagogy, chatbot design, and composition instruction.

How does writing with generative AI transform our experiences as thinkers, learners, and communicators? This study investigates the question through threshold concepts, transformative ideas that prove troublesome yet shape disciplinary participation, previously identified in writing studies through retrospective analysis. We propose that technological disruption creates conditions for observing new concepts as they emerge within communities of practice. To test this approach, we designed an experimental “AI and Writing” course. Across two iterations (Fall 2023 and Fall 2024), 38 undergraduate students from 22 majors engaged in scaffolded challenges and self-directed projects, developing strategic approaches to AI-assisted composing. Analysis of students’ final reflections, using Meyer and Land’s characteristics as sensitizing criteria, revealed three concepts essential for productive AI engagement: writing with AI is an experimental process; writing with AI requires expertise and dialogue; and writing with AI should augment rhetorical agency. These transformations prove troublesome because they contradict expectations shaped by prior experience: better tools should require less effort, linguistic fluency signals substantive knowledge, and assistance either wholly helps or harms learning and development. The findings show how AI transforms perennial questions in writing studies and composition, and they offer insights for navigating the threshold between productive collaboration and problematic dependency.

User experience (UX) as both a vocation and a skillset is currently in the center of a wicked knot: emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) are (for the moment) widely accessible in unprecedented ways and are already heavily integrated into modern workplace practices and educational spaces. Further, workplace demands have led to a change in perception of the function and value of UX, and the field is facing new obstacles to hiring and research funding. Our article argues that a resituation of UX is needed: we-as instructors and administrators-need to focus on UX as an act of slow, embodied, and multimodal UX composition. To do this work, we offer the strategy of détournement as central to UX curriculum and preparing students for design work in a variety of rhetorical situations, expressed through our example assignments for instructors to implement within the college classroom.

Content personalization or tailoring content as per the needs of users has been a focus of technical communicators’ work since a very long time. Recently, algorithms have helped trace users’ characteristics such as devices they use, platforms they work on, local language spoken, etc. to personalize content through strategies like responsive content, automatic translation and so on. AI tools have extended algorithmic capabilities for personalization, but at the same time increased the randomness of personalized content. That is, algorithms produce different results for the same user at different times or different results for different users at the same time with the same prompt thus shifting the agency of both rhetors (or content creators) and the audience (or content users). While conventional technical communication pedagogy has focused on writing for users, and more recently on writing for algorithms which serve the users, today it is crucial to understand how technologies like AI impact knowledge consumption processes from a user experience perspective? And how can we teach content personalization and adaptive techniques in the increasingly digital spaces of audience interactions? These questions motivated our research. To follow the roles of algorithms and technical communicators closely, we analyzed three different case studies where algorithms are responsible for a high level of personalization beyond the decisions made by technical communicators. Our findings suggest that we must teach students to investigate concepts such as user personas in UX for understanding audiences, several methods of decision-making for content assets, and rhetorical ecology for a holistic view of content production to dissemination.

This article explores teaching writing with generative AI as critical play where students and teachers engage in an ethically dialectical and aleatory game with generative AI. I qualitatively surveyed 24 writing teachers about how they teach writing with generative AI as well as its advantages and disadvantages. I discovered that teachers used generative AI to teach about the ethics of generative AI's design and rhetorical use to avoid plagiarism. Teachers also critically played with generative AI to teach the writing process of invention, drafting, revision, and editing. Specifically, the critical, dialectical interplay of human and machine invents in aleatory and emergent ways, creating moments of epiphany for students and teachers within the writing process for invention, drafting, revision, and editing while the real time pace of generative AI democratizes education, making writing and teaching more accessible for them.

• Indexes are hylomorphic; they turn accidence into substance. • Indexes are authored, not merely produced. • The syntactic, alphabetic, and columnar form of indexes are rhetorically powerful. • Indexes are political because they destabilize hegemonic reading practices. This article, in the area of digital rhetoric, argues that the apparatus of the index is an authored text that bears all of the qualities of creative work. Its primary and distinguishing quality, moreover, is a hylomorphic one that bridges the temporal and material divide by taking the accidence in a text and naming it in substance. This dual nature is especially apparent in indexes that are produced by software, such as MS Word, that require the tagging of a main text to create what is called an “embedded index”; indexes of this sort exist both inside a main text and outside of it, in the tags and in the index list. Because the index both transforms (accidence to idea) and translates (from the main text to index list), the index has rhetorical force, interpreting a text for its readers. It does so as much by its content as by its formal qualities: syntactic, alphabetic, and columnar. Its persuasiveness in tandem with its intervention in the reading process, moreover, has social and political implications since the index can serve as both a means of rebellion and control for those who use and make them.

In this paper, we demonstrate how studying the rhetorics of ChatGPT prompt writing on social media can promote critical AI literacies. Prompt writing is the process of writing instructions for generative AI tools like ChatGPT to elicit desired outputs and there has been an upsurge of conversations about it on social media. To study this rhetorical activity, we build on four overlapping traditions of digital writing research in computers and composition that inform how we frame literacies, how we study social media rhetorics, how we engage iteratively and reflexively with methodologies and technologies, and how we blend computational methods with qualitative methods. Drawing on these four traditions, our paper shows our iterative research process through which we gathered and analyzed a dataset of 32,000 posts (formerly known as tweets) from X (formerly Twitter) about prompt writing posted between November 2022 to May 2023. We present five themes about these emerging AI literacy practices: (1) areas of communication impacted by prompt writing, (2) micro-literacy resources shared for prompt writing, (3) market rhetoric shaping prompt writing, (4) rhetorical characteristics of prompts, and (5) definitions of prompt writing. In discussing these themes and our methodologies, we highlight takeaways for digital writing teachers and researchers who are teaching and analyzing critical AI literacies.

In this article, we draw on focus group interviews collected for the Wayfinding Project to explore how university alumni orient themselves as writers while participating in social media after graduation. By looking at alumni's self descriptions of their writing processes across public networks, we are able to trace pathways that recognize the rhetorical and communicative intentions of users, while also acknowledging the roles that serendipity, creativity, and the unexpected play in shaping these literate practices. Specifically, we point to how these alumni describe their experiences as they adapt to addressing audiences across different platforms and confront the “reach” of those platforms for engaging unexpected audiences. Several focus group participants use the term “branding” as a way to describe how they conceive of their writing across multiple social networks. These participants describe their public, networked writing as a form of managing their identities at the same time that they are “branding” themselves to manage the expectations of multiple audiences. In sum, our research shows us how the unexpected audiences generated through social media participation operate in tension with writers’ deliberate shaping of their messages and their self-presentation.

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.

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.