Written Communication

Using a multiple case-study approach, this study investigated the dynamics of peer interactions that took place through Microsoft Copilot among six pairs ( n  = 12) of ESL learners, focusing on their interaction patterns, use of semiotic and multimodal resources, and functions of languaging. Our analyses illustrated that four pairs displayed collaborative orientation, one pair demonstrated an expert-novice pattern, and one pair exhibited a dominant-passive pattern. It was also found that while the collaborative group students focused more on text search and revision, the expert-novice group and the dominant-passive group allocated more time to image generation. Furthermore, in terms of languaging functions, our results revealed that all six pairs of students spent most of their time negotiating writing content. Our study has implications for technology-enhanced multimodal writing pedagogy in a generative artificial intelligence machine-in-the-loop setting.

This article tells a story about two methodologies, one used to examine the workings of the other. The examined methodology, the build-measure-learn loop used in Lean Startup, is a design methodology: It involves developing a series of design objects and using them to elicit feedback from huddles of stakeholders in a series of dialogical encounters. But unlike most design methodologies used in technical and professional communication, which assume that both stakeholders and propositions constitute stable categories, this one tests different propositions with different compositions of stakeholders during each cycle. Thus, it disrupts the incrementalist assumptions that underpin conventional design methodologies. To examine the build-measure-loop in action, we require an examining methodology that guides our conceptual decision about what to study. In this article, I use a compositional methodology to offer one such conceptual decision: the fractional object , which is made to cohere across diverse dialogic cycles, with different huddles, evaluating different claims. I apply this examining methodology to a 7-year study of a device developed by an early-stage technology startup. The study has implications for both design methodology and case study methodology.

As ChatGPT is increasingly used in second language (L2) writing practice and research, its potential to provide feedback and revision has attracted much scholarly attention. However, it remains largely unknown whether and how ChatGPT revision can influence rhetorical move-steps. This study investigates the effects of ChatGPT revision on rhetorical move-steps in English personal statements (PSs) written by L2 English undergraduate students, using a combination of corpus data and stimulated recall interviews. Based on an unstructured prompt, our analysis revealed significant reductions in the rhetorical efforts devoted to five rhetorical steps. Students’ responses highlighted both benefits and concerns regarding these revisions, illustrating how AI-generated changes can alter textual features and affect writer-reader communication from the writers’ perspective. The findings highlight the importance of students’ critical evaluation of AI-generated revisions and iterative engagement with them.

This qualitative study investigates the biographical factors that influence the professional identities and teaching practices of second language (L2) writing instructors. Previous L2 writing studies have tended to rely on teacher interviews to examine such identities and practices and have failed to include the important perspective of classroom observations. This study conducted teacher interviews and classroom observations with three graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) of a first-year writing course at a U.S. university. The findings suggest that although teachers’ disciplinary backgrounds, teaching philosophies, and prior experiences shape their professional identities and instructional approaches, their classroom practices in language instruction do not always align with their beliefs and stated values. Teacher education programs should integrate language pedagogy and grammar instruction into writing pedagogy, while encouraging teachers to engage in consistent self-evaluation and reflection on their practices.

Studies on the writing process through the analysis of pauses, highlight a link between content formulation and linguistic units. From a text linguistics perspective, particularly Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this relationship becomes even more apparent. This study investigates the location and duration of pauses in relation to syntagmatic units and their functional roles using an SFL-based framework, answering: (1) In what syntagmatic and functional contexts do pauses occur during the process of writing? (2) How does the length of pauses vary in different syntagmatic and functional contexts during the process of writing? (3) How do the frequency and length of pauses during writing vary because of interactions between their syntagmatic and functional contexts? Using keystroke logging, the writing process of 20 adult native English speakers composing argumentative essays was recorded. Findings suggest key syntagmatic and functional units prompt pauses, signaling decision-making moments and cognitive effort in generating a coherent text.

In primary education, children frequently combine drawings with alphabetic writing in their compositions, and research has shown that drawing can support early writing development. Building on existing research on multimodality and intermodality in early writing, this study examines how drawing and writing function together in children’s multimodal compositions produced for diverse social purposes. The study analyses multimodal texts written by Swedish learners aged 7–8 years and explores intermodal relations between writing and drawing using a systemic functional, transitivity-based analytical approach. The findings indicate a predominance of word-led and combinatory intermodality, with alphabetic writing generally assuming a dominant role. At the same time, children strategically integrate drawing and writing in ways that vary according to social purpose, task theme, and the specific affordances of each mode. In several cases, drawing enables the expression of meanings that are less readily conveyed through writing alone, underscoring its distinct representational potential. The study contributes to ongoing work on intermodality in early school writing by demonstrating the analytical affordances of transitivity for examining multimodal meaning-making, and it highlights the need for pedagogical practices and teacher metalanguage that support flexible movement across semiotic modes in early literacy education.

This study has analysed and compared Chinese learners’ use of 17 types of complex noun phrases (NPs) in English writing from beginner to advanced levels to explore the learners’ development in NP complexity. The findings reveal a correlation between learners’ proficiency levels and noun modification, which progresses from a reliance on pre-modifying adjectives and possessives at beginner levels, through more use of noun+noun and noun+ of phrases as postmodifiers at intermediate levels, to finally incorporating coordinated structures (noun+multiple prepositional phrases as post-modifiers and noun+ to -clauses as postmodifiers) and nominalized NPs (noun+complement clauses) at advanced levels. These learners’ preference for pre-modifiers in writing, irrespective of proficiency levels, highlights a potential impact from their L1 Mandarin. Qualitative analyses demonstrate beginner-level learners’ reliance on repeated identical NPs from essay topics and prompts in contrast to upper-intermediate learners’ deployment of varied vocabulary to create more complex NPs in writing. The discovery of distinct NP features at various developmental stages confirms L2 learners’ phrasal complexity development from early stages of learning, and the appropriate timing for instruction of specific NP structures is discussed accordingly.

In technical and professional communication (TPC) there have been calls to locate the field in transnational contexts. Aligned with the social justice turn in TPC is an emergent body of critical and decolonial scholarship attending to power, privilege, and positionality. The following study extends this scholarship through attention to these issues in an emergent startup ecosystem in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Grounded in mobility studies, this telling case attends to the strategic manner in which a female entrepreneur navigates this system through a process of networking, or knotworking, as she navigates both patriarchal and colonial systems of oppression. Central to this process is the complex way she mobilizes a multimodal and spatial repertoire—conceptualized as repertoires of resistance. These moves shape not only the ways that she traverses the social, semiotic, and geographic landscape, but also the shifting nature of the landscape itself. Methodologically such moves entail a conceptual shift from a focus on activity systems to mobility systems.

This article makes the case for studying community writing using sociohistorical writing ethnography, an approach that combines ethnographic and historical research methods to produce “deep theorizing” about present writing activities grounded in felt senses of history. Drawing from a study of a community writing group, the author demonstrates how individuals’ writing practices become entangled with a community’s literacies throughout time, highlighting how this methodology provides deeper insight into this research context.

While methods associated with community-engaged research have traditionally included surveys, interviews, workshops, and stakeholder feedback, this article argues that the affordances of eye tracking make it a strong candidate for use in community research contexts. Because eye tracking is grounded in experiential metrics that describe—rather than prescribe—how participants engage with multimodal work, the method encourages genuine engagement with written and visual materials, inviting the experience of a broad range of participants. Using examples of eye tracking data collected as part of three previous community research initiatives, I argue that eye tracking can bolster community-engaged research by (a) reflecting a multiplicity of reader experiences, (b) revealing how design choices impact cognitive load, and (c) fostering reflection on strengthening community engagement. While eye tracking has often been used in educational and academic settings, community-engaged research projects offer an opportunity to expand the impact of the method, benefiting the work of researchers, writers, and designers as well as the communities they serve.

Traditional assessments of technical writing privilege final products or task outcomes and provide limited warrant for predicting writing competence across task types and workplace contexts. This article proposes a methodological shift toward process-based assessment, which evaluates the effectiveness of writers’ strategic actions during text production using observable process indicators and translates that evaluation into individualized, strategy-focused feedback benchmarked against group norms. To address alphabetic bias and genre/context blindness in keystroke logging, the article develops an integrated logging method for analyzing technical writing processes. To demonstrate feasibility and analytic affordances, it presents a case study adapting Perrin’s progression analysis for professional writing: Processes from 24 technical writers were captured and analyzed to generate performance feedback, strategy instruction, and process-based competence measures. By specifying analytic procedures, key process indicators, and principles for inferring writing competence from writing processes, this article advances process-oriented professional writing research and offers a transferable, scalable framework for workplace evaluation.

Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.

As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools become embedded in writing practices, researchers must refine methodologies for studying self-regulation in AI-assisted composition. While sociocognitive and co-regulation frameworks have effectively captured self-regulatory processes in human collaboration, they are insufficient for understanding how writers manage the dynamic and probabilistic nature of AI-generated text. This article introduces interplay as a methodological framework to analyze the recursive process of initiating, responding, adapting, and revising in human–AI writing interactions. Unlike co-regulation, where collaborators share communicative intent, interplay highlights the writer’s active role in interpreting and steering AI-generated content. Drawing on self-regulation theory, we propose an analytical framework that integrates traditional self-regulation categories (goal-setting, monitoring, and reflection) with interplay-specific coding (initiation, evaluation, acceptance, and adaptation). Through case analyses of human–AI writing exchanges, we demonstrate how interplay provides a systematic approach to studying agency, decision making, and regulatory strategies in AI-assisted writing. We argue that recognizing interplay as a distinct dimension of self-regulation advances both empirical research and pedagogical approaches to AI-mediated composition.

Approaches like participatory translation expand methods for researching multilingual writing, enabling writing studies researchers to further interrogate the connections among positionality, power, and identity in multilingual writing. Using examples of community-based multilingual writing projects, the author proposes participatory translation as an avenue for centralizing multilingual student and community goals in writing research. This approach can help researchers expand from traditional classroom studies of writing to further consider how language shapes participation in all communication contexts.

This article develops the concept and procedures of a large-scale, autoethnographic research process termed Community Inter-Autoethnography . This is a research methodology in which multiple individuals conduct autoethnographies and collaboratively synthesize their positionings to produce negotiated, community-level understandings. The methodical argument is that there is a need for a research process that allows multiple voices across large social groupings to be heard in order to capture and understand diverse and shared positionings within that setting. As argued, this increase in scale answers historical questions concerning the representativeness and applicability of autoethnographic research. Building upon the expansion of single-person autoethnographies to collaborative studies (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez) and developments in science education toward the inclusive Research and Education Community (Hanauer et al.), the current article explicates how autoethnographic research can be used with a large number of participants across a community. In Hanauer et al. this approach is exemplified in a study that included 106 participants co-authoring a study of the professional identity of Course-Based Research lab instructors. Community inter-autoethnographic research provides a way of reaching community conclusions based on both diverse individual experiences and negotiated collective understandings.

This study explores how a human-centered design (HCD) approach encourages written communication researchers to rethink methodologies when studying wicked problems, particularly in healthcare communication contexts. We argue for “methodological mutability” as a strategy to address complex and evolving challenges in rural healthcare communication. Using design thinking principles, we investigated how generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning can enhance medical communication, streamline documentation, and improve telemedicine usability. Our research revealed that rural healthcare providers view effective patient-provider communication as their primary challenge. This finding led us to pivot toward exploring how AI applications can structure and enhance patient narratives. We advocate for researchers to adopt a designer mindset, integrating methodological flexibility to move beyond problem analysis and instead develop solutions. By embedding HCD, design thinking, and methodological mutability into research design, researchers can prioritize practical interventions when working in spaces beset by wicked problems.

Finding a research problem is the first and most consequential choice a researcher can make, but making this choice about what is not yet known can leave the researcher in a hazy world of uncertainty until the project takes shape. While each person needs to find their own path through the haze, I have found that four kinds of questions help me locate and design a useful research project: what is in front of me; how I add up what I and others have learned previously; how the project fits in various perspectives in and outside the field of writing studies; and how the study advances knowledge and/or aids with practical problems. Only when the answers to these four different questions come together, am I confident of the value of a particular study. Often it takes, however, some kind of unexpected catalyst to bring the project into focus.

The problem of data extraction to feed LLMs impacts all digital archives and open-sourced initiatives. Though the practice of data-scraping bots used to create the LLMs that feed algorithms is recent, extractivist models of language documentation are nothing new. To redress the challenges presented by extractivist methods, Indigenous language scholars and linguists as well as digital archivists and librarians have innovated methodologies to provide for a mutually sustaining relationship between language documentation efforts and indigenous language practices with the goal of enhancing language persistence practices and recuperating dormant practices. The Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) at Northeastern University provides one effort to redress extractivist methods using Indigenous Data Sovereignty methodological frameworks. In this essay, I describe the CARE heuristic in relation to DAILP’s goals and methods to support the decision making required to meet the challenges of language extractivism. Though data scraping for LLMs presents ongoing challenges, Indigenous data-sovereignty methodologies allow language persistence with Indigenous communities and digital archives.

This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

The disaggregation of data around human identities can act as a rich method, providing researchers with new ways of understanding community and workplace writing. However, demographic analysis can unknowingly perpetuate harmful stereotypes and constructions of human identity. This article examines common issues with disaggregation of identity-based data in research and details an empirical research project that drove the research team to reconsider new approaches to desegregated data. In response, I propose a participant self-identification method and offer a heuristic guiding researchers to critically interrogate demographic data collection, enabling more equitable, participant-centered approaches to understanding identity in writing research.

This article illustrates the affordances of a four-part interview protocol that combines elements of phenomenology with traditional discourse-based interviews. On the basis of two case studies with Black and Latinx writers, I demonstrate how this protocol affords a richer understanding of tacit writing competencies developed to push back against and mitigate the harm of marginalization.

This article uses a novel theoretical frame—materio-cognitivism—to explore how digital writing processes change with time and experience. Researchers observed 10 second langauge writers as they completed two research writing tasks—one at the start of their first year of university and one near the end of university. Interviews and screen recording were used to track writing activity. Five key writing strategies were identified. Among the most improved writers, researchers identified a set of shared changes in how writing strategies were deployed. In particular, the most improved writers showed increased ability to sequence subtasks, to arrange digital interfaces, and to combine internal cognitive functions with the affordances of digital tools. These findings suggest what the development of writing processes might look like in digital environments, potentially informing both writing pedagogy and assessment.

Despite extensive research on metadiscourse, methodology descriptions in research articles provide limited guidance on how to identify, classify, and, particularly in cases of clustered items, quantify metadiscourse markers. This article discusses the methodological challenges of analysing metadiscoursal adjectives, using the example of novice academic writers’ use of adjectival interactional metadiscourse markers. Our exploratory analysis of the corpus (654,925 tokens) revealed that, in a non-negligible number of cases (13.5%), metadiscoursal adjectives co-occurred with other linguistic items that were performing different metadiscoursal functions, thus putting a different interpretation on the initial observation. The phenomenon whereby both the adjective and its co-occurring item exercise a prominent metadiscoursal function—which we labelled superimposition —has been observed in previous studies but has not been adequately explored and has led to divergent, and often incomparable approaches, to metadiscourse quantification. We argue that metadiscoursal superimposition as a methodological approach can help bridge the gap between the individual marker analysis and their use in academic writing discourse, thus providing a structured, quantifiable, and functionally richer framework. We discuss the benefits, possible pitfalls, and implications of our proposal that superimposition be included and quantified as a supplementary step in metadiscourse quantification analyses.

This study investigates collaborative interdisciplinary research writing at a large public Western U.S. university through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and textual analyses. While 75% of faculty at this institution supported campuswide interdisciplinary initiatives, only 31% believed current institutional structures enhanced such work—a 44-percentage-point gap that our analysis suggests stemmed from five key obstacles to successful interdisciplinary writing: structural barriers, career concerns (particularly for pre-tenure faculty), disciplinary cultural differences, terminological conflicts, and divergent goals between faculty and administrators. Faculty in this study focused on immediate practical challenges and professional development, while administrators prioritize institutional transformation and structural change. The study concludes with recommendations relevant for universities with comparable resources and commitment to Writing Studies informed approaches, including revised tenure guidelines that explicitly value interdisciplinary contributions, dedicated funding mechanisms, facilitated networking opportunities, and targeted writing support programs. By addressing faculty’s practical needs and administrators’ strategic vision, institutions can create environments where collaborative boundary-crossing becomes not just possible but sustainable and rewarding.

We conducted a post hoc analysis of 771 students’ argumentative writing plans and essays in the Criterion ® database, a digital writing tool, to explore the relations among plan features, essay quality, and writing traits. Students in the study were in Grades 5 to 10 from 68 schools. We found that older students produced writing plans that received higher scores and demonstrated greater genre-specific knowledge than younger students, but regardless of their grade, most students did not consider alternative perspectives or rebut counterarguments in their writing plans. We also found that students’ choice of plan templates was associated with the scores of their plans. Further, factor analysis showed that six of the seven plan feature scores hung together in a single factor (Factor 1) and correlated with multiple trait scores (Factor 2), accounting for most of the shared variance connecting plan scores with writing traits. The “both sides” plan feature loaded on a different factor by its own, suggesting that considering different perspectives is a challenging skill that students may need extra support to develop.

This study investigated how reading medium (print vs. digital) and communicative purpose (informative vs. persuasive) shape writing processes and outcomes in integrative academic tasks. Eighty-one university students read three source texts in print or digitally and, after random assignment, produced either an informative or persuasive synthesis within a 2×2 between-subjects design. Keystroke logging recorded pausing across three writing stages, indexing planning, translation, and revision. Text quality was scored with holistic rubrics capturing discourse features and integration of sources. Reading medium significantly influenced pausing: students who read in print paused longer during writing, yet medium had no effect on overall text quality. Task purpose mattered: persuasive tasks yielded higher-quality formal writing, whereas scores reflecting level of source integration did not differ. No interaction between reading medium and task purpose emerged. When controlling for reading comprehension, working memory, and planning ability, the main effects of medium and task purpose remained, but period-specific pausing effects were no longer significant. Findings highlight distinct roles for reading medium and task purpose in shaping writing behavior and performance. The results support cautious causal interpretations and suggest that incorporating digital reading and varying task types may enhance academic writing in higher education, informing curriculum design and assessment.

This article adds to previous literature on writing “wayfinding” by examining how a writer’s religious beliefs and commitments shape their rhetorical choices and influence their writing wayfinding. The 5-year longitudinal study we report here used discourse-based interviews to understand the experiences of student writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Examining texts our study participants wrote in and outside of college classrooms, our analysis highlights moments when they used emotion and affect as rhetorical strategies to accomplish instrumental and relational goals. We found that in these moments, participants’ commitments as Latter-day Saints and their related identities significantly affected their writing decisions and their sense of wayfinding, particularly as they navigated writing contexts outside of familiar academic settings. The article suggests that understanding the challenges and opportunities writers face in the intersections between their rhetorical choices and their commitments as members of an organized church can help writing teachers better support students' writing development.

This article presents findings from a content analysis of 707 articles appearing between 2011 and 2020 in five journals issued by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a major teaching and research organization in North America. We examined topics and theoretical frameworks, finding that while core topics such as academic writing, curriculum, cultural studies, literacy, and teacher development remained stable, the latter part of the previous decade (2016–2020) showed increased attention to labor, diversity, social justice, and writing program administration, alongside declines in work focused on history, educational policy, ESL, and community writing. Many articles lacked explicit theoretical grounding, often using broad labels like “critical theory,” though use of specified frameworks (e.g., feminist and postcolonial theory) has grown. We identify differences among the journals and discuss the implications of these findings for NCTE, for content analysis as a method and for scholars’ efforts to navigate a complex and expanding field.

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

For many transnational students in North America, digital literacies entail precarious participation—the adaptive engagement in digital literacy practices under conditions of systemic vulnerability and instability. This multiple case study examines how Chinese international students at a Canadian university perceive and navigate the precarity of their digital literacy practices across national and cultural boundaries. Findings reveal that the four participants exhibit tacit sensitivity to transnational digital precarity, employ strategic adaptation, and engage in measured resistance that cautiously transgresses digital norms. These insights contribute to broader discussions on digital literacies, transnational literacies, and digital precarity, extending and complicating existing frameworks in writing studies, literacy studies, and media studies.

Our questionnaire-based study explored the perceptions and reported practices of students about using GenAI in writing-intensive (WI) courses and instructors’ perceptions of those student-held perceptions and reported practices. The data were collected from a large state university in the Southeastern United States. We administered two parallel versions of a questionnaire to 6,000 student emails and 390 instructor emails across two semesters. Using SPSS 29, we analyzed the data to calculate descriptive statistics, multivariate analyses of variance, post hoc analyses, and factor analyses. Our analysis revealed numerous significant differences between the students and instructors in how students use GenAI as a writing assistance tool and as a source of feedback, among others. Our results provide important insights into the divergent perspectives students and instructors hold about the role of GenAI in writing-intensive classes and recommend increased communication between instructors and students to achieve common understanding about GenAI’s applicability to writing processes.

This article explores how public writers view rhetorical decisions in their use of quantitative information to educate, inform, and move audiences toward action. Using the concept of “statistical framing” to describe how writers signal evaluations of numbers to their readers, we set out to learn how these writers connected their rhetorical goals to how they framed quantitative information. We interviewed 14 writers using the discourse-based interview method and found that, for various reasons, writers valued speeding up and slowing down evaluations of numbers.

This State of the Inquiry (SotI) critically investigates the implications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) for interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication within the global English-medium knowledge economy (GEMKE). Anchored in three guiding questions, the article interrogates (1) the extent to which GAI facilitates genuine interdisciplinary knowledge production versus reinforcing entrenched disciplinary silos; (2) how GAI’s dependence on established academic infrastructures influences the visibility and legitimacy of particular interdisciplinary fields; and (3) the impact of automated cross-disciplinary synthesis on the epistemic agency and intellectual labor of human scholars. While GAI holds potential to enhance research efficiency and foster new forms of interdisciplinarity, the outcomes of its integration depend largely on how scholars employ these tools; without critical and contextually informed use, it may contribute to epistemic homogenization and the marginalization of nondominant knowledge systems. The SotI advocates for a critically reflexive and contextually informed approach to the integration of GAI in academic practice, while also recognizing the capacity of scholars—particularly those on the (semi)periphery—to actively shape, adapt, and resist these tools in ways that foster inclusive and transformative interdisciplinary scholarship.

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

This article reports a case study of teachers’ enactment of writing instruction for adult learners in Swedish as a second language at lower secondary level in municipal education. It highlights instructional practices and discourses surrounding writing in three classrooms. The analysis centers on literacy events initiated by teachers to support adult learners’ final individual assignments. Data consist of classroom observations (24 hours) and informal interviews with teachers. The findings reveal that teachers adopt different positions in their teaching. There are varying levels of support for students, with varying numbers of literacy events occurring both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers universally adjust their methods based on contextual factors, including diverse student groups, local agreements on content, and time constraints, raising questions about equality. Furthermore, a text-focused approach prioritizes templates and models over content. As a result, writing assignments emphasize genre awareness rather than personal views, thoughts, or experiences. In sum, teachers' pedagogical choices in writing instruction are shaped by their beliefs about writing, learning to write, and contextual factors. These differences in teaching practices seem to provide students with partly unequal opportunities for writing development. This is further elaborated in the discussion.

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

On Friday morning, December 2, 1955, less than 18 hours after Rosa Parks’s arrest, copies of an anonymous, half-page leaflet began circulating in Black neighborhoods of Montgomery, Alabama. It called for a 1-day boycott of city buses on Monday, December 5. The leaflet was the work of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), namely, its president, Jo Ann Robinson. After drafting the text on the night of December 1, she drove to her office at Alabama State College (ASC) to copy it, then, the next day, with helpers, distributed those copies across the city. By evening, nearly everyone in Montgomery’s Black community knew of the boycott plan. This article offers the fullest examination yet of that leaflet, one of the most impactful texts of its kind in U.S. history. It analyzes its composition, which drew on years of activism by the WPC; its reproduction, using a mimeograph machine at ASC; and its distribution, by car, foot, and hand, across a divided urban landscape. Rhetoric and writing studies help us uncover the material resources, social context, and situated processes that enabled that text; history reminds us of its extraordinary mobilizing power.

This case study of three female Chilean scientists with distinct levels of scientific writing expertise—novice, competent, and near-expert—investigates their notions about drafts. Interrogation of data—that is, document analyses, an entry questionnaire, a set of semistructured interviews, and member-checks—identified seven different notions about drafts: (1) draft as a canonical structure of scientific research articles, (2) draft as influenced by medium/time, (3) draft as an incomplete text, (4) draft as a process, (5) draft as product, (6) draft as a nondefinitive version, and (7) academic writing as a draft from scientific writing. Findings show that some shared notions about drafts transcend writer profiles and that these notions are rooted in writer identity, their writing practices, and the context of producing scientific research articles.

Using multilevel modeling, the current study examined student-level predictors of compositional quality and productivity in Grade 2 Australian children ( N = 544), including handwriting automaticity, literacy skills, executive functioning, writing attitudes, and gender; and classroom-level ( n = 47) variables predicting students’ writing outcomes, including the amount of time for writing practices and the explicit teaching of foundational (handwriting, spelling, grammar) and process writing skills (planning and revision strategies). Multilevel analyses revealed that student-level factors, including gender, general attitudes, and transcription skills (handwriting automaticity and spelling), were key predictors of writing outcomes. Interaction analyses showed that spelling and word reading influenced writing outcomes, with effects varying by gender. At the classroom-level, time spent on planning had a positive effect on students’ compositional quality, and time spent on spelling instruction had a negative effect on students’ compositional productivity. Implications for research and education are discussed.

We report on a longitudinal case study (n = 9) about popularization writing skills in undergraduate interdisciplinary students. Writing skills were determined by analyzing components of the cognitive process model of writing proposed by Hayes. Keystroke logging and video observation were used to analyze the text construction process (the process level) in third-year writing. Genre knowledge (the control level) was analyzed through text analysis and assessment of first-year and third-year texts. Results showed that writing was highly individualized at the process level, including switches between processes, timing, number of edits, and reliance on the source text. At the control level, popularization genre knowledge did not significantly change over time and text quality remained low to average, suggesting a lack in genre knowledge. Choices in the writing process are, thus, not reflected in the quality of the writing product. These findings point to a need for explicit training in popularization discourse alongside academic discourse training.

Because evidence is still limited on writing motivation around the globe and the factors that could influence it, a survey-based quantitative study with 2,067 Costa Rican students from first to sixth grade (84 classrooms in 4 schools) was conducted to explore variations in two constructs of motivation for school writing across school grades and gender in Costa Rican students. Attitudes towards writing were investigated with students from first to sixth grade, while self-efficacy beliefs towards writing were investigated with students from third to sixth grade. Results show that students’ positive attitudes towards writing decreased with grade level, with the highest positive attitudes found in second grade and the lowest in sixth grade. Grade level only determined students’ perceived self-efficacy for generating ideas and concentrating during writing, but not for punctuation and spelling, which is interpreted in relation to the Costa Rican writing education curriculum. Girls from second to sixth grade reported more positive attitudes towards writing than boys; however, they only had higher self-efficacy beliefs for generating ideas and not for punctuation, spelling, or concentrating on a writing task.

This experimental study aimed to investigate the relationship between text structure (TS) in argumentations written by Hebrew-speaking primary school children and their reading comprehension (RC) performance. A total of 293 students from second to fifth grade wrote an argumentative text and completed two RC tasks. These tasks consisted of a passage followed by multiple-choice questions targeting different levels of reading comprehension: literal, inferential, evaluative, and gap-filling questions. The students’ scores on the RC tasks were calculated, and their arguments were classified into different levels of complexity based on various structural components. Significant associations were found between text structure and grade level, with the most complex texts produced by students in the highest grade. However, there were fluctuations in the elaboration of text components across different grade levels. Correlations between reading comprehension and text structure were found to be weak and dependent on grade level. Children who scored higher on inferential reading comprehension questions tended to produce texts that were better structured and provided lengthier support for the writer’s claims.

Leader messages play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships between globalized corporations and their diverse stakeholders. By constructing two corpora, each containing 45 texts of leader messages from CSR (corporate social responsibility) reports of corporations operating in China and the United States that appeared on the 2021 Fortune Global 500 list, this study explored the move structure and interdiscursive strategies employed in the messages. The study identified a rhetorical structure consisting of seven moves and eleven steps shared by both corpora. Analysis reveals that interdiscursivity is a prevalent feature of leader messages in both corpora. Specifically, discourses of promotion, strategic management, and financial accounting are favored by Chinese corporations, while evaluative and interpersonal discourses are preferred by the U.S. corporations. The findings enhance our understanding of how professionals from different cultural contexts adopt appropriate move structures and interdiscursive strategies to craft leader messages for effective CSR communication.

This article contributes to discussions of literacy in Old Kingdom Egypt (2700–2200 BCE) by offering a new perspective on “reading” that challenges alphabet-centric approaches and emphasizes the semiotic functionality of hieroglyphs. Through an analysis of publicly displayed royal decrees in temples, it argues that these texts, composed primarily of ideograms, nouns, and specific visual arrangements rather than phonograms or grammatical constructs, were designed to communicate effectively with nonscribal audiences. Local Egyptians, familiar with the visual layouts and ideograms, could grasp key messages, enabling the state to disseminate practical information about work-related regulations and discourage unauthorized labor. This pictorial and visual grammar-based system, which avoided the use of phonetic complements, facilitated comprehension across dialects, functioning as lexical “reminders” reinforced by oral transmission.

Marking the point of departure of the clause, Theme position is used to identify subject matter, the writer’s angle on that subject matter, and the direction of travel of the text. Learning to exploit this cohesive resource is essential to the learning-to-write process, becoming increasingly relevant in late childhood as children begin to write longer texts in a wider variety of registers. This research explores how children achieve this, by comparing texts written by 17 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years, analyzing changes to thematization and identifying children’s “gateways” into new repertoires. Findings reveal that the writers’ choice of “macroTheme” (an overarching initial thesis statement) significantly influenced subsequent thematic choices. Furthermore, experimentation with new thematic resources reflected the writers’ adoption of a meta-perspective elicited by appropriation of modeled macroThemes, the integration of counterarguments, and recognition of the potential of abstract Themes to provide new insights into lived experience.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has brought into question how much ownership college students feel for “their” writing when it is AI-generated. This study recruited 88 college writers at one midwestern state university in the United States. In a within-subjects design, participants composed poems about a meaningful, challenging life experience, then prompted GenAI to compose a poem about that same event. Results showed significantly greater ownership for human-made poems; additionally, human-made poems were rated as more accurately reflective of selected lived experiences. Aesthetic merit, however, was rated higher for AI-generated poems for imagery, language, and form—but not for originality. Half the students preferred GenAI poems, mainly because of their textual features, while less than half preferred human poems, mainly for personal connections to the events presented. Implications for GenAI as a tool to support creative writing and meaningful literacy are explored.

This study explores how the scholarly writing practices of early-career academics in China create new “ecologies” of research writing. Using a literacy studies framing, we examine how productivity policies, including evaluation and incentivization, impact the writing practices of academics working in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), creating a set of spatiotemporal predicaments and uncertainties. We draw on interviews and multimodal journals obtained from 22 academics at Chinese universities. Findings reveal important practices among China’s HSS academics within the distinctive institutional and policy landscape of Chinese academia, including how they organize their space and time for writing, the significance and function of writing practices, and the ways in which boundaries are disrupted and negotiated. We show that writing is deeply intertwined with multiple spaces and times, forming an ecology of research writing within emergent and shifting assemblages. We emphasize the need for further theoretical and practical understanding of research writing in the context of Chinese universities.

Recent years have seen renewed attention to the dynamic aspects of second language writing, such as writing processes. Situated in this vein of research, this study uses screen capture, interviews, observations, and analysis of student texts to closely examine the digitally-mediated writing micro-processes of 38 first-year multilingual writers enrolled in composition courses at two U.S. universities. By studying a relatively large data pool, the study complements case studies of multilingual writers’ digitally mediated composing processes to provide a broad picture of multilingual writers’ digitally mediated micro-processes. Drawing on the framework of the extended mind, we show that the participants’ micro-processes incorporated digital tools through three clusters of practices: (1) L1 use through translation, (2) use of text-generators, and (3) self/writing regulation. While the three practices were shown to be widely used by the participants, their use varied depending on the participants’ goals. The study demonstrates the theoretical significance and pedagogical implications of closely examining writing micro-processes as they intersect with the use of digital tools.