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I contracted Lyme disease when I was thirteen years old. I struggled with vague symptoms for nine months (maybe my busy parents assumed my fatigue and headaches were normal complaints for a teenage...

The release of ChatGPT in 2022 introduced both transformative opportunities and notable challenges for writing instruction and heightened instructors’ concerns about its impact on teaching and student learning. To explore how GenAI may enhance business communication in the age of AI while mitigating its negative effects on writing instruction, this Feature on Teaching article explains how instructors can proactively design custom AI tools to shift use from content generation to learning support, and offers a practical approach to adapting to an evolving, AI-driven context while exploring strategies to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes.

This study investigates how perceived credibility can serve as self-feedback to enhance speaker credibility. Using a critical literacy-informed self-assessment tool, 30 business undergraduates in an advanced business communication course observed the first minute of their recorded presentation at 5-s intervals for 5 non-verbal cues. Coded findings revealed two key gender differences in positioning for speaker credibility: females used fewer body movements, more facial expressiveness and eye contact while males demonstrated greater fluency and more confident hand gestures. These findings may allow instructors and learners to mitigate gender-based differences in the classroom to enhance oral presentation competence critical for workplace success.

Abstract A significant proportion of human reasoning is systematically biased, a fact that sits uneasily with argumentation theory’s methodological commitment to the principle of charity. Traditionally, the principle requires arguments to be reconstructed as plausibly and rationally as possible, which conflicts with the definition of cognitive biases as irrational. The aim of this paper is to show that we can and should integrate cognitive biases into argument reconstruction. Firstly, we demonstrate both the ubiquity and societal consequences of biased reasoning. We then articulate a trilemma for argument analysis: (i) exclude biased reasoning from reconstruction, (ii) redefine it as rational, or (iii) abandon the principle of charity. We argue that this trilemma can be resolved by adopting a nuanced understanding of charity that puts sufficient emphasis on the descriptive standard of accuracy alongside the normative standard of plausibility. By properly pursuing these dual aims, we can account for instances of biased reasoning in argument analysis in terms of the underlying mental states and processes. By taking the effect of the in-group bias in climate skepticism as an instructive example, we present one way of integrating cognitive biases into argument analysis by reconstructing instances of biased reasoning as arguments. The aim of such reconstructions is not to vindicate biased reasoning as epistemically sound, after all, but rather to make its justificatory structure transparent and discussable.

Organizational communication patterns were utilized to predict employee creativity and innovation, with employee engagement examined as a potential mediator. Data were collected from participants employed across a variety of industries and organizations, using a census-matched, nationally representative sample ( N  = 378). As hypothesized, the conversation and positive conformity orientations positively predicted both creativity and innovation. Although negative conformity negatively correlated with creativity and innovation, it positively predicted employee innovation in the path analysis. Employee engagement served as a full mediator for positive conformity and a partial mediator for the conversation orientation with both creativity and innovation.

This case study examines factors that significantly affect student success in online first- and second-year composition at an open-access community college and, in doing so, contributes to scholarship on online composition and student success by empirically linking community and communication through high-context communication and students’ holistic contexts to indicators of academic outcomes and validating experiences. The study analyzes 175 participant responses to five low-stakes check-in assignments designed around the course-level concept of servingness. Eighty-one patterns identified in earlier research were grouped into 14 factors from which variables were derived. These, combined with check-in responses, course grades, course, sex, ethnicity, and race, yielded a total of 27 variables for quantitative analysis. Using chi-square tests (alpha = .10) and multiple correspondence analysis, 15 of 27 variables showed significant associations with course grades. Positive associations with academic growth, peer interaction, instructor engagement, inclusion, course design, and college resources aligned with higher check-in completion and higher grades; negative associations aligned with lower check-in completion and lower grades. Background characteristics, specifically course (English 1010/2010), ethnicity (Hispanic/Non-Hispanic), and race (White/Non-White), also showed significant associations with course grades. Results suggest that academic outcomes and validating experiences must be evaluated together to inform strategies that support both academic achievement and students’ racial and cultural ways of knowing. Future research should examine how targeted, low-stakes assignments and high-context communication practices operate across institutions and student groups, including longitudinal analyses that track how community, communication, and access to college resources interact with student success over time.

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.

We explore how language development, and training informed by development, impact L2 students’ navigation of ethical collaboration with machine translation (MT). Our interdisciplinary approach integrated the Writing Studies’ concept of ‘ethical collaboration’ – an ethically guided interface between students and GenAI – with Applied Linguistics, which highlights the need to address GenAI/MT ethics and L2 language. We created a model synthesizing the “Student Guide to AI Literacy” (MLA, 2024) with a theory of L2 development. Data were collected by 1) an established protocol – direct writing in English, self-translation from the L1 and machine translation from the L1, 2) developmentally focused and acknowledgement training, and 3) post-editing of self-translation. An emergence (onset) criterion and frequencies measured written development and evaluation of MT output, frequencies measured monitoring after training and a statistical analysis measured impact of the training types. The analysis of development and evaluation demonstrated that development impacted un/ethical evaluation of MT output. The post-edits indicated that developmentally focused training encouraged ethical monitoring when development permitted and had more impact than acknowledgement training. We conclude that guidelines and training on ethical collaboration with GenAI should be informed by L2 development, not only GenAI literacy, and that research on this topic should continue.

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.

Editor's Introduction, Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2026

Building on Nancy Fraser’s (1990) theorization of transnational public spheres, this study examines protest rhetoric of Ghanaian environmental activists who use social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter to protest illegal mining (galamsey). I argue that these activists, locally in Ghana and across the diaspora, construct what I call a Transnational Environmental Counterpublic (TEC) to mobilize, raise awareness and influence policy decisions in Ghana. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, I examine protest rhetoric across hashtags, viral posts alphabetic and visuals, and non-human materialities (colors, paper, cloth) to understand how networks of activists contest environmental injustices. This analysis shows that protest rhetoric is not only shaped by embodied and material actants, but they also contest the dominant narrative of land exploitation, extractive capitalism, and ecological responsibility in Ghana. I call on the field to recognize the value of transnational rhetorical practices and their role in shaping global conversations on environmental justice, digital activism, and transnational coalition building.

This essay examines three iconic photographs of “The 15 White Coats” who are a group of fifteen African American medical school students and emerging physicians who posed in solidarity in front of a former slave cabin in Louisiana. Although the photographs generated wide acclaim regarding underrepresentation in medicine, I argue that the performative goal of The 15 White Coats was to subvert any standard images of physicians as white and to underscore past and ongoing exploitation of Black bodies in medicine. More specifically, I demonstrate through these images a methodology of “visual counterstory,” which serves as a form of resistance to anti-Black sentiment while reinforcing positive images of Black physicians. Ultimately, I show how “visual counterstory” makes an important intervention in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine scholarship, thereby, raising consciousness of the disparities occurring in the contemporary discourse of health and medicine.

Becoming an AARP-designated “age-friendly'' state is a five-year project, and states who choose to do so, often create a website devoted to policy efforts and initiative updates. On these websites, visual rhetoric and writing play a central role in communicating with the public. These websites have implications for how aging is represented and who is included in this online space, both in photographs and in a website’s alternative text (alt text). To conduct my analysis, I selected three “age-friendly” state homepages and used a framework of text and image integration (Shriver, 1997) and accessibility (Horton & Quesenbery, 2013). My analysis revealed that “age-friendly” state pages must provide greater representation of what aging can look like and should include informative and useful alternative text. I also analyzed the Age-Friendly Minnesota site for the network of digital tools (Spinuzzi, 2015). Through this analysis, I found evidence of an ethos of transparency being developed through a large amount of content being made available online, including meeting videos, which captured both efforts to be accountable to the public and moments of adapting to technology. In giving users access to the unedited meetings, they gain access to the mundane and necessary coordination of technology as well as a greater understanding of the process for developing policy.

Following Gogan (2014), this article outlines how shifting emphasis from persuasion to participation as the desired “end” of public writing can help scholars, teachers, and students better conceptualize public rhetorical work. To better understand the range of “participation,” I argue that scholars and teachers might consider three separate-but-overlapping formulations of public writing participation: 1) participation as confronting—accessing and inhabiting places of institutionally-sanctioned rhetoric through agonistic presence, 2) participation as conditioning and coordinating rhetorical action and engagement within broader ecologies, and 3) participation as constructing and creating through future-building and the assembling of publics. To describe these formulations, I outline the rhetorical work of “copwatching,” the organized effort to monitor policing through video documentation and other routinized tactics. Functioning within the contemporary ecology surrounding police reform, copwatching’s diverse activities help illustrate the realities of public rhetorical work as forms of strategic participation across times and spaces.

Abstract In argumentation theory, loci - also referred to as topoi - are commonly viewed as abstract sources of inference that guide the invention of arguments. Within the Argument Model of Topics (AMT), loci are analysed as sources of inference underlying individual arguments. This paper extends said view by arguing that loci perform a discourse-directive function beyond the level of individual arguments. This function is understood in an analytical sense and refers to how loci orient argumentative interaction by indicating the inferential relations along which issues become arguable in particular ways, such as procedural conditions, goals, constrained choices, conceptual boundaries, or source evaluation. Situated at the meso-level of analysis, this function exceeds the micro-level reconstruction of individual arguments while preceding the identification of recurring argumentative patterns at the macro-level. This paper shows how the reappearance of premises in extended debates, when repeatedly connected to conclusions through the same loci , recurrently instantiates the same inferential relations that orient argumentative interaction. These recurrent inferential relations do not themselves constitute argumentative patterns, but repetition makes these relations empirically traceable across argumentative contributions before the stabilization of argumentative patterns. The analytical framework is illustrated by examples from the controversy of nuclear energy production.

Abstract This paper offers a pragma-dialectical reconstruction of AI-authorship accusations directed at human discussants: the charge that a contribution is machine-generated or not attributable to a responsible participant. Such an accusation is best understood not as a factual label but as a meta-level procedural move. Introduced during the argumentation stage, it can shift the exchange from the merits of a standpoint to the discussant’s status and the admissibility of starting points, and under specified procedural consequences it triggers a nested opening-stage sub-discussion while leaving the original difference of opinion intact. The paper names the configuration in which discussant status, admissible commitments, and sufficiency thresholds are jointly reclassified procedural capture, and gives the conditions that mark it off from an ordinary personal attack or premise misuse. Its contribution is a symmetrical, default-governed repair protocol, with a warrant-filter for detector-based evidence, that restores critical testing of the original standpoint. The claim is normative rather than descriptive: the worked examples are analytic reconstructions.

This study examines how a structured LinkedIn workshop influenced undergraduates’ intention to engage in professional online networking. Grounded in Experiential Learning Theory, the workshop combined interactive instruction, guided profile development, and a practitioner-led session. Based on post-intervention survey data from undergraduate students in Vietnam, the findings show that only familiarity with LinkedIn and the perceived training role of the guest speaker significantly predicted engagement intention. The study contributes to business communication pedagogy by emphasizing platform familiarization and expert-led instruction in career-oriented digital learning.

This research uses a hypothetical case discussion to make students understand writing as a thinking and managerial decision-making process versus as a technical output–based task in the context of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted writing. Using post-and-then-pre survey data and classroom experience of students, the study reports significant improvement in students’ awareness of contextual reasoning, critical thinking, and the limitations of generative AI tools. AI’s compliance orientation and lack of human judgement was critically analysed. This article highlights the importance of sequential use of AI with humans setting the context and critically understanding the problem before giving a prompt.

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into educational settings has created both opportunities and challenges for student learning. While GenAI adoption in education continues to grow, instructors remain divided about its educational value and appropriate usage. To further complicate matters, instructors are learning in real-time how this new and rapidly evolving tool works. Here, we describe an assignment developed for a large-enrollment, 100-level, general-education, environmental science course at the University of Arizona (RNR 150: Sustainable Earth) that provides students with structured opportunities to experiment with and critically evaluate GenAI tools. The assignment requires students to create a public facing infographic about water conservation using Piktochart's GenAI platform and then to evaluate and edit the style, format, and content of the AI output. Students then complete reflective writing analyzing the strengths and limitations of AI-generated content. Students completing this assignment in spring 2025 generally responded positively to using GenAI as a tool to support their thinking and effort, recognizing the importance of GenAI now and in their future.

Welcome to our second special issue focused on assignments from a single

This reflective essay examines my implementation of artifact-based collaborative learning in cybersecurity ethics education through the analysis of authentic but fictional case studies. Rather than analyzing pre-digested narratives, such as the case of Edward Snowden, students engage with hypothetical primary source materials (internal memos, encrypted communications, investigative reports, and exit interviews) that mirror reality and professional investigative practice. The assignment requires collaborative groups to produce a written analysis addressing six analytical tasks that integrate ethical frameworks, legal analysis, and stakeholder perspectives. Students learn to craft arguments that synthesize documentary evidence, construct legal analyses using appropriate discourse, and develop policy recommendations in professional genres. Students navigate the grey areas of cybersecurity ethics, law, and policy, wrestling with competing approaches where reasonable people disagree. The artifact-based collaborative writing approach demonstrates how technical students can develop integrated writing and reasoning capabilities essential for cybersecurity governance roles when these skills are embedded in meaningful professional contexts.