Often, composition instructors struggle to encourage STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students to see the relevance of writing courses to their personal goals. Students' lack of recognition of the importance of literacy skills can lead to disengagement in required college writing courses compared to their so-called…

An interdisciplinary Pop-Up Learning Community (PLC) allowed students from various disciplines with different levels of content knowledge to discuss their perspectives on and beliefs about climate change. The impact of this event on students' climate change beliefs was gauged by a survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. This…

This study sought to determine the impact writing center consultations have on student writing self- efficacy and to illuminate effective consultant strategies for fostering student writing confidence. As part of a multimethods study, a survey was administered for students to reflect upon and to assess their feelings of writing self- efficacy by…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore sonic play in close proximity to a music, literacy and songwriting for social change community-based initiative. The authors leverage ideas about time, space and narrative under the concept of sonic flux to understand youth's sonic and aural play on digital beatmaking technologies. In doing so, the authors break…

This short article reviews key corpus-based pedagogic initiatives in the spirit of the Swalesian tradition of genre analysis. Pedagogic genres covered include report writing, thesis writing, writing a grant proposal and legal essay writing. More recently, attention has been paid to the writing of research articles by postgraduate students for whom…

We, as community college English teachers, have the opportunity to empower students who have been subjected to years of top-down, teacher-directed education. We have the obligation to make them critical thinkers, improving their chances of being thoughtful and successful adults. It all begins with the way we teach writing and the respect we have…

In a primary care health clinic, providers before, after, and throughout their shifts retrieve archival patient information and document new empirical data from each patient encounter into an electronic medical record (EMR). This documentation, called charting, contributes to ever increasing workload and provider burnout. While a provider may not…

Current trends in developmental writing have focused on corequisite support courses that developmental writers take in conjunction with college-level courses. Much recent scholarship has focused on the design of the corequisite course, but a corequisite model also raises the stakes of the curricular design of the college-level course, since it now…

What does it mean to study "embodiment"? What does it mean to study this concept from a rhetorical perspective? Why is embodiment important? These questions are at the heart of this article--a story about a graduate-level class that investigated these ideas. This article offers reflections from the instructors, multiple students'…

In social work practice, writing is a tool for advocacy, communication with clients, and other professionals, and accountability. In virtually all practice settings, workers at every organizational level invest significant time and effort in writing. However, the social work education literature reveals little attention to teaching BSW students to…

The University of Michigan-Dearborn Writing Program and Writing Center serve an increasingly large number of recent immigrants, international students, and students who as children immigrated to the United States. The Writing Program and Writing Center have for a decade developed curriculum and support services geared specifically toward meeting…

An important topic in writing research has been the use of cohesive features. Much of this research has focused on local and text cohesion. The few studies that have studied global cohesion have been restricted to first language writing. This study investigates the development of local, global, and text cohesion in the writing of 57 language (L2)…

This article analyzes a proposal submitted to a funding unit in Michigan Technological University by a PhD Forestry student. A rhetorical-cultural approach of the text provides evidence to argue that scientific writing is rooted in a cultural practice that valorizes certain kinds of thought, practices, rituals, and symbols; that a scientist's work…

This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argumentative essays written by incoming first-year university students in comparison with the writing of upper-level undergraduate students and published academics. The findings reveal linguistic stance markers shared across the first-year essays despite…

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their…