This exploratory case study was designed so that I could investigate the writing processes of sixth-grade students when composing traditional and digital compositions. With the increase in multimodal composing in classrooms, understanding how students compose and what traditional print text skills can be appropriated for digital composition is…

This dissertation investigates police report writing at the Jackson Police Department in Northwest Arkansas. It presents three primary research questions which are addressed through qualitative methods of interview, observation, and discourse analysis: (1) In what ways does police training address report writing?; (2) What audience awareness do…

Elementary children's sense of audience related to their multimodal information writing was examined. Forty-six third graders' interviews about the books that they created at the end of a science unit were analyzed to understand children's conception of audience, the connection between their sense of audience and their composing process, and their…

The purpose of this interpretivist qualitative study is to discover what factors influence first-year college students as they construct their text messages. Using grounded theory methodology, 11 first-year college students at a university in the Southeast were interviewed one-on-one and through text messaging in order to gain insight into…

This research focuses on the current role of mapping practices in communicating climate change in the United States. This includes maps used in monitoring climate change, projecting its potential impacts, and identifying potential adaptation strategies at particular scales. Since few, if any, studies have been done specifically on mapping…