This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an…

Educational standards documents worldwide include reading and writing of evidence-based argument as a major focus. In order to help students craft arguments that will be considered seriously by those with the power to make changes that affect them, educators need to cultivate within students their sociological imagination--that is, an…

This article introduces a new course in the Virginia Community College System English Curriculum, "English 114: Scientific Writing." The article briefly reviews the concept of "science rhetoric," then discusses the intended audience and purpose of the course, and explains the basic goals of the course in relation to the…

This study takes a dynamic view of transfer as reusing and reshaping previous knowledge in new writing contexts to investigate how novice Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) writers draw on knowledge across languages to construct L1 and L2 texts. We analyzed L1 English and L2 Japanese argumentation essays by the same JFL writers (N = 19) and L1…

Assessment is essential to all forms of work in the arts. Successful arts assessment concepts, patterns, and methods have evolved over many centuries. They are inherent in all arts teaching and central to art-making at all levels of proficiency and sophistication. And they work: achievements in the arts are among the highest in civilization. At…

In "Cinema Paradiso" (Tomatore, 1988), Salvatore's love of movies came from spending his earlier, young life inside a cinema with the fatherly projectionist Alfredo, now blind and bitter. Alfredo is right. Life is much harder, yes, yet still very much "like in the movies" filled with frustrated actions, performed inside blind…

Just as WAC pedagogy and writing studies both stress the ways that writing and communication practices can act as both heuristics and products of genre-based, discipline- specific knowledge, in much the same way, performance, too, can be used as a heuristic and as a product and should be more fully explored in WAC theory and pedagogy. This article…

Each Air Force recruiter is formally trained in public speaking and the art of salesmanship or persuasion. These recruiters communicate to thousands of high school students each year through presentations in classrooms, auditoriums and other venues as part of their assigned duties. Persuasive presentations are public speaking events specifically…

Metadiscourse is a prevalent linguistic resource that helps writers to manage the flow of the propositional contents and to direct their stance towards their contents and readers. Its dominance in persuasive writings has motivated this study which is to examine the occurrences and forms of metadiscourse use in the writing of both the high (HEP)…

The proliferation of online simulation games across the globe in many different languages offers Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) researchers an opportunity to examine how language learning occurs in such virtual environments. While there has recently been an increase in the number of exploratory studies involving learning experiences of…

This article, the first of a two-part series, presents teaching 10 innovations from the 2015 Association for Business Communication's 80th annual conference. The creative new assignments offered here include building listening skills by journaling, oral interpretation, positive message framing, storytelling, delivering bad news, persuasive…

The study of bullshit, what the author calls "taurascatics", has been making a splash of late. It was Harry Frankfurt who tossed the stone: his essay "On Bullshit" came out in "Raritan" in 1986, hit the "New York Times" best-seller list as a book in 1995, and has been adopted, adapted, and criticized across the academy since. The ripples spread…

This essay builds upon prior attempts to foster linkages between the disciplines of Composition Studies and professional writing. I take up Jennifer Bay's suggestion that service learning is a site for connection and "hospitality" (in a Derridean sense) between these disciplines, advocating for and at the same time complicating Bay's proposal.…

Writing for an audience different from teachers motivates students to translate their existing knowledge into audience-appropriate language, in which students explain, elaborate, and integrate their understanding of science concepts using more than just the technical language of the subject. Several studies also have found that students can…

Opportunities to read and analyze others' writing or to observe readers as they analyze writing might enhance one's own sense of audience and improve one's own writing. This mixed-methods study investigated whether reader and observer activities in comparison to writing practice activities affected fifth-grade students' persuasive writing and…