As generative artificial intelligence becomes normalized in L2 writing, questions of authorial voice and textual ownership require analysis beyond broad claims of benefit or risk. This study reanalyzes the focal-case subcorpus of a semester-long EFL writing dataset drawn from English-major undergraduates at a public university in Jordan. The analysis is limited to 24 focal participants because only these cases contained the linked evidence needed to trace authorship across process and text: interviews, reflections, AI-use logs, prompt-output examples, Essay 2 draft histories, focal profile indicators, and paired first and final drafts. Using a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods multiple-case design, the study combines codebook thematic analysis of the process corpus with a structured paired-draft voice-comparison layer applied to the source-based Essay 2 drafts. Cross-case analysis identified three recurring pathways: revoiced assistance, support sliding toward dependence, and strategic nonuse to preserve control. The bounded quantitative strand suggested stronger final-draft voice where agency and verification were higher and direct text uptake lower. AI did not itself diminish voice; risk arose when fluent output displaced writer judgment and evaluative control.
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.
The increasing use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in writing instruction has expanded the range of feedback sources available to learners, creating human-AI feedback ecologies in which AI-generated and teacher feedback coexist. In these environments, learners actively evaluate, position, and regulate multiple sources of feedback during writing. Despite growing research on AI-generated feedback, limited attention has been paid to how learners make sense of AI feedback in relation to teacher authority and self-regulated writing practices. This study investigates how learners engage with and position AI-generated feedback in L2 writing contexts. Using Q methodology, data were collected from 40 Chinese learners of Thai as a foreign language who sorted statements reflecting diverse experiences with AI- and teacher-mediated feedback. Analysis identified four learner orientations toward AI feedback: (1) Evaluative Reliance with Teacher Anchoring, (2) Instructionally Aligned Use of AI Feedback, (3) Affective-Relational Engagement with AI Feedback, and (4) Instrumental Use with Epistemic Distance. The findings show that engagement with AI feedback is shaped less by trust than by how learners evaluate, position, and regulate feedback across writing activities. The study advances a human-AI feedback ecology framework and offers implications for AI-supported writing pedagogy and feedback design.
Since the launch of ChatGPT and other generative AI (genAI) models, the composition field has had varied responses ranging from writing with genAI, to genAI refusal. With this vast spectrum of responses, it may be unclear where the composition field currently stands with these new technologies, and what its trajectory will be. This paper positions previous pedagogical writing practices such as process writing and pre-writing as skills that not only withstand the current technological development but are even more pertinent for students’ writing processes. Drawing on process writing and rhetorical situation analysis, this paper reframes structured prompting as a pre-writing protocol that teaches students to analyze the rhetorical situation before technological engagement. It then uses the TRACI prompting framework as a worked example, demonstrating how structured prompting can operationalize rhetorical situation analysis as a pre-writing practice before genAI engagement.
Through analyzing the Talk and History pages of Wikipedia’s English-language article titled “writing,” I challenge the notion that Wikipedia excludes expertise. I provide examples of ways in which contributors invite experts to help determine what content makes its way to the forward-facing “writing” article. This article seeks to show that valuing subject-matter expertise alongside popular public contributions, what I call an invitational approach to expertise, can result in a successful forward-facing article in Wikipedia and, by extension, potentially model a way for experts and the larger populace to work together in public discourse. An invitational approach positions expertise as dialogic and in process and both experts and non-experts as necessary.
Responding to how fragmented information architectures perpetuate communication barriers and hinder service delivery and cross-sector collaboration, we identified a need for a reimagined and centralized database to map services for newcomer refugee populations in the state of Virginia. Through a multi-institutional research consortium with resettlement agencies, migrant advocates, and education institutions, we secured funding to develop a "Resettlement Services for New Americans in Virginia" database and accompanying website that reimagines how information about refugee services is produced, organized, and accessed by centering community voices and knowledge in design. By collating disparate resources into one database and iterating based on community feedback, our initiative supports not just service delivery and stakeholder collaboration, but refugee integration outcomes. In this paper, we describe our project and showcase how digital tools can transform communication across nonprofit, government, and grassroots organizations while centering community voices in design processes. Our work investigates how centralized digital infrastructure can reshape rhetorical and digital practices in service ecosystems and enhance collaborative knowledge sharing across boundaries.
The increasing prominence of digital and multimodal composing in writing curricula introduces new methodological opportunities and challenges. As students compose with image, sound, and design as well as alphabetic text, traditional research methods, focused on textual products or retrospective accounts, are limited in capturing how transfer unfolds across digital environments. This article introduces a multimodal, process-retrospective inquiry method for studying writing transfer in digital contexts. The method integrates screencast video capture, stimulated recall interviews, and reflective journaling to document how students interact with multiple modes, make design decisions, engage digital tools, and transfer prior writing knowledge during composing. It provides not only a systematic way to collect data on layered, recursive digital composing but also an analytic framework for tracing transfer across tasks and contexts. This method can be adapted for varied research and instructional settings to study and teach digital multimodal writing, digital literacy, and writing transfer.
Online Writing Instruction (OWI) has been a key component of Computers and Composition. In this article, we explore the historical trajectory of OWI through five distinct eras. Beginning with the foundational research of the early 1980s, we review landmark publications, organizational initiatives, educational crises, and technological inflection points to trace how OWI evolved into a sophisticated area of inquiry and practice. Across over forty years of milestones, we argue that OWI’s development has been a response to and a driver of innovation in writing technologies, digitally enhanced writing, pedagogy, and digital literacy. During this time, OWI has evolved from the distance learning movement and the early 21st century boom in online educational offerings to become an established field within Rhetoric and Composition. The COVID-19 pandemic and the conflation of emergency remote instruction with OWI illustrates OWI practitioners’ and scholars’ ability to rise in a crises to provide professional development opportunities for those in the discipline unfamiliar with online pedagogy. With the current challenge of GenAI, we argue that OWI must draw on lessons from past technological shifts to meet the moment. We conclude with recommendations for how OWI can build on its rich history to address new and ongoing challenges.
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.
Despite audience awareness being fundamental to writing pedagogy, student writers often struggle to move beyond considering their instructor as the primary reader, making connections between audience analysis and actual writing practice difficult. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) when viewed as models of culture that can be prompted to adopt various audience personas, may enable writers to interact with simulated audiences across multiple theories of audience consideration. We thus critically review a taxonomy of five audience theories: (1) writing without audiences, (2) specific people as audiences, (3) discourse communities, (4) publics, and (5) networks/algorithms. Rather than using GenAI as a text production tool, we argue for using these technologies as objects of critical inquiry that allow students to “craft and design” audiences through iterative interaction. This approach encourages writers to critique the biased design of the technology itself as well as their own biases embedded in audience descriptions.
In our conversation below, we consider how Indigenous peoples, with Native Americans as our primary touchstone, have gained access to digital technologies and made use of them for community building, sustaining, and outreach. We discuss [Author 2]'s 2024 monograph, [Book Title] and build conversations beyond, all connected through our shared interests in culture, language, technology, and identity. We offer this as a space to learn with openness, compassion, and collaboration. [Book Title] makes [Author 2]'s epistemology her methodology. In publishing what are normally privately-texted conversations, I open my own epistemological orientation, as displayed through our dialogue, to function as a method for you to question social and linguistic justice, sustainability, archival activism, surveillance, and survival.
Rhetoric scholars have long recognized that vocal performance transmits affect through what Hawhee (2015) calls rhetoric's "sensorium," the sensory, embodied dimensions of persuasion that operate beyond semantic content, but methodological limitations have constrained empirical analysis of these patterns. This exploratory case study examines how Large Language Models might enable a new computational approach to rhetorical analysis by synchronizing continuous acoustic data (pitch, intensity, timing) with discrete data from stylistic schemes, making what Keith and Whittenberger-Keith (1988) termed the "notoriously hard to capture" musical dimension of public oratory more empirically tractable. We introduce a toolkit that integrates phonological, prosodic, acoustic, stylistic, and musical data layers, providing analytical access to what psychologist Daniel Stern calls activation contours (temporal patterns of intensity that create conditions for mimetic response). Applied to James Baldwin's 1965 speech at the Cambridge Union, when he debated William F. Buckley and received the first standing ovation in the Union's 150-year history, the toolkit reveals strategic patterning invisible to transcript-based analysis: the phrase "it comes as a great shock" repeats with controlled pitch consistency, creating rhythmic entrainment, while the pronoun "you" erupts with a 2836-Delta cent pitch leap (nearly two and a half octaves) at the moment of identificatory rupture. These measurements suggest empirical mechanisms through which vocal performance may amplify rhetorical force. By enabling computational analysis of affect in speech performance, this approach extends rhetorical scholarship beyond symbolic/semantic content toward the temporal, embodied dimensions through which voice transmits energy or affective force.
Almost 30 years ago, Cynthia Selfe’s CCCC Chair’s Address and subsequent book Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century gave the Computers and Writing community both a motto and a guiding principle: “the importance of paying attention.” This approach to the study of writing technologies has served both the field and higher education well in researching the impact of those technologies on individuals’ writing lives and their use in the classroom. This essay argues that the convergence of Generative AI bots based on Large Language Models, surveillance capitalism, and rising authoritarianism within the United States requires the field of Computers and Writing to take a new approach to our work. This critical essay argues for a move toward collective praxis that allows computers and writing scholars to act more collectively as a field to organize against these threats. The essay also provides suggested orientations for acting and collaborating with others.
Generative AI systems hold potential as assistive technologies throughout the research process, but their usage also surfaces a number of issues researchers need to consider. In this article, I begin with the threats to research and researchers raised by genAI (and threat is not too strong of a word). I then address the opportunities for AI assistance throughout the research process from study planning and data collection to data analysis and reporting. I close by raising some future research directions for our field to consider, so that we have a voice in shaping the design and usage of AI for writing research.
This article argues that user experience (UX) is not merely an industry-driven trend but also a concept deeply rooted in the composition’s historical values such as multimodality, audience awareness, and inclusive practices. Drawing on four decades of scholarship in Computers and Composition, the article maps a historical genealogy of UX-mediated practices, ranging from early conversations surrounding technologies in the service of writing instruction to the contemporary focus on multimodality, accessibility, and participatory design. This historical analysis demonstrates how these critical conversations align with the key principles and values of UX, including human-centered design, iterative design, and design thinking. The article then reframes UX composition as a bridge between the field’s past and its future, with a focus on showing how the integration of emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality extends the field’s long-standing commitments to UX composition practice and pedagogy. Ultimately, UX composition provides both a reflective and forward-looking framework for designing human-centered, multimodal, and culturally diverse writing futures.
The story of digital publishing in Writing Studies is one of innovation, collaboration, and do-it-yourself spirit. The field's digital publication venues emerged alongside the birth of the World Wide Web, and scholars used those venues to experiment with the possibilities of publishing in digital spaces. Visionary editors built journals with just a university server and a call for papers, and that creative spirit expanded the form and possibilities of scholarly communication. This article extends that work through the concept of “reader-choice publishing,” an approach that privileges reader needs and preferences by distributing scholarly texts in multiple open formats: HTML, PDF, and EPUB. Through a reader-choice approach, writers and publishers ask, “How will the reader use this text?” “What affordances do they need?” “What tradeoffs will they accept, and how might a single text be offered in multiple ways to offset those tradeoffs as the reader's needs and contexts change?” This article situates the reader-choice approach alongside a history of digital publishing in the field, acknowledging the past while pointing to a more usable future.
This computational study examines 1607 articles published in Computers and Composition from 1983 through 2025, using Structural Topic Modeling to analyze the journal's 40-year intellectual trajectory. Employing STM with temporal covariates, I identified 20 distinct topics and tracked their evolution across four decades of scholarship. The analysis reveals how the field has continuously negotiated relationships between technology and writing through recurring themes: automation anxieties, digital equity and access, and questions of authorship and originality. While technological platforms have shifted dramatically—from word processing to hypertext to social media to generative AI—the fundamental concerns remain consistent. Topics such as word processing, once dominant in the 1980s, have declined to near invisibility as these technologies became ubiquitous, while newer topics like artificial intelligence show unprecedented rapid growth. The field's response patterns demonstrate neither uncritical adoption nor reflexive resistance, but rather sustained critical engagement that interrogates technological change while remaining attentive to writing's human dimensions. This distant reading approach surfaces both dominant trends and marginalized areas of inquiry, revealing how Computers and Composition has developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding technology's role in writing—frameworks that remain essential as the field navigates an increasingly computational future.
As digital technologies have become increasingly embedded in writing practices, scholars have worked to define the literacies necessary not only to use digital tools, but to critique and understand the social, ethical, and rhetorical forces shaping them. This article reports findings from a multimethod analysis of the Computers and Composition archive, including distant reading of all article titles and abstracts from 1983-2025 as well as close reading of 63 articles published during this same time frame. The authors trace how understandings of critical digital literacy have evolved in response to emerging tools and technological infrastructures. Our findings demonstrate how critical digital literacy in C&C is enacted through both anxieties about new tools (such as access, agency, surveillance, and power) as well as through detailed accounts of tool implementation. Our approach also suggests the utility of analyzing how individual digital tools have been discussed in computers and writing scholarship as a means of better understanding the field's evolving values and pedagogical commitments.
To mark the 40th anniversary of Computers and Composition, the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) Fellows interviewed three generations of the journal’s leadership: founding co-editor Cynthia Selfe, past editor Kristine Blair, and current editor Jason Tham. In this interview, the DRC Fellows ask the editors to discuss the arc of the journal, including the editorial process, mentorship, and inclusion, as well as our present moment, from our current political and technological landscape to the journal’s radical reinvention. The interview highlights the human-centered legacies and commitments of the field of Computers and Composition, offering sustainable approaches and insights that are especially critical amid current AI-related technological upheavals and political contention.
Coding animated stories in the English classroom has been advocated from over a decade ago as an integrated curriculum context for early teaching of computer programming while simultaneously developing students’ multimodal narrative authoring. However, related research has not adequately addressed English curriculum requirements for narrative creation. This article describes the development of a framework for analysing coded animated stories from the perspective of English curriculum expectations. Analysis of 23 stories showed substantial variation in the emphasis given to different multimodal resources among those stories with the most extensive use of such resources. Stories with limited use of these resources excluded those expressing characters’ emotions and positioning the audience to experience the story from a variety of points of view. Stories with extensive multimodal expression were at the upper, but not necessarily highest, coding proficiency levels, while some with high coding proficiency showed limited use of multimodal resources. Implications are drawn for coding as an engaging creative tool in English classrooms.
