The hybrid exchange project described here aims to facilitate intercultural learning and cultural awareness by promoting meaningful virtual and cultural interactions among students from universities in Kenya, Ireland, and Germany. We collected qualitative data from former participants, who engaged in virtual and in-person exchanges. Our study indicates that hybrid exchange programs effectively promote intercultural understanding, and personal and professional development in technical communication. The program's design, which includes structured activities and social exchanges, contributed to the successful achievement of these goals. Such approaches can serve as a model for improving virtual team dynamics in various sectors, applicable beyond educational contexts.

Video games are forms of multimodal technical communication, conveying complicated information about game goals, mechanics, game physics, and more, to the player in a way that usually feels integrated into the game itself. This article highlights ways that games use interaction to convey information to players, classifying the communicative elements in several popular games into C.S. Pierce's classes of sign (decoratives, indicatives, and informatives). This paper asserts that technical communicators can take cues from video games to design technical communication products that better meet contemporary users’ expectations of agency and interaction—allowing them to explore and discover on their own.

This study revisits Sam Dragga’s research on ethical decision-making in document design, updating it to reflect contemporary concerns. Our findings indicate that participants today perceive the document design scenarios as significantly more unethical than those in Dragga's original study, with heightened attention to accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and social justice. While Dragga's study emphasized concerns over the consequences of document design choices, our results suggest a shift in focus toward the writer's intent. Participants frequently judged deliberate manipulation as unethical, even in cases where no direct harm was evident. These findings highlight the evolving ethical priorities in technical communication and underscore the need for practitioners and educators to reassess and revise the field's guiding principles to align with contemporary values of inclusivity and social responsibility.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping technical communication, necessitating strategies to assess its impact. This article introduces a framework combining human-in-the-loop automation with a task-based approach for communication roles. Effective AI integration requires identifying and organizing key writing tasks to fit into automated workflows. The framework underscores the value of writing expertise and offers practical guidance for practitioners, scholars, and educators. By aligning AI tools with technical communication tasks, professionals can produce accurate and complex communication products. This approach highlights the essential role of human expertise in effective, AI-assisted writing.

This corpus-based study investigates the grammatical stance constructions in CEO statements within the annual reports of U.S. and Vietnamese banks from 2020 to 2022. The findings indicate that modality is the dominant stance type followed by attitudinal and epistemic stance markers. Both groups of bank leaders favor desire/intention/decision verbs with infinitive complement clauses, certainty/likelihood verbs controlling complement clauses, and volition/prediction modality. But variations exist in the specific stance devices employed to shape corporate image and engage with stakeholders. These findings provide insights into cross-cultural corporate discourse in the banking sector and have valuable implications for business writing and professional communication.

This study uses an online questionnaire survey to investigate Chinese social media users’ acceptance of firm-generated credibility-building posts (FGCPs) on Sina Weibo. The findings show that heuristic cues related to content (i.e., topics regarding competence, benevolence, and integrity) and source (i.e., firm nationality and industry types) along with the moderating role of topic, account, and platform familiarity cues significantly influence users’ acceptance level of such posts. After incorporating the insights gained from participants’ responses to open-ended questions in the questionnaire, this study concludes with practical recommendations for crafting effective FGCPs on social media platforms like Sina Weibo.

This study investigates the social media strategies that Chinese museums use in communicating on Weibo, focusing on the ways these museums engage with the public and the effectiveness of their online interactions. Combining grounded theory and content analysis, the authors analyze 319 posts from six major museums and 842 posts from 36 smaller museums. Their findings suggest that although museums effectively use social media for educational purposes, there is room for more interactive and diverse content to enhance public engagement. The study provides practical insights on how museums can optimize their social media strategies by emphasizing audience-centered communication and greater interactivity in order to foster deeper connections with the public.

Community health practitioners face a common challenge of communicating the value of their work because it is intentionally designed to prevent health issues from happening. This case study examines how impact storytelling—a four-question framework developed by a community health manager at a nonprofit health system—mediates between technical expertise and executive's understanding. Through interviews with four Community Health practitioners, this research explains how the framework addresses specific technical communication challenges. This research brings together theory with practice by offering both a transferable framework for nonprofit organizations as well as theoretical insights into how workplace communication tools emerge from workplace practices.

This article uses a novel theoretical frame—materio-cognitivism—to explore how digital writing processes change with time and experience. Researchers observed 10 second langauge writers as they completed two research writing tasks—one at the start of their first year of university and one near the end of university. Interviews and screen recording were used to track writing activity. Five key writing strategies were identified. Among the most improved writers, researchers identified a set of shared changes in how writing strategies were deployed. In particular, the most improved writers showed increased ability to sequence subtasks, to arrange digital interfaces, and to combine internal cognitive functions with the affordances of digital tools. These findings suggest what the development of writing processes might look like in digital environments, potentially informing both writing pedagogy and assessment.

Despite extensive research on metadiscourse, methodology descriptions in research articles provide limited guidance on how to identify, classify, and, particularly in cases of clustered items, quantify metadiscourse markers. This article discusses the methodological challenges of analysing metadiscoursal adjectives, using the example of novice academic writers’ use of adjectival interactional metadiscourse markers. Our exploratory analysis of the corpus (654,925 tokens) revealed that, in a non-negligible number of cases (13.5%), metadiscoursal adjectives co-occurred with other linguistic items that were performing different metadiscoursal functions, thus putting a different interpretation on the initial observation. The phenomenon whereby both the adjective and its co-occurring item exercise a prominent metadiscoursal function—which we labelled superimposition —has been observed in previous studies but has not been adequately explored and has led to divergent, and often incomparable approaches, to metadiscourse quantification. We argue that metadiscoursal superimposition as a methodological approach can help bridge the gap between the individual marker analysis and their use in academic writing discourse, thus providing a structured, quantifiable, and functionally richer framework. We discuss the benefits, possible pitfalls, and implications of our proposal that superimposition be included and quantified as a supplementary step in metadiscourse quantification analyses.

This study investigates collaborative interdisciplinary research writing at a large public Western U.S. university through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and textual analyses. While 75% of faculty at this institution supported campuswide interdisciplinary initiatives, only 31% believed current institutional structures enhanced such work—a 44-percentage-point gap that our analysis suggests stemmed from five key obstacles to successful interdisciplinary writing: structural barriers, career concerns (particularly for pre-tenure faculty), disciplinary cultural differences, terminological conflicts, and divergent goals between faculty and administrators. Faculty in this study focused on immediate practical challenges and professional development, while administrators prioritize institutional transformation and structural change. The study concludes with recommendations relevant for universities with comparable resources and commitment to Writing Studies informed approaches, including revised tenure guidelines that explicitly value interdisciplinary contributions, dedicated funding mechanisms, facilitated networking opportunities, and targeted writing support programs. By addressing faculty’s practical needs and administrators’ strategic vision, institutions can create environments where collaborative boundary-crossing becomes not just possible but sustainable and rewarding.

We conducted a post hoc analysis of 771 students’ argumentative writing plans and essays in the Criterion ® database, a digital writing tool, to explore the relations among plan features, essay quality, and writing traits. Students in the study were in Grades 5 to 10 from 68 schools. We found that older students produced writing plans that received higher scores and demonstrated greater genre-specific knowledge than younger students, but regardless of their grade, most students did not consider alternative perspectives or rebut counterarguments in their writing plans. We also found that students’ choice of plan templates was associated with the scores of their plans. Further, factor analysis showed that six of the seven plan feature scores hung together in a single factor (Factor 1) and correlated with multiple trait scores (Factor 2), accounting for most of the shared variance connecting plan scores with writing traits. The “both sides” plan feature loaded on a different factor by its own, suggesting that considering different perspectives is a challenging skill that students may need extra support to develop.

This study investigated how reading medium (print vs. digital) and communicative purpose (informative vs. persuasive) shape writing processes and outcomes in integrative academic tasks. Eighty-one university students read three source texts in print or digitally and, after random assignment, produced either an informative or persuasive synthesis within a 2×2 between-subjects design. Keystroke logging recorded pausing across three writing stages, indexing planning, translation, and revision. Text quality was scored with holistic rubrics capturing discourse features and integration of sources. Reading medium significantly influenced pausing: students who read in print paused longer during writing, yet medium had no effect on overall text quality. Task purpose mattered: persuasive tasks yielded higher-quality formal writing, whereas scores reflecting level of source integration did not differ. No interaction between reading medium and task purpose emerged. When controlling for reading comprehension, working memory, and planning ability, the main effects of medium and task purpose remained, but period-specific pausing effects were no longer significant. Findings highlight distinct roles for reading medium and task purpose in shaping writing behavior and performance. The results support cautious causal interpretations and suggest that incorporating digital reading and varying task types may enhance academic writing in higher education, informing curriculum design and assessment.

This article adds to previous literature on writing “wayfinding” by examining how a writer’s religious beliefs and commitments shape their rhetorical choices and influence their writing wayfinding. The 5-year longitudinal study we report here used discourse-based interviews to understand the experiences of student writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Examining texts our study participants wrote in and outside of college classrooms, our analysis highlights moments when they used emotion and affect as rhetorical strategies to accomplish instrumental and relational goals. We found that in these moments, participants’ commitments as Latter-day Saints and their related identities significantly affected their writing decisions and their sense of wayfinding, particularly as they navigated writing contexts outside of familiar academic settings. The article suggests that understanding the challenges and opportunities writers face in the intersections between their rhetorical choices and their commitments as members of an organized church can help writing teachers better support students' writing development.

This article presents findings from a content analysis of 707 articles appearing between 2011 and 2020 in five journals issued by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a major teaching and research organization in North America. We examined topics and theoretical frameworks, finding that while core topics such as academic writing, curriculum, cultural studies, literacy, and teacher development remained stable, the latter part of the previous decade (2016–2020) showed increased attention to labor, diversity, social justice, and writing program administration, alongside declines in work focused on history, educational policy, ESL, and community writing. Many articles lacked explicit theoretical grounding, often using broad labels like “critical theory,” though use of specified frameworks (e.g., feminist and postcolonial theory) has grown. We identify differences among the journals and discuss the implications of these findings for NCTE, for content analysis as a method and for scholars’ efforts to navigate a complex and expanding field.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.