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.

• Year 7 students can learn to code engaging animated narratives with basic Scratch. • English teachers can learn to sufficient coding to support students coding stories. • Student animated narratives of 2 – 3 min can meet English curricula requirements. • Student multimodality use can be evaluated using a criterion-based framework. • Student coding proficiency can be extended through coding animated narratives. 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.

• Students reported better understanding of writing with screencast assignments. • Students reported technology gains from screencast and screen recording assignments. • Students reported screencast and screen recording assignments were not complicated. • Blending spontaneous speech with the writing process helped students. • Students may feel self conscious when recording their screens and voices. Inexperienced writers often resist meaningful revision, which underscores the need for pedagogical approaches that foster deeper engagement. This study explores the use of student-led screen recordings and screencasts as pedagogical tools to promote students’ ownership and confidence in their writing processes. Our study surveyed 76 student writers in First-Year Writing classrooms to investigate this approach. The findings suggest that these assignments are easy to use, focus writers’ attention on the writing process, and leverage learning opportunities afforded by the transmodal blends of writing, video, and speech. Specifically, students reported more benefits from screencast assignments that allowed them to blend spontaneous speech into the writing process. Additionally, students reported that their technology skills improved after completing either the screencast or screen recording assignment. One downside was that students tended to feel self-conscious when recording their screens and voices. Overall, these student-led assignments are worth exploring in composition classrooms as they can lead to a deeper, more hands-on understanding of the writing process.

• Generative AI can help multilingual communicators in professional writing. • Generative AI supports email/report writing and meeting summary. • Practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. • Students’ AI use at workplace informs academic writing teaching and learning. Because multilingual students’ languaging practices are not limited to academic settings, it is important to explore their lived experiences communicating in real-world situations to shed light on how to prepare them in college classrooms in the era of generative AI. Drawing upon writing samples, artifacts and interview data, this case study brings attention to the potential and challenges a multilingual international student face in implementing generative AI-assisted written communication during her 5-month internship in the workplace. The findings indicate that generative AI tools, especially ChatGPT, have the potential to help multilingual communicators meet their written linguistic demands in professional contexts, especially in email writing, report drafting and meeting summary. Generative AI-assisted writing tools could assist multilingual students with idea expression and boost their confidence and agency in communication. Yet, despite its many advantages, practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. This study contributes to the scarce yet budding literature exploring multilingual international students’ AI engagement in professional settings and offers concrete pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

This article develops the concept and procedures of a large-scale, autoethnographic research process termed Community Inter-Autoethnography . This is a research methodology in which multiple individuals conduct autoethnographies and collaboratively synthesize their positionings to produce negotiated, community-level understandings. The methodical argument is that there is a need for a research process that allows multiple voices across large social groupings to be heard in order to capture and understand diverse and shared positionings within that setting. As argued, this increase in scale answers historical questions concerning the representativeness and applicability of autoethnographic research. Building upon the expansion of single-person autoethnographies to collaborative studies (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez) and developments in science education toward the inclusive Research and Education Community (Hanauer et al.), the current article explicates how autoethnographic research can be used with a large number of participants across a community. In Hanauer et al. this approach is exemplified in a study that included 106 participants co-authoring a study of the professional identity of Course-Based Research lab instructors. Community inter-autoethnographic research provides a way of reaching community conclusions based on both diverse individual experiences and negotiated collective understandings.

This study explores how a human-centered design (HCD) approach encourages written communication researchers to rethink methodologies when studying wicked problems, particularly in healthcare communication contexts. We argue for “methodological mutability” as a strategy to address complex and evolving challenges in rural healthcare communication. Using design thinking principles, we investigated how generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning can enhance medical communication, streamline documentation, and improve telemedicine usability. Our research revealed that rural healthcare providers view effective patient-provider communication as their primary challenge. This finding led us to pivot toward exploring how AI applications can structure and enhance patient narratives. We advocate for researchers to adopt a designer mindset, integrating methodological flexibility to move beyond problem analysis and instead develop solutions. By embedding HCD, design thinking, and methodological mutability into research design, researchers can prioritize practical interventions when working in spaces beset by wicked problems.

This study examines how diversity and inclusion are communicated in LinkedIn job advertisements as workplace communication texts. Using qualitative, discourse-oriented analysis of job advertisements from global hotel brands, the study identifies recurring discursive frames through which organisations construct inclusivity, including belonging-oriented language, celebration of diversity, formal equal opportunity claims, and well-being–focussed narratives. These discourses are realised through specific communicative signals such as non-discrimination statements, values-based cultural cues, identity-affirming language, and references to inclusive policies. The study proposes the Inclusive Recruitment Communication Process conceptual framework, explaining inclusive recruitment communication as a platform-mediated process linking discourse, signalling, and conceptualised applicant sensemaking.

This article’s author situates late 19th-century essays by Andrew Carnegie within the rhetorical history of business and professional communication (BPC). A close analysis of the essays reveals that Carnegie relied on rhetoric to shape his public image as a benevolent business leader during a period characterized by significant socioeconomic divisions in the United States. Three primary themes— wealth , labor , and democracy —emerge, which the author argues animated Carnegie’s reasoning and arguments throughout the essays. The author concludes by recommending greater attention to the rhetorical history of BPC in future research and teaching.

Finding a research problem is the first and most consequential choice a researcher can make, but making this choice about what is not yet known can leave the researcher in a hazy world of uncertainty until the project takes shape. While each person needs to find their own path through the haze, I have found that four kinds of questions help me locate and design a useful research project: what is in front of me; how I add up what I and others have learned previously; how the project fits in various perspectives in and outside the field of writing studies; and how the study advances knowledge and/or aids with practical problems. Only when the answers to these four different questions come together, am I confident of the value of a particular study. Often it takes, however, some kind of unexpected catalyst to bring the project into focus.

This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

The disaggregation of data around human identities can act as a rich method, providing researchers with new ways of understanding community and workplace writing. However, demographic analysis can unknowingly perpetuate harmful stereotypes and constructions of human identity. This article examines common issues with disaggregation of identity-based data in research and details an empirical research project that drove the research team to reconsider new approaches to desegregated data. In response, I propose a participant self-identification method and offer a heuristic guiding researchers to critically interrogate demographic data collection, enabling more equitable, participant-centered approaches to understanding identity in writing research.

This article illustrates the affordances of a four-part interview protocol that combines elements of phenomenology with traditional discourse-based interviews. On the basis of two case studies with Black and Latinx writers, I demonstrate how this protocol affords a richer understanding of tacit writing competencies developed to push back against and mitigate the harm of marginalization.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly marketed to knowledge workers as productivity tools for focused, immersive work. Yet little empirical research examines the lived experience of sustained VR use for complex academic writing tasks. This study presents a 10-week diary study of a doctoral candidate using VR to compose her dissertation during summer 2025. Through weekly reflective entries, screen recordings, and artifact analysis, we examine the user experience dimensions of immersive academic writing. Our thematic analysis reveals six major findings: (1) technical infrastructure constraints dominated the writing experience; (2) embodied discomfort consistently limited sessions to 30–50 min; (3) affective dimensions shaped productivity; (4) learning curves remained steep throughout the study; (5) task type significantly influenced success, with structured administrative writing outperforming open-ended academic drafting; and (6) technical disruptions fragmented flow and made momentum recovery difficult. We argue that VR writing tools require task-appropriate design, realistic session expectations, and user agency to discontinue when needs are not met. These findings contribute user-centered evidence to technical communication scholarship on emerging composing technologies and offer practical guidance for graduate writing programs.

This study addresses the persistent misalignment between Arabic language curricula in Chinese universities and the communicative demands of Arabic-mediated business work. Adopting an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, we surveyed 105 Chinese graduates who use Arabic in professional settings and conducted follow-up interviews with three lecturers responsible for Arabic for Business Purposes (ABP) courses. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed three reliable constructs: teaching methodology, workplace ability, and future training needs, while regression analyses showed that learner-centered, task-based teaching methodologies significantly predict graduates’ perceived workplace ability and heighten their awareness of ongoing training needs. The qualitative findings illuminated high-stakes communicative events such as negotiations, client correspondence, and intercultural meetings, and revealed systematic gaps between academic instruction and workplace discourse practices. Integrating quantitative and qualitative strands, the study proposes a dual-layer instructional model consisting of eight developmental stages and five interrelated competence domains that link classroom tasks to authentic business communication events. The model offers a contextualized pathway for redesigning ABP curricula in China and contributes to wider debates on how language-for-specific-purposes programmes can better support employability and professional communication readiness.

Teacher communication influences students’ cognitive and emotional well-being, yet mechanisms linking communication behaviors to learning outcomes remain underexplored. Grounded in the conservation of resources framework, this study tested an ecological model in which teacher clarity and rapport indirectly reduced writing apprehension through perceived immediacy, self-efficacy, and burnout. Undergraduate students ( N  = 389) in Business and Professional Communication courses completed validated measures. Structural equation modeling supported a serial mediation: clarity and rapport predicted immediacy and self-efficacy, which reduced burnout and, in turn, writing apprehension. Findings highlight burnout as a psychological conduit linking instructional communication to student anxiety.

To address students’ challenges in business writing and bridge the gap between workplace demands and the skills of new professionals, this quasi-experimental study examined the effects of flipped-ARCS and face-to-face ARCS instruction on Pakistani undergraduate English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ business writing achievement and motivation in a business communication course. The findings indicated that the flipped-ARCS model was more effective in improving business writing, while face-to-face ARCS instruction better boosted students’ motivation, supporting the potential of innovative teaching strategies and providing valuable insights for educators and policymakers on integrating technology-based instructional methods into business writing education.

Communicating risk through public-facing formats like infographics is important in technical communication. Grounding our work in a collection of infographics about extreme heat risk, we argue that understanding attention and memory can help communicators make more effective design choices. This study combined eye tracking with memorability data to determine (a) what elements of infographics (text, visuals) drew attention and (b) what participants found memorable about heat risk communication. Results from our exploratory research found that student designer and community participants (1) spent less time reviewing the bottom quarter of infographics and (2) spent the majority of their time reading text but remembered visual and textual elements equally.