Recent Publications by Faculty

• Author(s): Rebekka Andersen and Carlos Evia
• Publisher(s): Routledge
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003451730
• Published: September 2025

"This book explores how workflows and technologies that treat content as computable data are changing the roles, work activities, and outputs of professional technical communicators.

It describes how the need for disciplinary approaches to design, manage, and deliver content has given rise to “the discipline of content” – content strategy, content design, content engineering, content operations – that increasingly defines a facet of technical communication work in modern organizations. This book draws on extensive research of the discipline of content and dozens of interviews with industry leaders, hiring managers, and academic administrators, educators, and alumni. These first-hand accounts outline how roles and activities in content organizations are changing, how these changes are impacting hiring needs and practices, and what skills and qualities students and early-career professionals now need to obtain content-related jobs and advance to strategic positions. This book also offers guidance for building curricular pathways that prepare students for work in the discipline of content and offers strategies for enhancing pathways through industry outreach and partnerships.

A thorough assessment of the implications of the discipline of content for technical communication, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of technical writing, professional and public writing, content strategy, content marketing and information design"

• Author(s): Marit Macarthur, Sophia Minnillo, Lisa Sperber, Carl Whithaus, and Nicholas Stillman
• Source: Frontiers in Communication, sec. Culture and Communication, Volume 10, Sep 2025
• DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1615752
• Published: September 2025

"Responding to educators’ concerns about how to address GenAI in professional writing assignments and courses, we present a tested pedagogical model that integrates GenAI feedback into writing curricula, with a particular focus on a Business Writing course with 34 students in 2024. The Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR) model follows this method: teachers scaffold major writing assignments so that students participate in peer review of a full draft, then elicit criteria-based feedback on the same draft from a chatbot. Next, students reflect on and critically assess both peer and chatbot-generated feedback and formulate revision plans. After revising, students compose a second reflection about how each kind of feedback influenced their revisions. In this paper, we motivate the PAIRR model, offer instructions for implementation, and share findings. We note the effectiveness of PAIRR in guiding students to critically interrogate AI output, build AI literacy, and prioritize their voices and writing goals while revising in response to peer and AI feedback. Addressing the particular challenges faced by multilingual international students in professional writing courses, we also showcase the affordances and utility of this model for these students. Finally, we discuss the applicability of PAIRR for a variety of writing courses."

• Author(s): Lisa Sperber, Marit MacArthur, Sophia Minnillo, Nicholas Stillman, and Carl Whithaus
• Source: Computers and Composition, Volume 76, Jun 2025
• DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2025.102921
• Published: June 2025

"Cycles of drafting and revising are crucial for student writers' growth, and formative assessment plays an important role. However, many teachers lack the time or resources to provide feedback on drafts. While research suggests that AI feedback is high enough quality to be used for draft feedback, especially when assignment-specific criteria are used (Steiss et al., 2024), it must be used in a human-centered process. AI has the potential to reduce educational equity gaps in writing support (Warschauer et al., 2023), but when narrowly implemented, technologies can deepen divides (Stornaiuolo, et al., 2023). Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR) combines peer review best practices with AI review in an approach that emphasizes student agency and reflection. Using a mixed methods approach, this study examined student perceptions of AI utility in the context of peer review. Results indicate that AI tools offer useful feedback when combined with peer review. Students found the similarity between AI and peer feedback reassuring, while also valuing their complementary perspectives. Moreover, by evaluating AI outputs, students developed AI literacy, gaining familiarity with AI feedback's affordances and limitations while learning ethical ways to use AI in their writing processes."

• Author(s): Kory Lawson Ching and Sabina Simon
• Source: College Composition & Communication, Volume 76, Issue 4, Jun 2025, p. 494 - 517
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc2025764494
• Published: June 2025

"This study explores student engagements with hybrid writing courses, revealing their experiences and perceptions of a modality that blends in-person and online instruction. Hybrid learning as a format is often overshadowed by its association with fully online instruction. After a number of writing courses on our campus were redesigned for hybrid delivery, we conducted interviews and focus groups with students taking those courses. What we found, among other things, was that students largely saw hybrid writing courses as striking a balance between the flexibility of online learning with opportunities for human contact and the social presence afforded by in-person class meetings. Even more intriguing, though, was how students talked about the purposes of—and relationships between—the online and in-person components of their hybrid courses. In other words, it was not just the case that students appreciated hybrid learning, but also that clear patterns emerged in the meanings and values they ascribed to the constituent elements of these courses and the perceived cohesiveness of instruction across the modes. This study ends with implications for the design and implementation of hybrid writing courses, and it emphasizes the need for further scholarship that recognizes the unique affordances and challenges of this instructional modality."

• Author(s): Carl Whithaus
• Publisher(s): ‎University of Pittsburgh Press
• ISBN: 9780822947950
• Published: April 2025

"Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local examines the social and rhetorical dynamics around emerging writing technologies. Carl Whithaus argues that these dynamics work across networked publics as patterns of behavior and ways of interacting through and with multimodal texts. This rhetorical analysis of the production and reception of born-digital rhetoric shows the ongoing and evolving impacts of online public discourse that can lead to bad restaurant reviews or the subversion of democracy. It is a networked process that gains significance because of the interplay and tensions between the global and the local. As these texts are created, distributed, received, and then recreated and shared again in viral ways, different messages resonate across media ecologies. Whithaus documents how emerging social dynamics shape—and are shaped by—digital writing, reading, and distribution technologies. "

• Author(s): Jennifer Burke Reifman, Stacy Wittstock, Tricia Serviss, Beth Pearsall and Dan Melzer
• Source: College Composition & Communication, Volume 76, Issue 3, Feb 2025, p. 423 - 451
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc2025763423
• Published: February 2025

"This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them."

• Author(s): Karen Lunsford, Carl Whithaus, and Jonathan Alexander
• Source: Improvisations: Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research (Chapter 15)
• Publisher(s): The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado
• DOI:  https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2024.2289
• Published: June 2024

"Improvisations provides readers with insights and options as they develop new lifespan writing research projects or seek to re-orient existing projects to incorporate a lifespan lens. In Part 1 of this edited collection, contributors consider research methodologies that have been adapted to the particular demands of lifespan writing research, with each methodology given two chapters: one that outlines the process of taking up the methodology, and another that provides a detailed example of the methodology in action. In Part 2, contributors suggest new methodologies for lifespan writing research and highlight challenges that this line of inquiry presents as an ethical and socially conscious research agenda. These chapters, representing both established experts and new voices in writing, literacy, and education research, will be of use to graduate students and novice researchers, accomplished researchers pivoting to this area of study for the first time, and others who want to learn more about lifespan writing research."

• Editor(s): Diane Kelly-Riley, Ti Macklin, and Carl Whithaus
• Publisher(s): ‎The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2024.2166
• Published: April 2024

"The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment. "

• Editor(s): Diane Kelly-Riley, Ti Macklin, and Carl Whithaus
• Publisher(s): ‎The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2024.2326
• Published: April 2024

"The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment."

• Author(s): Karen Lunsford, Carl Whithaus, and Jonathan Alexander
• Source: Rhetoric Review, Volume 43, Issue 1, Mar 2024, p. 59 - 77
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2023.2286138
• Published: March 2024

"This article examines what activism looks like in an age of “deep writing.” As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices."