We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich…

This article details the material, locational, and time-use dimensions of student writing processes in two networked social spaces. Drawing on case examples, the findings show how composing habits grounded in the materiality of places can build persistence for learning in a mobile culture. Public social spaces support these habits, enabling some…

Through an eighty-one-year-old woman's literacy narrative, I argue that literacy researchers should pay greater attention to elder writers, readers, and learners. Particularly as notions of literacy shift in digital times, the perspective of a lifespan can reveal otherwise hidden complexities of literacy, including the motivational impact of…

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public…

Recent appeal to the concept of design in composition studies benefits teaching writing in digital media. Yet the concept of design has not been developed enough to fully benefit composition instruction. This article develops an understanding of design as a matter of resolving wicked problems and makes a case for the advantages of this…

The study of writers and writing in digital environments raises distinct and complex ethical issues for researchers. Rhetoric theory and casuistic ethics, working in tandem, provide a theoretical framework for addressing such issues. A casuistic heuristic grounded in rhetorical principles can help digital writing researchers critically…

Suggests the Internet has introduced the play element into student and corporate work culture. Examines a series of InterChange transcripts to demonstrate how discourse that combines serious and playful purposes works to provoke and mediate conflict. Concludes that students use serio-ludic discourse to critique and to negotiate power relations and…