This article focuses on the writing strategies second-language students use to compose on social media sites. These alternative and unconventional sites for learning provide language learners opportunities to acquire language by using multiple modalities to respond to various rhetorical situations. In comparison to these sites, academic writing…

The study of discourse genres as social action has steadily displaced more traditional views of genre, proposing the organic and ecological model that any consistent pattern of response to a recurrent rhetorical situation might constitute a genre. Observation of the life cycles of genres as transient social events can occur in a classroom using…

A composition instructor became interested in the playfulness of electronic discourse and how it might reshape student composition. He noticed that playfulness sets many hypertexts off from their better-behaved print ancestors, suspecting that the playful elements of student hypertexts were more than mere "play," that they opened writers…