Rethinking the Structures of Academic Writing in the Times of Exacerbated Inequity: An Introduction

2025-07-10 17:50:07 | Contributor(s): Sean Zwagerman, Kim M. Mitchell | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.985

An introduction to the special issue for Rethinking the Structures of Academic Writing in the Times of Exacerbated Inequity. This paper presents a discussion of the inspiration for this special call for papers, an analysis of the genre presentation of the typical critical examination of...

Élaboration d’une typologie élémentaire des genres écrits professionnels à des fins didactiques

2025-07-10 17:50:06 | Contributor(s): Luca Pallanti | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.959

Based on the epistemic field of professional literacies, the study aims to build a basic typology of professional written genres for teaching purposes. It strives to categorize 135 authentic texts that have circulated in three companies whose activities fall within certain branches of the...

Drawing on Readerly Intuition in Sentence Level Feedback

2025-07-10 17:50:05 | Contributor(s): Michael John Kaler, Jonathan Vroom, Christoph Richter | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.913

In this paper, we discuss our research into the effects on student writing of giving sentence-level feedback at several stages in a scaffolded assignment in a large second year science course. Our results indicate that feedback that draws on the reader’s intuitive sense for writing, rather...

Academic Literacies in a South African Writing Centre: Student Perspectives on Established Practices

2025-07-10 17:50:05 | Contributor(s): Tyler Evans-Tokaryk, Kabinga Jack Shabanza | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.945

Through a case study conducted in 2014 and 2015 at the University of X in South Africa, the researchers collected focus group and survey data to develop a better understanding of the kinds of students who use the university’s Writing Centre and their perceptions of the support they receive....

What Is It Like to Sound Like a Bot?

2025-07-10 17:50:04 | Contributor(s): Amanda Paxton | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1043

This article proposes that the rise of GPT technology presents an opportunity to initiate meaningful discussions in the postsecondary classroom about the connections between writing, language, and personal autonomy. Partly grounded on predictive text, GPT-produced language is often...

The JSTOR Daily Project: Building Genre Awareness through Heuristic Learning

2025-07-10 17:50:04 | Contributor(s): Sarah Seeley | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1035

The article describes a publicly oriented writing assignment that can be adapted across disciplinary contexts. The assignment is linked to the JSTOR Daily publication with its tagline “where news meets its scholarly match.” Emulating the style of writing published in this open-access online...

“A podcast would be fun!”: The fetishization of digital writing projects

2025-07-10 17:50:04 | Contributor(s): Brian Hotson, Stephanie Bell | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.915

While digital writing projects (DWPs) like podcasts, videos, and infographics are rigorous sites of scholarly knowledge production, the growth in their popularity as classroom assignments often has more to do with a sense that these are “fun” assignments. Horner, Selfe, and Lockridge (2015)...

The Complexity Paper: A Writing Assignment that Targets Cognitive Bias

2025-07-10 17:50:03 | Contributor(s): James Southworth | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.981

Cognitive bias, especially confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, poses a significant challenge to argumentative writing genres, including the persuasive essay. To address this challenge, I introduce the complexity paper. Rather than attempting to convince the reader of a particular...

A Multimodal Assignment Design to Develop Discursive Skills in Engineering

2025-07-10 17:50:03 | Contributor(s): Faye D'Silva, Ken Tallman | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1027

Multimodality in assignments is increasingly common in higher education, thereby requiring students to demonstrate competency in the employment of multiple modes to communicate. Specifically, the field of engineering communication relies on multimodal resources to construct meaning and convey...

Genres in the Public Domain: Genre Uptakes, Responses, and Responsibility

2025-07-10 17:50:02 | Contributor(s): Stephen Dadugblor | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.999

This article analyzes a rhetorical genre ecology emerging in the aftermath of a natural disaster in Ghana. Drawing on news articles and opinion pieces, a presidential speech, a government post-disaster assessment summary, and a World Bank Group action report, I argue that in their operation...

“Nobody who can’t write can get a degree here”: The story of a Canadian university writing test

2025-07-10 17:50:02 | Contributor(s): Laura Dunbar | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.967

We see our study as falling into the category of writing program historiography known as microhistory: a narrative reconstruction that explores in thorough detail a particular time period in a specific writing program’s history while striving to remain sensitive to the socially constructed...

"Bilingual Always": A Study of Second Language Writing's Influence on Writing Studies in the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/Redactologie

2025-07-10 17:50:02 | Contributor(s): Christin Wright-Taylor | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.951

A neoliberal agenda has driven the evolution of internationalization in Canadian Higher Education since the early 2000s. This agenda positions translingual, visa students as human capital and influences educational policy particularly for writing classes and writing instruction. My research...

Beyond the word count: Using assignment sheets to promote genre awareness

2025-07-10 17:50:01 | Contributor(s): Kristen Allen | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1041

Despite the best efforts of their instructors, first-year students often misinterpret or even ignore assignment sheets, leading to unmet learning outcomes and demoralising marks. Like academic writing as a whole, assignment sheets often contain conventions, terminology, and expectations that...

Power effects, normalising advice and evolving knowledge of doctoral writing

2025-07-10 17:50:01 | Contributor(s): Kevin Gormley, Naoko Mochizuki | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.989

Prescriptive advice about doctoral writing often fails to recognise the complexities of the doctoral journey. Linguistic and cultural backgrounds are negated where advice about writing converges around a norm. In this paper, we explore the role of ‘advice’ in our growth as thesis writers by...

Teaching and Learning in a First-Year Writing Skills Transfer Course: Investigating College Professor and Student Experiences

2025-07-10 17:50:00 | Contributor(s): Taunya Tremblay, Jamie Zeppa, Shannon Blake, Kiley Bolton, Katarina Ohlsson, Christine Dalton, Victoria Yeoman, Lavaughn John | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1067

When Seneca Polytechnic replaced EAC150, an essay-based English course, with COM101, a first-semester writing course based on writing skills transfer, we saw the opportunity to investigate both professors’ and students’ experiences of the new approach. Specifically, we wanted to know how...

A Diverse Contributing Body: A Study of Second Language Writing’s Influence on Writing Studies in Inkshed

2025-07-10 17:50:00 | Contributor(s): Christin Wright-Taylor | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1053

In 1962, the CCCC released a report titled “The Freshman Whose Native Language is Not English.” In this report, the chair argued for separate courses dedicated to teaching language-diverse students and staffed by instructors specially trained in Linguistics. Paul Kei Matsuda (1999; 2013)...

Welcoming Writers, Welcoming Instructors: Integrating Antiracist and Decolonial Pedagogies via Multimodal Assignments in Canadian Postsecondary Writing Courses

2025-07-10 17:49:59 | Contributor(s): Marci Prescott-Brown | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1069

Canadian scholars increasingly recognize the importance of diverse and inclusive writing pedagogies to welcome students of various races, languages, orientations, genders, and abilities. Yet, if instructors do not feel welcomed into using the tools of antiracist and decolonial writing...

Doing our work in a good way: a framework of collaboration and a case for Indigenous-only writing classrooms

2025-07-10 17:49:59 | Contributor(s): Lydia Toorenburgh, Loren Gaudet | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1049

Since fall of 2021, UVic has offered a section of the foundational writing course, ATWP 135: Intro to Academic Writing that is dedicated for Indigenous students. This course provides a space for first-year Indigenous students to find a sense of belonging with each other and in the university...

New Tropes for Old: Changing the Conversation in Canadian Writing Centres

2025-07-10 17:49:58 | Contributor(s): Srividya Natarajan | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1095

Many of the celebrated and generative tropes that defined the work and self-image of American writing centres—tropes like Stephen North’s “fix-it shop in the basement,” Andrea Lunsford’s “Burkean Parlour,”and Kenneth Bruffee’s “conversation of mankind”—also helped create and affirm an apparent...

Examining AI Guidelines in Canadian Universities: Implications on Academic Integrity in Academic Writing

2025-07-10 17:49:57 | Contributor(s): Faith Marcel, Phoebe Kang | https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.1051

Academic integrity is a crucial aspect of higher education that fosters intellectual honesty and upholds the principles of fairness and trustworthiness (Stoez & Eaton, 2020; Kang, 2022; Eaton, 2022). As the introduction and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies becomes...