Paula Rosinski’s research while affiliated with Elon University and other places

Reporting on survey data from 1,366 students from seven colleges and universities, this article examines the self-reported writing choices of students as they compose different kinds of texts using a wide range of composing technologies, both traditional (i.e., paper, pencils, pens, etc.), and digital (i.e., cell phones, wikis, blogs, etc.). This analysis and discussion is part of the larger Revisualizing Composition study, which examines the writing lives of first-year students across multiple institution types throughout the United States. We focus especially on what appear to be, at first glance, contradictory or confusing results, because these moments of ambiguity in students' use of composing technologies point to shifts or tensions in students' attitudes, beliefs, practices and rhetorical decision-making strategies when writing in the 21st century. The implications of these ambiguous results suggest paths for continued collaborative research and action. They also, we argue, point to a need to foster students' reflexive, critical, and rhetorical writing - across composing technologies - and to develop updated writing pedagogies that account for students' flexible use of these technologies.

This article shares results from a multi-institutional study of the role of writing in college students' lives. Using case studies built from a larger population survey along with interviews, diaries, and a daily SMS texting protocol, we found that students report SMS texting, lecture notes, and emails to be the most frequent writing practices in college student experience and that these writing practices are often highly valued by students as well. Our data suggest that college students position these pervasive and important writing practices as coordinative acts that create social alignment. Writing to coordinate people and things is more than an instrumental practice: through this activity, college students not only operate within established social collectives that shape literacy but also actively participate in building relationships that support them. In this regard, our study of writing as it functions in everyday use helps us understand contemporary forms of social interaction.

As digital interfaces increasingly mediate our access to information, the design of these interfaces becomes increasingly important. Designing digital interfaces requires writers to make rhetorical choices that are sometimes technical in nature and often correspond with principles taught in the computer science subfield of human-computer interaction. We propose that an HCI-informed writing pedagogy can complicate for both writing and computer science students the important role audience should play when designing traditional and digital interfaces. Although it is a subtle shift in many ways, this pedagogy seemed to complicate student understanding of the relationship between audience and the texts/interfaces they created: it was not just the “human” (beliefs, attitudes, values, demographics) or the “computer” (the software or hardware or other types of mediation) that mattered but rather the “interaction” between the two. First we explore some of the ways in which writing code and writing prose have merged and paved the way for an HCI-informed writing pedagogy. Next we examine some parallels between human-computer interaction principles and composition principles. Finally, we refer to assignments, student responses, and anecdotal evidence from our classes where an HCI-informed writing pedagogy drew—or could have drawn—student attention more acutely to various audience-related technical and rhetorical interface design choices.