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The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a "CARE" framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational--a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

Since its release in late 2022, ChatGPT and subsequent generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools have raised a wide variety of questions and concerns for the field of technical communication: How will these tools be incorporated into professional settings? How might we appropriately integrate these tools into our research and teaching? In this review, we examine research published in 2023-2024 addressing these questions (N = 28). Overall, we find preliminary evidence that GAI tools can positively impact student writing and assessment; they also have the potential to assist with some aspects of academic and medical research and writing. However, there are concerns about their reliability and the ethical conundrums raised when they are used inappropriately or when their outputs cannot be distinguished from humans. More research is needed for evidence-based teaching and research strategies as well as policies guiding ethical use. We offer suggestions for new research avenues and methods.

Collaborative writing assignments are an essential element of teaching technical and professional writing, and they should be included in online writing instruction (OWI). The COVID-19 pandemic was a drastic interruption of regular teaching practices that had the potential of derailing the practice of assigning online collaborative writing projects, which often require a heavy investment of time and energy to manage. As educators and scholars, we must learn from the experiences we had during the pandemic time. For example, amidst the trials and turbulence of the period, we had an opportunity to learn from some of the practices we undertook and identify ways to support post-pandemic team-writing online. This article focuses on the integration of online collaborative writing projects, among which are team-written assignments. Using an archival case study approach combined with reflective writing, several current intersections are explored: the landscape of Online Writing Instruction (OWI): the application of four specific themes to collaborative writing projects; how digital meeting platforms have transformed collaborative writing projects; assessing collaborative writing projects completed during mandated isolation; and how best to support student learning in all of the preceding intersections. Results suggest that agile practices, transparency, adaptability, and virtual makerspaces support online team-writing assignments.

Writing a research paper as a graduation requisite by university students is an important part of university education. It is not a simple task for most university students who face several problems during writing the graduation project. Several kinds of research have been conducted onrecognising the challenges and problems that face students in academic writing, but to the researcher's best knowledge, no study has been conducted on the problems faced in writing a graduate research paper by Jordanian undergraduate students of the English Language and Literature major. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the academic writing challenges and difficulties encountered in writing graduation papers by EFL undergraduate students in the Department of English at Alzaytoonah University of Jordan (ZUJ). The data for the study was collected through distributing a questionnaire of three parameters: attitude about writing a research paper, methodology challenges, and background knowledge about research. The questionnaire is based on identifying the causes of the students' challenges in writing their graduation papers. The respondents were 45 undergraduate students of the English Language and Literature. The findings revealed that the most important problems were lack of an academic prerequisite of teaching the techniques of how to write a research paper, lack of knowledge of research paper writing process, lack of resources, lack of the methodology, etc. Thus, for these reasons, the present study attempts to present suggestions and recommendations to overcome such hurdles faced by graduate students in writing their graduation research papers.

Although retrospective project reports are common in the materials development literature, accounts of textbook writing sessions are rare; so too are accounts of open textbook production. Open textbooks are learning resources that are free to use and oftentimes adapt by virtue of their copyright permissions. The authors used concurrent verbalization and interviews to document writing episodes while preparing their first book, an open textbook devised for corequisite technical writing courses. Corequisite designs pair content courses with explicit skill-building modules as a means to support underprepared learners in higher education in the United States. Qualitative content analysis of the data revealed how teaching and other praxis influenced the open textbook's composition: in the authors' applications of technical writing principles, pedagogical reasoning skills, and nonteaching work. The findings may encourage open textbook writers to exploit their established composing practices and knowledge bases to proceed with textbook production. In addition, the article highlights the usefulness of concurrent verbalization to textbook research and identifies the various materials development opportunities open textbook projects provide. It also contributes to the underresearched area of textbook production by exposing the complexities of open textbook development and how two novice authors negotiated them during writing episodes.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates' scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students' writing needs in tertiary settings.

Institutions of higher education introduced professional writing classes as a way of preparing students for on-the-job-writing. To better accomplish the goal as well as to get a more consistent output from these classes that require the writing of a project proposal or report, writing teachers may want to incorporate "R.E.A.L." principles onto the "Find-Test-Deliver" pedagogical triangle that mark the three phases of their project writing courses. When R.E.A.L principles, where R stands for "Reader oriented," E for "Extensively researched," A for "Actionable solution," and L for "Looped composition," are used, the writing output becomes both academically sound and workplace appropriate. The article delves into the rationale behind the principles and proffers suggestions on how teachers could incorporate them into their teaching. It concludes that such an approach is a paradigm shift in professional writing instruction. First presented at the University of Maryland Global Campus's "Explore, Collaborate, Innovate" conference in 2017, the article grows out of the author's experiences and insights from being Marketing Director and Technical communicator at INFINITEE & other corporate houses as well as a Professor and content expert of business and technical writing courses at Rutgers University and other institutions of higher learning in the United States.

This article describes a course design that offers an innovative approach to using client-based projects (CBPs) in technical and professional writing. It shows how teachers can incorporate CBPs in hybrid or fully virtual instruction, adapt it for a quarter or semester, and tailor it to meet students' needs. While there are standard writing assignments, such as letters, memos, progress reports, and job application materials, other writing activities assigned depend on the CBP. These projects can involve creating operation manuals, employee handbooks, event planning guides, rewriting gaming instructions, summarizing scientific reports, producing website content, and/or compiling annotated bibliographies. First, CBPs foster students' different talents and abilities and provide different ways to improve communication skills, allowing students to pursue their writing interests across a range of disciplines. Secondly, this course has broad enough goals to support CBP integration. This course was designed around three such broad goals: (1) composing in professionally appropriate modes; (2) understanding professional obligations and ethical behaviors in diverse situations; and (3) working individually and collaboratively. Finally, the learning objectives for each goal are flexible, thus providing both instructor and student with an open framework for pursuing client-based work.

Engineers, being hands-on experts, need to produce technical documents that are convincing to colleagues, executives, and clients. This study analyzes different technical documents written by engineers and offers instruction on how to approach the task of technical writing. The quantitative part of the study involved gathering statistics on the types of documents most frequently written by engineers and the importance engineers assign to technical writing in their career. The study participants consisted of 60 engineers selected through a snowball sampling method. Data was collected through the use of a questionnaire. The results of the data are presented in frequencies and percentages. An analysis of the data reveals that engineers currently practicing in Saudi Arabia believe writing to be important in their field. In total, 66.7% believe writing to be "very important," whereas the remaining 33.3% believe it to be "important"; none of the respondents believe writing to be only "slightly important" or "not important." When asked whether their background education in the engineering field adequately prepared them for writing on the job, only 30 (50%) were confident of their writing abilities following their engineering degrees. The other 30 (50%), although they found their skills in technical writing to be useful, were not confident of its adequacy in the workplace. Given the option of selecting more than one answer, respondents recorded the following frequencies for the type of writing they usually do at work: 40 out of 60 respondents (6.7%) stated that they frequently write interim or progress reports; 30 (50%) stated that they write final or recommendation reports. However, only 10 (16.7%) of the respondents revealed that they often write more focused reports, such laboratory reports. Engineers also write a fair number of non-report documents, including memos, emails, and logbook entries.

This paper aims at investigating the effects of a genre-based approach to teaching technical writing to Thai engineers, with a focus on writing work instructions, and the attitudes of Thai engineers toward this genre-based writing. The lesson plan was evaluated by three experts for the appropriateness of teaching technical writing to Thai engineers. Learning achievements have been examined using a comparison of pre- and post-tests for ten engineers who are in the same discipline, yet have different backgrounds of English proficiency. The learning outcomes were measured by the difference in scores between pre-test and post-test, and revealed that there was a significant difference between after teaching at p-value < 0.05 (p= 0.002) as indicated by their paired t-test analysis. Lastly, a satisfaction interview of the overall course has been conducted for four participants and showed that the engineers' attitudes were positive about the teaching method.

Tackling environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity in writing courses. Yet, for teachers designing professional and technical writing classes, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses in their digital compositions, including blogs? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in professional and technical writing courses affect students' research, digital writing, collaborative, and critical-thinking outcomes, along with influencing their personal and larger goals? This article discusses a four-year case study at a Southwestern university of an experimental course assignment's design, and it involves 252 students, including many Native Americans. Students engaged with environmental themes and ecocomposition methods in an upper-division class. This article includes a description of the class's major assignment, a blog site and reflective essay, and the blog's assessment criteria, with raters measuring the blog's writing outcomes. Overall, employing ecocomposition practices within the blog assignment unit provided students with a relevant curriculum, assisting them in conducting research for a blog space; writing digitally and thinking critically about diverse spaces related to their backgrounds, majors, and futures; and forging ties with classmates and potential outside audiences. The study's results have implications for implementing ecocomposition design in writing classes.

This article presents a reexamination of intercultural components in prominent, recent technical professional communication textbooks. This examination reveals the need for the technical professional communication field to establish a dynamic definition of culture as well as presents a possible definition, presents areas where textbooks have addressed previous scholars' concerns as well as areas that could still use improvement and may require instructors to add supplemental instruction, and presents considerations for instructors when incorporating intercultural component elements into their courses.

Lecture videos have become an increasingly prevalent and important source of learning content. Lecturergenerated summaries may be used during a video lecture to improve student recall. Furthermore, the integration of a guest lecturer into the classroom may be a beneficial educational practice drawing the learner's attention to specific content or providing a change of pace. The current study measures the effects of lecturer-generated summaries and the inclusion of a guest lecturer on students' ability to recall online video lecture contents. Seven sections of a flipped scientific writing course were divided into three groups. The control group videos featured a lecturer speaking with PowerPoint slides in the background. The "Summaries Only" group viewed the same videos as those of the control, with the addition of lecturergenerated summaries spliced into the middles and ends of the videos, respectively, and these summaries were delivered by the same lecturers of the original video. The "Summaries with a Guest Lecturer" group viewed the same videos as the control, but with the addition of lecturer-generated summaries respectively spliced into the middles and ends of the videos, and these summaries were instead delivered by a guest lecturer. Student recall was measured through two online multiple-choice quizzes. The results of the study show that the Summaries Only group significantly outperformed the other two groups, while no significant difference was found between the performances of the control and the Summaries with a Guest Lecturer group. The results suggest that lecturer-generated summaries help to improve student recall of online video lecture contents. However, the introduction of a guest lecturer shown in a different setting may cause learners to lose concentration, nullifying the benefit of the summaries.

We present a strategy for using scientific argumentation in an early undergraduate laboratory course to teach disciplinary writing practices and to promote critical thinking, knowledge transformation, and understanding of the scientific method. The approach combines targeted writing instruction; data analysis and interpretation; formulation of a hypothesis; and construction of an argument. Students submit and receive feedback on two drafts of two different argumentation essays, providing the opportunity for guided practice. Each written argument is intended to draw on several weeks' course material, including short lectures, discussions, readings, and problem sets. Thus our aim with these writing assignments is to help students synthesize content and concepts, deepening their learning. We have found that this inquiry-based approach to writing engages students in course material, and significantly improves both writing and learning. We observed the greatest improvement among students with the lowest initial scores, suggesting that lower-achieving students benefitted disproportionately from this approach. Students have responded positively to the use of writing in the course, many stating on course evaluations that this is the first time they have received instruction in scientific writing. They have also pointed to a greater ''big-picture'' understanding of the course gained through writing. We describe the course and our curriculum, and provide suggestions for implementation as well as rubrics used to evaluate problem sets and student argumentation essays.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the "what" and "why" of online technical writing instruction but also the "how" of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

The ability to read and compose original scientific literature is critical to educating informed citizens, yet may be severely lacking in undergraduate curricula. We developed a linked course offering in fall 2017 consisting of a 16-student group taking an introductory biology course paired with a first-year composition course. The composition course focused specifically on scientific literature composed in the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) structure. In the composition course, instruction focused on helping students conceptualize and compose proposals, poster presentations, and manuscripts based on their lab activities. We surveyed for prior experience with scientific literature and self-reported reading and writing confidence. Participants in the linked courses showed an improvement in self-reported ability and confidence in writing compared to a control group that did not participate. We assembled a rubric assessing correct IMRaD structure and used it to assess composition before and after the linked courses. Adherence to IMRaD improved significantly for the Methods section. Our experiences indicate that learning communities can be useful pedagogies to provide students with confidence and learning gains that facilitate use of information and communication.

This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka's approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka's pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes educational theory that insists upon the importance of disequilibrium. We then report how our students respond to our disequilibrating pedagogy, collecting survey responses via an IRB approved study. We hope these responses can help instructors interested in our postpedagogical notion of creativity anticipate and prepare for student discomfort and resistance--to recognize the fine distinction between productively confused and hopelessly lost. With that goal in mind, we conclude by addressing difficult questions of assessment.

Technical writing skills are vital to professional engineers, but many engineering students find them difficult to master. This paper presents a case study carried out among ~300 first and second year engineering students who had little previous experience in technical writing. The aim was to support them to write better technical reports. Students were asked to write an 800-word report following an experimental laboratory and to include written reflection on their work. This improved writing skills (as measured by mark awarded and by questionnaires completed by students before and after the activity) by encouraging self-regulation and had the additional benefit that students were more satisfied with and engaged with the feedback they received on their work.

Drawing on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum, this study documents how students in writing courses at four different institutions transferred writing knowledge and practice concurrently into other sites of writing, including other courses, co-curriculars, and workplaces. This research demonstrates that when students, supported by the TFT curriculum, understood that appropriatetransfer of writing knowledge and practice is both possible and desirable, (1) they engaged in writing transfer during the TFT course into other sites of writing; (2) they transferred from in-school contexts into out-of-school contexts with facility; and (3) in both cases, they engaged in a just-in-time transfer.

This article introduces a new course in the Virginia Community College System English Curriculum, "English 114: Scientific Writing." The article briefly reviews the concept of "science rhetoric," then discusses the intended audience and purpose of the course, and explains the basic goals of the course in relation to the two-year science student-writer. Next the article reviews the Course Content Summary, explaining and giving examples for each of the objectives listed, and notes one significant challenge to the success of the class in the VCCS. The article includes student responses, a sample syllabus, two sample writing assignments, and a complete Bibliography of relevant readings for the instructor new to the subject. The article recommends texts to support class instruction. The writer is also the author of the course.

The science laboratory report, a staple of science instruction across all educational levels, can be syntactically and lexically challenging for both native and nonnative speakers of English. Because mastery of the science report genre in Western societies relies on internalized knowledge of the structure of the science report as well as on the mastery of writing techniques, nonnative speakers of English can be at a disadvantage if they have not mastered these skills. To succeed, students need explicit instructional guidance in writing science reports. The purpose of this article is to describe general linguistic features of the science report genre and the individual sections of the science report, along with the corresponding convention requirements and general recommendations for writing each section effectively. Discussion focuses on strategies to meet the needs of all students to attain the standards of the science report genre, emphasizing English learners' needs.

We build on previous scholarship calling for sustainable growth in technical and professional communication programs through "maintenance and reflection." Inspired by continuous improvement models used in industry, we offer GRAM--Gather--Read--Analyze--Make--a continuous improvement model designed to identify and align often overlooked practices and processes necessary to build and sustain programs.

Responding to the call for the contemplative teaching of writing initiated by O'Reilley (1993) and extended by Kirsch (2008; 2009), Kroll (2013), Kroll (2008), Wenger (2015), and Harrison (2012), among others, this article explores the theoretical considerations, practical components, challenges, and adaptability involved in teaching a contemplative research writing course. This article takes up the theoretical considerations of teaching a contemplative research writing course by examining the growing need for contemplative writing as a practice of mindfulness in an increasingly de-selfed academic culture (Hurlbert, 2012). Relatedly, this article examines the challenges involved when a pedagogy makes attendant assumptions about students, knowledge creation, the role of mindfulness in higher education, and the holistic decentering of the classroom space. Concerning the practical components of a contemplative research writing course, this article describes the central roles of contemplative silence (Kirsch, 2009) and freewriting, sustained inquiry writing projects, stable writing groups, and cycles of revision and reflection. Following this, this article takes up the challenges often engendered by the deployment of contemplative pedagogies in the context of higher education. Finally, this article describes the use of this course as a model for fostering writers' engagement with their own disciplinary knowledge that is adaptable for sustained writing courses across the disciplines.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy's assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff's approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

In undergraduate biology laboratory courses, laboratory reports can be a useful tool for teaching scientific writing, integration of source material, and information literacy; however, these teaching objectives are at times undermined by students' plagiarism. Laboratory instructors often use similarity-matching software to detect plagiarism in laboratory reports, yet similarity hits detected with such software remain poorly characterized. In the upper division molecular biology laboratory course described here, Turnitin® routinely detected dozens of similarity hits in laboratory reports. To determine whether this abundance of similarity hits was indicative of widespread plagiarism, we analyzed similarity hits detected in 255 laboratory reports written by 135 students. Only a small minority of Turnitin® similarity matches were problematic, but over half of the laboratory reports contained at least one problem with incorporation of scientific sources (e.g., laboratory manual and scientific articles). We identified four common types of such writing problems: patchwriting, technical parroting, copying, and falsification of sources. In 18% of the laboratory reports, we detected an alarmingly superficial use of primary literature. Most of the source incorporation problems did not rise to the level of plagiarism. As a result of this study, we recommend changes in scientific writing instruction and a transition to laboratories providing more authentic research experiences.

Writing transfer scholarship is more systematically investigating the influence of dispositions, which are internal qualities that influence how individuals react to learning contexts. In this article, we consider dispositions in science laboratories, which are important contexts for WAC/WID instruction, especially at institutions where these courses serve majors and other students simultaneously. Drawing on data from a larger longitudinal study of writing transfer in the major at a state comprehensive university, we offer case studies of two science laboratories developed from interviews with students and faculty, supported by analysis of student writing and instructional materials. Faculty approaches to teaching scientific writing varied in their engagement of "verification" and/or "inquiry" approaches to instruction, and also in ways they attempted to motivate prior knowledge, prepare students for future contexts, and help them develop scientific identities. Students' responses also varied, and dispositions strongly influenced the degree of success of pedagogical goals. Our findings contribute to efforts to identify the dispositions critical for writing instruction and to diversify the specific WAC/WID contexts where writing transfer is being considered.

To succeed as tomorrow's workers in the knowledge society of the new century--a world characterized by ceaseless change, boundless knowledge and endless doubt, today's business writing students must develop the skills and traits needed to become creative problem-solvers, flexible team-players and risk-taking life-time learners (Bereiter, 2002a). And teachers must play an important role in helping students transit successfully from school to work by finding ways to develop useful life skills and the flexibility that facilitates a willingness to work cooperatively and a readiness to learn continuously. Preparing today's students for tomorrow's work world challenges 21st century teachers to reinvent their professional personas by creating a fresh professionalism founded not on old, comfortable abilities and attitudes, but on new, unfamiliar skills and traits. For many teachers (most of whom teach exactly as they were taught--typically, following the talk-chalk model that fills a classroom with five or 10 rows of passive listeners in fixed seats, and fills a class period with 50 or 60 minutes of garbled monotones in lecture format), learning to teach in ways they were not taught represents the greatest challenge of their careers (Silberman, 1996; Hargreaves, 2003). Challenging students and teachers to rearrange the furniture and to reconfigure the lecture, a well-considered active learning model (Bonwell & Eison, 1991) can be applied to the business writing classroom (an application unexplored in the literature) to help students develop the abilities and attitudes most required for success in the work world of the 21st century (an area explored in the "futuristic business literature")--to help students learn and transit. In fact, classes in business writing, professional writing and technical writing can function, through the use of active learning strategies, as dynamic workshops in which students can prepare for the change and doubt of the knowledge society by becoming creative and flexible, cooperative and confident, eager and ready to learn and work. The paper explores the active learning techniques (e.g., preview lists) used successfully in a decade of business writing classes taught at a typical Midwestern American university. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

This article presents an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) task developed for teaching aeronautical engineering students. The task Design-Build-Write rests on the assumption that engineering students are skilled at mathematical reasoning, problem solving, drawing and constructing. In Gardner's 1983 Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory, these skills strongly correspond to the logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic and spatial intelligences. The current task combines creativity, innovation and problem solving with the description of technical concepts. An enthusiastic learner response in class suggests that the target group of aeronautical engineering students could be engaged and captivated by this assignment.

The challenges of redesigning and reviving Longwood University's Rhetoric and Professional Writing program involved skills in collaboration, negotiation, and advertisement. While unexpected obstacles arose, taking an honest look at the existing program design and working to maintain the focus on rhetoric helped to circumvent failure. Finally, student involvement, student feedback, and the use of online resources became key elements in bringing a weak program to life. (Contains 4 notes.)

Case reports are an established form of scholarship used for teaching and learning in medicine and health care, but there are few examples of the teaching and learning activities used to prepare students to write a case report. This report describes the implementation of two courses that prepare physical therapy students to write and disseminate a patient/client centered case report. The first course is taught in a distance-learning format and is taken concurrently with a 12-week clinical experience where the student collects case data from a patient/client who consents to be the subject of the report. The second course is campus-based and supports the student's dissemination of the case report as a manuscript and oral and poster presentations. After three years, we have experienced widespread support from the students, patients/clients, and clinics. Factors that may have contributed to the students' positive experiences include course organization, student engagement, and support of the instructor, peers, and clinical community. This information can assist educators in all professional health care disciplines to establish or modify courses that prepare students to write case reports. (Contains 3 tables.)

This essay proposes that in light of what has been called the "new economy," writing instructors need to rethink some of the pedagogical approaches and theories they use to professionalize their students. While at one time the concept of experiential or situated learning was useful for maximizing educational possibilities, everyone has moved into an era where technologies, economies, and global phenomena necessitate a reexamination of the ways that students learn and can potentially learn. Students are learning in networked ways much more than they are learning from traditional pedagogical approaches, even approaches that incorporate technologies in the classroom. In this essay, the author argues for a move from attention to the concept of situated learning toward what she would call networked learning, and she delineates networked learning according to four descriptors: horizontal, peripheral, nomadic, and independent. Such a move might allow writing instructors to (1) connect the classroom with what students are already doing in their own lives; (2) account for the current economic and technological influences; and (3) diffuse the conflict between academic and workplace interests, building bridges between these two interested parties. (Contains 78 online resources.)

The role of a professional and creative writing degree is to provide resources, structured workshops, professional interactions--and the potential for creative risk. Opportunities for risk, within the structured environment of the university, challenge the individual's perspectives and judgements, as well as their ability to analyse and to reflect on their writing and creative practices. From this starting point the authors, both writing industry practitioners and academics, have developed experiential projects with the aim of transforming their teaching practice from a model of narrative hierarchies of knowledge to learning through performativity, social connectedness and immersive workplace learning. As the case studies illustrate, this transitional approach has enabled our millennial learners more confidently to take risks, accept challenges and transform their understanding of their own knowledge, skills and identities.

An integrated technical writing and design course has been developed at Rowan University. This course was developed using aspects of project-based learning and recent discussions about design education, as well as pedagogical approaches from the write-to-learn and the writing in the disciplines (WID) movements. The result is a course where the writing and design instruction are highly integrated, resulting in improvements in both technical writing and engineering design.

Drawing on three cases from a larger (N=169) longitudinal study of student writing development, this article shows how STEM students "rewrote" disciplines to suit their writerly purposes as they moved through their undergraduate years. Students made it clear that the institutional dimensions of disciplines, visible in administrative units or departments that control resources and records, remained visible in their mental landscapes, but they had a much more flexible view of the epistemological dimensions of disciplines. Rather than entering a field as novices aiming to emulate the writing of its experts, they drew on the intellectual resources of multiple disciplines in order to carry out their own projects. The goals and choices of these students suggest that the term new disciplinarity has implications for the ways WID is conceptualized. As theorized by Markovitch and Shinn (2011, 2012), new disciplinarity posits elasticity as a central feature of disciplines, calls the spaces between disciplines borderlands, and affirms the dynamic nature of projects and borderlands with the term temporality. As such, new disciplinarity offers terms and a theoretical framework that conceptualize the intellectual negotiations of students.

Students in introductory science laboratory courses benefit from comprehensive technical writing instruction. Written communication is an important skill for people in the workforce as well as education; STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students need to develop good technical writing skills, and most enter college with little experience in this type of writing. We describe a comprehensive model for writing instruction in the introductory laboratory that we have used successfully for many years with different instructors. It incorporates multiple instructional elements, including the use of good and poor examples, a grading rubric, preclass questions, scaffolding student writing over multiple weeks, practice on multiple assignments, and feedback from instructors. We find that this is more effective in helping students develop technical writing skills than mere practice and feedback, an observation based on student surveys, end-of-course examinations, and tracking growth of student skills over the course of the semester. This evidence corroborates the perception among multiple instructors that it results in an improvement in students' entering writing skills, including in subsequent classes.

Writing and communication skills are important in all fields of employment. During the course of everyday life, people have to perform tasks they have never done before, or learn a technology they have never used. Most tasks are processes, and it takes some time to learn how they work. Instructions are the most common method of explaining how to complete these new tasks (Eiriksdottir and Catrambone 749). Instructions help codify behavior to create standards and best practices, which benefits all areas of employment. Novice employees train with senior workers to learn "how things are done" at a workplace. New hires learn how to perform (and how not to perform) tasks, and after enough experience, they too will be expected to train or supervise new employees. The way instructions are written can influence the user's performance of the task at hand (Eiriksdottir and Catrambone 749). Ideally, the skills might be transferred to another similar task or technology, allowing the employee to adapt to a continually changing workplace (Boiarsky and Dobberstein 529). This article proposes technical writing components to help prepare students to write for audiences beyond the classroom.

An approach is described that gradually transitions second-year organic chemistry students to writing full "The Journal of Organic Chemistry" ("JOC") style lab reports. The primary goal was to introduce students to and build rhetorical skills in scientific and technical writing. This was accomplished by focusing on four main strategies utilizing a stepwise method where assignments progress from lower- to higher-level writing tasks, collaborative writing, journal-style lab reports, and imitation. This approach is built upon work from numerous educators and combines them into a unique pedagogical writing tool to enhance student learning.

This study investigating the effectiveness of Calibrated Peer Review (CPR )[TM] in a senior-level biochemistry class had three purposes: to (a) compare the CPR process for feedback with TA-generated feedback in improving students' ability to write scientific abstracts; (b) compare CPR results for males and females; and (c) observe whether CPR improved the quality of student writing. Statistical analyses of three assignments by 50 students indicated significant differences between CPR and TA feedback on student writing quality. In addition, while scores of students who received TA feedback decreased, scores of students who had CPR improved. Students also progressed in CPR-generated measures of their writing and reviewing abilities. A separate analysis including 256 students found no significant differences between males and females. In addition, students' writing showed statistically significant improvement in CPR-generated scores. (Contains 4 tables.)

Writing courses are increasingly popular in higher education. This paper presents a pedagogic approach that combines theory and practice, in an accessible way, to help students appreciate the interrelation of styles and contexts, and develop skills for writing in a range of genres. The approach is characterised as "adaptive application". It is illustrated by the modification of a traditional tutorial-group structure to provide a new setting in which students can immediately apply key terms of rhetorical theory as they negotiate differentiated experiences as writers, readers, speakers, and listeners. This change in classroom practice is achieved by adopting and adapting the roles, organizational genres, and communication conventions of the committee meeting. The resultant hybrid form of committee-tutorial assists students to engage collegially in the disciplinary study and practice of writing. It also encourages them to consider how they may transfer their understanding of rhetorical principles and techniques to writing endeavours in other scholarly and social settings. [Note: The publication year (2009) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct publication year is 2008.]

To be actively involved in their own writing requires that students make decisions. In order to build a new approach for our Technical/Professional Writing classes, we assessed our individual teaching practices and past experiences, studied current scholarship on teaching writing, and conducted research on technical writing in our local community. Using this information we developed a teaching model that involves students in discovering/establishing the class content, creating time frames/project plans, selecting tools to complete projects, contributing to evaluation criteria, and working with the local community. The success of this approach requires students to reconstruct their roles and their attitudes toward the dynamics within the classroom. It also requires the teacher to rethink his/her role in the classroom, sense of authority, and perceptions of how knowledge is created. These changes, however, are not achieved without challenges and struggle. While our programmatic approach has proven successful, we found the need to help students view struggle as a normal part of the decision making processes that writers experience.

Students have to learn two distinctly different tasks when writing research papers: a) creating and organizing prose, and b) formatting a manuscript according to the nuances and mechanics of a pre-determined format, such as Modern Language Association (MLA) or American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines. Two studies examined different approaches for teaching the details of APA style, including: a template, a checklist, and a combined approach that used both the template and checklist. The results demonstrated that while each technique individually helped students to learn APA style, using both together appeared to provide the most help to students. (Contains 2 tables and 1 footnote.)

This paper describes a graduate-level scientific/academic writing course for non-native speakers (NNS) of English at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel, which is taught in a technology-enhanced or blended learning environment. The use and integration of electronic discourses, such as email and Powerpoint, on-screen marking techniques, and submission of written assignments and writing consultancies by email, and asynchronous online discussion forums are described. Features of the HighLearn course-supporting WEB site, which enable the integration of discussion forums into the writing course, are explained. Results of teacher-initiated student evaluations and advantages and dilemmas of teaching scientific/academic writing in the digital age are discussed. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research and suggestions for the further integration of ICT in the scientific/academic writing course.