Why Don’t Students Use Plain Language?
This article provides a conceptual framework to help you understand how to present your ideas effectively, avoiding unnecessary complexity while conveying deep insights clearly. It introduces a four-quadrant chart that illustrates the relationship between the complexity of your thinking and the clarity of your writing. The chart distinguishes between complex and simple thinking paired with either complex or simple expression.
Finding the Bunny: How to Make a Personal Connection to Your Writing
Having trouble finding the motivation to complete assignment? This article reviews strategies for making a personal connection to any writing project—even those that don’t immediately spark your interest.
Ableist Language – Disability Metaphors – Disability Studies
Ableist language refers to language that dehumanizes and marginalizes people with disabilities. Learn how to identify ableist language in your texts and the texts of other. Adopt a style of writing that is accessible to those with disabilities. Expand your sense of audience and work towards more access and equity for those with disabilities.
Counterarguments – Rebuttal – Refutation
Ignoring what your target audience thinks and feels about your argument isn’t a recipe for success. Instead, engage in audience analysis: ask yourself, “How is your target audience likely to respond to your propositions? What counterarguments — arguments about your argument — will your target audience likely raise before considering your propositions?”
Writing with AI – Introduction to the Course
Explore how generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping creativity, authorship, composing, learning, copyright, and work—and what these changes mean for human agency.
This course introduces you to the writing and design technologies transforming contemporary knowledge work. Adopting a case-study approach, it asks how GenAI alters how we think, write, and learn—and how colleges and universities should respond. You’ll act as a researcher on an eleven-member university team led by Dean Stacy Adams, the university’s AI Czar. Together, we’ll contribute to Navigating AI Disruption: A Guide for the University Community, a collaborative resource on AI policy and practice.
Across a series of interrelated projects, you will examine how technologies of writing—from cuneiform tablets to ChatGPT—shape human thought and culture. You’ll begin by studying Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space to understand writing as a technology that reorganizes consciousness and social relations. Building on that foundation, you’ll investigate how GenAI affects authorship, learning, and academic integrity through research, interviews, and policy writing. Later projects ask you to experiment directly with GenAI tools, conducting an autoethnographic study that measures how these systems influence your agency and critical thinking. You’ll also evaluate how artificial general and superintelligence may transform the future of work, synthesizing research from McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, and leading scholars in AI and ethics.By the end of the semester, you’ll be able to use GenAI ethically and rhetorically—to collaborate, design, and compose without outsourcing your judgment or creativity. Writing With AI prepares you to think critically and act strategically in a rapidly changing world where human insight remains our most valuable technology.
Reading and Disruptive Emotions
This article examines the relationship between reading and emotional response. It addresses the emotions reading can provoke, identifies potential emotional triggers, and suggests practical strategies for managing emotional responses, like mindfulness and emotional regulation. Learn to identify, manage, and strategically respond to emotions stirred by reading in both personal and academic contexts.
Workplace Writing
This article introduces workplace writing as an umbrella term that encompasses written and visual communication within sites of work—an activity that students across academic majors will need to accomplish in their careers.
Pronouns and Inclusivity – How Are Pronouns Tied to Inclusive Language?
Gender-neutral pronouns have been the subject of debate for hundreds of years. Find out how the debate began and where the writing community stands on inclusive pronoun use today.
Rhetorical Moves in Academic Writing
Rhetorical moves refers to a stretch of text that does a particular job. Learn the rhetorical moves of expert writers to advance the clarity and persuasiveness of your work.
Rhetorical Listening – The Importance of Breaking the Silence When It Matters
This article examines rhetorical listening as a vital strategy for fostering understanding and bridging cultural and social divides. It explores how rhetorical listening encourages openness, empathy, and accountability, empowering individuals to navigate differences and cultivate meaningful dialogue. By highlighting examples like Malala Yousafzai’s courageous advocacy, the article demonstrates how rhetorical listening can inspire impactful change, improve communication, and enhance critical thinking in personal, academic, and professional contexts.
Academic Writing – How to Write for the Academic Community
Academic writing refers to the writing style that researchers, educators, and students use in scholarly publications and school assignments. An academic writing style refers to the semantic and textual features that characterize academic writing and distinguish it from other discourses, such as professional writing, workplace writing, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Learn about the discourse conventions of the academic community so you can write with greater authority, clarity, and persuasiveness (and, in school settings, earn higher grades!).
Professional Writing – How to Write for the Professional World – Guide to Professional and Business Communication
Professional writing is fundamentally transactional: usually if you are writing it is because you are trying to solve some kind of a problem. Your audience — the people you are writing to — probably need to do something in response to your writing. They may not be expecting your writing. They probably don’t want to read your writing. Your writing is interrupting their day. So, if you’re gonna bother them you need to make it worth their time. Learn about the style of writing that characterizes the texts of professional writers in workplace writing contexts. Master the discourse conventions of professional communities of practice.
Credibility and Authorial Authority – How to Develop Readers’ Trust and Respect
If your listeners or readers think your communications lack credibility (aka authorial authority), then they are less likely to listen or read your work. This article defines the textual attributes of authoritative discourse. Learn how to communicate in ways that enhance your authority and persuasiveness.
Popular Articles
Contract Grading – So Your Instructor is Using Contract Grading…
Educational psychologists have shown that grades can undermine student engagement with their own work, making them more focused on grades than on learning (Kohn 29). As a result, students are often more concerned with how to get an “A” than how to write effectively for different audiences, purposes
Rhetorical Analysis in the Real World: A Useful Thinking Tool
As a citizen and a scholar, I use rhetorical analysis to sort out questions about politics and relationships. In everyday life, rhetorical analysis is a valuable tool for understanding and preparing to engage in the world.
Rhetorical Appeals: An Overview
Rhetorical appeals are strategic tools writers use to effectively persuade their audience. Comprising ethos (credibility), logos (logic), pathos (emotion), and kairos (timing), these appeals form the backbone of influential persuasive writing. By understanding and harnessing these appeals, you’ll not only recognize them in the texts you read but also enhance your own writing, making your arguments more compelling and impactful.
Using First Person in an Academic Essay: When is It Okay?
This essay explores the circumstances under which using the first person in an academic essay is acceptable. In academic writing, the use of the first person—expressed through pronouns such as “I”, “me”, “my”, and “we”—is in a state of flux. Historically, scholars were advised to avoid the first person to maintain objectivity and a formal tone. In school settings, students were often told to set their own opinions aside and write summaries and reviews of literature. Yet recently, especially in the humanities, qualitative researchers have questioned the possibility of objectivity and this convention of avoiding the first person. Instead, these theorists argue that researchers and writers can be more authoritative by employing the first person.
Kairos – How to Strategically Time Your Messages for Impact
“Kairos” is an ancient rhetorical concept meaning “to say the right thing at the right time.” In order to say the right thing, you need a sense of audience. And, of course, you need to craft your message with clarity and brevity. Yet that by itself isn’t sufficient. It doesn’t matter how eloquent you are if you audience is not willing to listen to you on a topic at this particular moment. Thus, kairos is chiefly about timing: it’s about knowing about when to give your message.
Recommended Articles
The Ultimate Blueprint: A Research-Driven Deep Dive into The 13 Steps of the Writing Process
This article provides a comprehensive, research-based introduction to the major steps, or strategies, that writers work through as they endeavor to communicate with audiences. Since the 1960s, the writing process has been defined to be a series of steps, stages, or strategies. Most simply, the writing process is conceptualized as four major steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing. That model works really well for many occasions. Yet sometimes you’ll face really challenging writing tasks that will force you to engage in additional steps, including prewriting, inventing, drafting, collaborating, researching, planning, organizing, designing, rereading, revising, editing, proofreading, sharing or publishing. Expand your composing repertoire — your ability to respond with authority, clarity, and persuasiveness — by learning about the dispositions and strategies of successful, professional writers.
Copyright – A Comprehensive Guide to U.S. Copyright Law
Copyright refers to intellectual property laws that grant an exclusive legal right to creators to control the copying and public exhibition of their original creative works. By default, in the United States copyright law protects the original works of authorship. Alternatively, authors may use a Creative Commons copyright to license their work. Learn about copyright and fair use (copyright exceptions) so you can avoid academic and legal penalties associated with copyright infringement and plagiarism.
Felt Sense
Felt Sense is prelinguistic, murky, vague–and yet it some conveys deep meaning. Felt Sense is “the soft underbelly of thought . . . a kind of bodily awareness that . . . can be used as a tool” to help you distinguish between what you’ve said or written and what you really hope to say or write. Review scholarship on felt sense and its role during composing. Learn to work with your felt sense to realize your creative potential.
ACRL Information Literacy Framework
In an era where almost anything can be digitally manipulated or “spoofed,” from audio to even making visuals that deceive, you need to discern genuine sources from misleading or false sources. Learn about information literacy dispositions, behaviors, and conventions to avoid being duped by manipulative authors.
The Elements of Style – The DNA of Powerful Writing
Just as DNA constitutes the building blocks of life — as illustrated in the depiction below of ions and DNA gliding through a single-walled carbon nanotube — the ‘Elements of Style’ form the foundation for powerful writing. Brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity — these stylistic elements empower writers to enhance the clarity and power of their work. Esteemed by educators, editors, and professional writers, they serve as the essential building blocks — indeed, the DNA — of clear, compelling communication.
Audience Awareness – How To Boost Clarity in Communications
If your text doesn’t appeal to your audience, then all is lost. Awareness of your audience (as well as purpose and context) is crucial to clarity in communications. Learn how to analyze your audience so you can determine what you need to say and how you need to say it.