This study investigates collaborative interdisciplinary research writing at a large public Western U.S. university through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and textual analyses. While 75% of faculty at this institution supported campuswide interdisciplinary initiatives, only 31% believed current institutional structures enhanced such work—a 44-percentage-point gap that our analysis suggests stemmed from five key obstacles to successful interdisciplinary writing: structural barriers, career concerns (particularly for pre-tenure faculty), disciplinary cultural differences, terminological conflicts, and divergent goals between faculty and administrators. Faculty in this study focused on immediate practical challenges and professional development, while administrators prioritize institutional transformation and structural change. The study concludes with recommendations relevant for universities with comparable resources and commitment to Writing Studies informed approaches, including revised tenure guidelines that explicitly value interdisciplinary contributions, dedicated funding mechanisms, facilitated networking opportunities, and targeted writing support programs. By addressing faculty’s practical needs and administrators’ strategic vision, institutions can create environments where collaborative boundary-crossing becomes not just possible but sustainable and rewarding.

Combining keystroke logging, screen recordings, interviews, and text quality assessment in two mixed-methods studies with technical writers, this research (1) identifies defining variables of technical writing processes and (2) examines their correlations with and predictive power for text quality. Study 1, an exploratory investigation with 10 participants, identified 22 distinct writing behaviors under six categories of information searching, information reusing, content shaping, organization structuring, language styling, and layout designing during planning, translating, and reviewing sessions. These behavioral variables, together with time-related variables, were subsequently analyzed as “process indicators” in a comparative experiment with 43 participants across experience levels. Results of Study 2 revealed significant differences among experience levels in writing speed, planning duration, pause, search, reuse, content shaping, and structuring. Detailed planning and systematic content/structure editing were strongly associated with higher-quality texts. Building on these findings, we propose a process model of technical writing, explain its correlations with writing score, and depict process profiles of different experience levels. We also highlight the importance of information processing skills in enhancing writing efficiency, offering empirical guidance for technical writing instruction and professional training.

Recent years have seen renewed attention to the dynamic aspects of second language writing, such as writing processes. Situated in this vein of research, this study uses screen capture, interviews, observations, and analysis of student texts to closely examine the digitally-mediated writing micro-processes of 38 first-year multilingual writers enrolled in composition courses at two U.S. universities. By studying a relatively large data pool, the study complements case studies of multilingual writers’ digitally mediated composing processes to provide a broad picture of multilingual writers’ digitally mediated micro-processes. Drawing on the framework of the extended mind, we show that the participants’ micro-processes incorporated digital tools through three clusters of practices: (1) L1 use through translation, (2) use of text-generators, and (3) self/writing regulation. While the three practices were shown to be widely used by the participants, their use varied depending on the participants’ goals. The study demonstrates the theoretical significance and pedagogical implications of closely examining writing micro-processes as they intersect with the use of digital tools.

This article demonstrates how an analysis of the net work of medical social work students in an interprofessional Standardized Patient Program (i.e., healthcare simulation) reveals the productive potential of a Critical Disability Studies orientation to writing studies and workplace research. Standardized Patient Programs were created as a method for uniformly assessing healthcare students’ interpersonal interactions with patients. In practice, they evolved to additionally standardize the professional attitudes and behaviors of students. Structured around three emergent claims, this article uses novel and established technical-rhetorical concepts to unpack how social work students comprehend and navigate issues of power, collaboration, and knowledge exchange within a Standardized Patient Program. And when these claims are further analyzed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, they reveal how disability-related disruptions can constructively challenge medicalized stances toward disability as well as understandings of collaborative labor, workplace/simulation-based writing, and professional discourse.

This mixed-methods study examined the effects of different models of online professional development (PD) on 21 US elementary teachers’ writing instruction, on the teachers’ confidence, and on students’ writing quality. Participants were first-grade teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Coaching-plus-Manual (C+M), Manual (M), or Business-as-Usual (BAU). All teachers received online-PD but the C+M and the M conditions received PD on genre-based writing-strategy instruction. The M group taught using only the manual of that approach but the C+M also received coaching. Results found that C+M teachers increased the most in their writing confidence, and C+M students wrote papers of better quality at posttest compared to the M and BAU students.

High school students for whom English is a second language (L2) often struggle with effective text revision because of limited ability to self-regulate their writing, that is, to manage the subprocesses of writing and to use writing-related knowledge and strategies. To help students in China acquire effective text revision skills for English persuasive essays, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) revision instruction was applied both with and without peer interaction targeting knowledge of six writing dimensions. An experimental design involving 120 Chinese 11th-grade students in three conditions, that is, SRSD revision instruction with and without peer interaction (two treatment conditions) and conventional instruction without SRSD (control condition), was applied to examine the instructional effects on students’ writing and text revisions. Analyses of covariance revealed a statistically significant increase in text length and improvement in students’ text quality regarding higher-order content-level writing dimensions in both treatment conditions compared to the control condition in a post-intervention test. Notably, the most substantial improvement regarding both text length and text quality was observed in the SRSD plus peer interaction condition. Further, students in both treatment conditions made more text revisions involving longer text segments aimed at improving quality and changing meaning compared to those in the control condition. Among these, the students in the SRSD plus peer interaction condition exhibited the highest frequency of high-quality text revision during the posttest. The findings provide new insights into the effectiveness of SRSD revision instruction and peer interaction in developing L2 high school students’ self-regulation in revising English persuasive essays.

Peer review is useful for providing students with formative feedback, yet it is used less frequently in STEM classrooms and for supporting writing-to-learn (WTL). While research indicates the benefits of incorporating peer review into classrooms, less research is focused on students’ perceptions thereof. Such research is important as it speaks to the mechanisms whereby peer review can support learning. This study examines students’ self-reported approaches to and perceptions of peer review and revision associated with WTL assignments implemented in an organic chemistry course. Students responded to a survey covering how they approached peer review and revision and the benefits they perceived from participating in each. Findings indicate that the assignment materials guided students’ approaches during both peer review and revision. Furthermore, students described various ways both receiving feedback from their peers and reading their peers’ drafts were beneficial, but primarily connected their revisions to receiving feedback.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are at the forefront of pedagogical considerations in classrooms across the academy. Many studies have spoken to the technology’s capacity to generate one-off texts in a variety of genres. This study complements those by inquiring into its capacity to generate compelling texts at scale. In this study, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a small corpus of generated texts in two genres and gauge it against novice and published academic writers along known dimensions of linguistic variation. Theoretically, we position and historicize ChatGPT as a writing technology and consider the ways in which generated text may not be congruent with established trajectories of writing development in higher education. Our study found that generated texts are more informationally dense than authored texts and often read as dialogically closed, “empty,” and “fluffy.” We close with a discussion of potentially explanatory linguistic features, as well as relevant pedagogical implications.

Governments the world over require scientific knowledge to inform policy makers’ decision-making processes. The recontextualization of this information for nonscientific audiences has received much attention, though it has primarily focused on publicly available texts. Little is known about the discursive nature of how science is transformed and repurposed and the confidential writing performed by boundary organizations that are working between science and policy. This ethnographic study explores the collaborative discursive activity involved in efforts by a boundary organization—the Council of Canadian Academies—to recontextualize science for policy makers. The analysis opens the discursive black box of the genre system and intermediary genre sets involved in one project, which led to the publication and distribution of the boundary object of an advisory report, Older Canadians on the Move. I claim that the discursive boundary work involves a complex genre system containing several sequential genred activities through which science is transformed and a boundary object created.

Many of our ideas about workplaces have been inherited from 20th-century corporations, in which the elements of the workplace have been packaged in a highly typified configuration: work is done by people belonging to an organization, for some clear reason, at a specific place and time, using specific processes. This configuration is increasingly at odds with work practice, and thus workplace writing researchers must reconsider what is meant by the “workplace.” This article argues for treating the workplace as a conceptual decision: a bounded case that researchers construct to enable systematic comparisons. After reviewing how cases are bounded in methodology and practice, the article ends with concrete principles and guidance for bounding such case studies.