Jessie Moore and Paula Rosinski, associate professors of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English, collaborated with researchers from the University of Central Florida, Michigan State University, University of Texas at El Paso, and Kenyon College on a research article about students' writing lives.
“Ubiquitous Writing, Technologies, and the Social Practice of Literacies of Coordination” will appear in the next issue of Written Communication and already is available online. The article describes results from the second phase of a multi-institutional study of the role of writing in college students’ lives. For this second phase, the research team surveyed students at three institutions (including Elon), asked survey participants to complete a weeklong diary study of their writing tasks throughout each day, and then interviewed participants for more detailed case studies.
The study’s data suggests that students report writing SMS texts, lecture notes, and emails most frequently as college students and that they value these writing practices. Further, students write extensively in these genres in rhetorically-sensitive ways to coordinate their daily lives and to build relationships.
This multi-institutional research is facilitated by the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State University. To learn about phase one of the Revisualizing Composition Study Group’s research, read the 2010 white paper, “The writing lives of college students.”