Associate professors of English Paula Rosinski and Jessie Moore presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) on March 22.
Their paper, “Mobile Writing Platforms and Multiple Genres: The Transfer of Writing Strategies from Informal-to-Formal Contexts” was part of a panel with Michigan State, University of Central Florida, and University of Texas-El Paso collaborators.
The “Revisualizing Composition” project is a multi-phase, multi-institution, and multi-year study that seeks to learn what college students write, why they do it, where they do it, and what technologies they use. The goal is to provide the field with the most comprehensive picture to date of the writing lives. Results from a spring 2010 survey were published as a widely-distributed and referenced white paper.
At CCCC, the multi-institutional team collectively presented “Revisualizing Composition One SMS at a Time: Technology, Value, and Purpose,” sharing results from phase two research with text-prompted writing diaries and interviews with students at three institutions, including Elon. Rosinski and Moore reported that students use texting primarily to maintain connections with friends and family and to plan events, but they modify their texting practices based on their audiences and purposes. These adaptations suggest that students make rhetorical savvy choices about this self-sponsored writing.