Welcome to Issue 14.2 of Xchanges!

Welcome to Issue 14.2 of Xchanges! We pride ourselves here at Xchanges on rendering visible the intellectual breadth and depth of undergraduate scholarship coming out of Writing Studies courses and programs. The current issue is no exception. However, the current issue is exceptional in that each of the five articles featured herein is extremely timely in its own way.

Several of the undergraduate scholars are taking on complicated and provocative political issues:

In “American Misconceptions of Syria,” Feras Aboukhater critiques American journalism’s coverage of the war in Syria to advocate for a more nuanced approach that captures the complexities of life in a conflict zone.

Analyzing the post-9/11 rhetoric of our 43rd president’s “war on terror” through the dual lens of rhetoric and public policy, Ross Fitzpatrick’s “What Bush Said: The War on Terror and the Rhetorical Situation” reveals some important implications that various constituencies might consider in developing their own counter-rhetorics in the present day.

And in “PragerU as Genre: How Ideologies Typify Speech,” Christopher Luis Shosted applies rhetorical genre analysis to expose how the far-right media outlet PragerU propagates falsehoods in order to destabilize competing worldviews.

Though less explicitly political, our other two articles are equally as timely in their subject matter and impressively rigorous in their research design:

Matthew White’s “A Disconnect in the Process and Understanding of Prescription Medications” employs survey and think-aloud protocols to investigate patients’ understandings of prescription medications and their effects as communicated to them by their physicians and by medication guides.

And in “Creativity and Collaboration: The Relationship of Fact and Fiction in Personal Writing,” Rachel Casey applies a theory of collaborative activty to analyze a series of artifacts collected over ten years of her own literacy development to reveal her own creative writing to be more collaborative than she had expected.

Lastly, we’re delighted to bring you the third and final installment in former-Associate Managing Editor and graduate student Elizabeth Barnett’s Profiles in Digital Scholarship and Publishing series, this time featuring the digital publishing paragon Cheryl Ball discussing historical and contemporary trends in multimodal pedagogy and digital scholarly publishing.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together for you. Please stay tuned in the coming months as we prepare to release Issue 15.1, a graduate-student issue that includes three full-length articles as well as a Symposium on the Status of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition.

~ Brian Hendrickson, Managing Editor