Welcome to Issue 10.2 and 11.1 of Xchanges!
Welcome to Issues 10.2 and 11.1 of Xchanges, a special double-issue featuring one undergraduate research project, two graduate-student scholarly works, and one graduate-student webtext. We hope you will enjoy reading and engaging with these fine examples of primary research and original scholarship in fields associated with communication and writing. Our writers/creators come from an array of universities and reflect the diversity of scholarly studies currently of interest to researchers and students in the fields of writing, rhetoric, and technical communication.
This issue's undergraduate writer, Paige Lenssen, graduated from Auburn University in 2014. Lenssen's rhetorical analysis of the Enron scandal--in particular the applicability of the "honest services clause"--focuses on her application of Aristotelian "virtue ethics" to the well known Enron criminal investigation. Her essay, "The Ethics and Legality of Financial Regulation: What Enron Revealed" argues that increased education in corporate ethics and legal regulation should be customary in corporations; her rhetorical analysis of Enron-related materials brings the utility of the application of Aristotelian ethics to the fore.
Graduate student Mary K. Stewart, a PhD candidate in the School of Education at UC Davis, presents here her webtext "Digital Invention: A Repository of Online Resources for College Composition Instruction." This resource hinges on the argument that "introductory composition courses should use online tools to teach invention"; relatedly, instructors of such courses should avail themselves of the wealth of materials currently available online. Stewart's webtext aims to both inform readers about strategies of invention for writers in a digital age and to provide a large array of links and tools for teachers. When writing instructors do not employ digital tools to help promote invention and argument, students run the risk of viewing "academic writing as a separate and unrelated process to composing with digital tools." Stewart's webtext aims to aid instructors in the use of online resources in their teaching of invention to students in college writing courses.
Amber McDonnell, a master's student in Auburn University's technical and professional communication program, argues in her essay "Ethics of Visual Rhetoric & Photo Manipulation" that "we should use well-considered ethical decision-making to check powerful, persuasive rhetorical claims in our work," particularly concerning communicators' use of images in their texts. McDonnell's focus is photo manipulation as perpetrated by BP in aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. She writes, "While manipulating photos for aesthetic purposes is something to be valued" by technical communicators, "it should not be prioritized over the honest and accurate delivery of information." McDonnell analyzes possible reasons for BP's manipulation and she records the public outcry that resulted from the discovery of these manipulations, bringing to light issues that must be considered by communicators in many domains.
In the essay "Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students' Digital Compositions," Bay VanWagenen, who graduated with an MA degree in English Composition from California State University, Sacramento, in 2013, offers a careful consideration of students' online writing practices and the connections between these practices and more "formal" academic writing expectations and products. As she writes, writing instructors must do more than teach "with technology"; writing teachers would benefit from using "their students' literacies as an important step in making connections between . . . digital knowledge and academic writing." Writing instructors can help "students understand how the literacies required in school are connected to and can build from their self-sponsored literacies." VanWagenen's study usefully relies on students' own remarks concerning their awareness of audience and their employment of circumstance-specific writing modes in digital domains.
We hope you enjoy reading and interacting with these four strong projects. We also hope these essays and webtext inspire students in their writing and creation practices and serve as useful tools for instructors. Submissions for our next two issues will be due in late June, 2015. We're eager to present our next issue in the Fall 2015. Thanks for reading!