Young Scholars in Writing

YSW V22 Front Matter and Masthead

Young Scholars in Writing — 2025-03-10

YSW V22 Editors' Introduction

Kim Fahle Peck — 2025-03-10

YSW V22 Incoming Editors' Note

Incoming YSW Editors — 2025-03-10

But You Are a Writer: Analyzing First-Year Composition Courses to Foster Student Confidence in Writing

Ailyn Del Rio — 2025-03-11

Students in first-year composition courses sometimes discuss their confidence in academic writing with instructors and tutors, but instructor and student perceptions of first-year writing and student confidence are often separated. Literature in the field of rhetoric and composition does not directly explore or define student confidence in writing. This article uses student perceptions of confidence in writing to find the best teaching practices that foster student confidence in writing in first-year composition. The study aims to discover the effects of various teaching styles on student confidence and provide concrete definitions of confidence. Three “Seminar in Writing and Rhetoric” courses participated in this study. Surveys at the start and end of the semester were administered to students, and interviews with four students and each instructor were conducted. After analyzing and interpreting the data, four categories of confidence emerged: personal belief confidence, emotional confidence, skills-based confidence, and risk-taking confidence. Students also identified classroom activities related to brainstorming/topic discussion, professor feedback, and embedded tutoring as the most helpful in fostering their confidence in writing. With this new knowledge of student confidence, instructors can adapt their pedagogies to include teaching practices that intentionally help students become more confident in their writing.

Bridging the Gap: Adapting IMRaD to Meet Student Needs

Kayleigh Di Brico — 2025-03-11

For many undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines, research reading and writing are major challenges and sources of anxiety (Huerta et al.) due in part to the limited writing instruction students receive in discipline-specific courses. Many instructors assume students have learned rhetorical conventions (Melzer) or feel too pressed for time while teaching disciplinary content (Goldsmith and Wiley). Meanwhile, for students, research writing can appear to be disconnected from “doing” research, even though these processes can productively inform one another (Carter). Our project sought to address this disconnect by adapting IMRaD into a reading assistant tool that could support students in performing rhetorical analysis on published research, which in turn would help students engage with model articles as repositories of rhetorical as well as expert knowledge within their field. To produce this tool, we performed a rhetorical analysis of 40 published research articles from across four knowledge domains: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and formal sciences. We then tested the tool in our experiences of reading an additional 23 articles. Analysis of resultant data showed that while performing rhetorical analyses on articles improved readers’ comprehension and overall experience—confirming existing research on the efficacy of rhetorical analysis as a comprehensive aid—incorporating our tool could result in a more confusing reading experience, especially for articles in the humanities and social sciences. Going forward, we are adapting the tool to incorporate this feedback.

“This Feeling Did Not Pass”: The Emotional Labor of Multilingual Undergraduate Peer Tutors

Nurzhan Asanov — 2025-03-11

Writing center tutors constantly engage in emotional labor by listening to students’ concerns and providing reassurance and motivation while managing their own emotions. Nevertheless, this aspect of tutors’ work has been long overlooked and only recently began receiving more attention in writing center scholarship. This qualitative project, the first study on this topic conducted outside the Anglophone world, aims to add to this growing body of research by examining the emotional labor of multilingual writing fellows—course-embedded peer tutors—and undergraduate writing center tutors at an English-Medium Instruction institution in a Central Asian country. The results of 14 semi-structured interviews reveal how external stressors constitute tutors’ emotional labor before consultations even begin, how consulting passive or resistant students induces feelings of guilt and demotivation during sessions, and how these negative feelings can linger, affecting tutors even after the consultations are over. The results suggest that recognizing and integrating the concept of emotional labor into tutor training programs will allow tutors to provide care for their tutees without exhausting their own emotional resources.

The Construction and Functions of Value Arguments in Scientific Literature of the SARS and COVID-19 Pandemics

Delia Savin — 2025-03-11

The scientific community is a unique rhetorical ecosystem in which scientists argue for the value of their work to the larger scientific community through writing. Michael Carter developed a classification system for value arguments and compared the rhetorical moves used in scientific writing across a sample of various fields and journals (“Value Arguments”; “The Construction of Value”). In this essay, value arguments in fifteen papers, each from scientific literature published during the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics, were rhetorically analyzed to investigate the effects of public health crises on scientists’ communication strategies. Though both the pandemic literature and Carter’s corpus rely mainly on implicit value arguments, the pandemic literature uses more value arguments that situate the research topic within the larger crisis and also includes reverse semi-explicit value arguments, a new category that was absent in Carter’s corpus. This investigation suggests that the nature of the rhetorical situation profoundly impacts scientific value arguments. These insights have the potential to further an understanding of the ways scientific knowledge is constructed and improve the rhetorical education of novice and seasoned scientific writers alike.

Death is Violent: Not-Violent Sit-ins and Embodiments of Victimhood in Anti-Police Protest Rhetorics

Kylie Rowland — 2025-03-11

Following the mass protests of 2020, awareness of the systemic nature of police violence in the United States has increased dramatically. However, much of this work remains to be finished, as is seen in the current Stop Cop City protests to prevent the construction of a militarized police training complex in Atlanta. In this article, I examine social media representations of a Stop Cop City sit-in following the police killing of an activist named Tortuguita to gain a deeper understanding of the rhetorical functions of embodied portrayals of victims of police brutality. Current research finds that protesters perform nonviolence to emphasize police violence in contrast to victims’ innocence (O’Rourke; Meckfessel; Goldberg). To extend this conversation, I utilize qualitative coding and employ feminist rhetorical criticism alongside theories of body rhetoric to bring to light how these protests disrupt the hegemony of militarized policing. In particular, Sonja Foss’s method of feminist criticism and Judith Butler’s theories of nonviolence as a rhetorical practice inform this work. By juxtaposing incongruities between peaceful protesters and violent police, rearticulating victimhood and symbolic death, and enacting their right to protest the police, Stop Cop City protesters reframe the narrative surrounding Tortuguita’s death and militarized policing at large. I argue that embodiments of victims of police brutality utilize performances of victimhood and the interplay between violence and nonviolence to disrupt the normalization of police brutality. These findings suggest how embodiments of (non)violence can work as a rhetorical strategy to disrupt established hegemonies.

YSW V22 Contributors

Young Scholars in Writing — 2025-03-10