Students in Dr. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s summer 2025 writing seminar crafted blog posts exploring Rhetoric & Composition. Over the next several weeks, we will share their work in this space to bring visibility to their posts and offer a variety of perspectives on pertinent topics within Rhetoric & Composition. These posts are written by graduate students currently in the MA and M.Ed. English programs.
Acknowledging Reception and Circulation for the Digital Writer
By: Quinn Haldeman
Digital writers should shift the writing process from centering the production of a product to focusing more on the circulation and reception of their work. Digital spaces allow writing to expand past the original or intended audience the writer had in mind while creating. Because of this circulation, writers lose control of who sees their content and must now respond to an expanded audience with multiple avenues for responding to or remixing their work. To gain back some of this control, or at least to be aware of the possible effects, Ridolfo and DeVoss (2009) explain how a writer needs to consider how their product will be used in different areas in the digital space, making intentional rhetorical moves while understanding how quickly their work can travel between these spaces. Digital rhetoric involves anticipating the circulation of writing and then tracking it once that product is published. Audiences are able to respond quickly in various formats within digital spaces. An important part of the rhetorical process is choosing how and when to engage with audience responses, as Gallagher (2019) emphasizes for his students, getting them to understand the importance of attending to responses in a digital space as a part of maintaining the conversation that originated from their writing. In a fast-paced digital space where the audience and algorithm can quickly manipulate a writer’s original meaning, it’s important for the writer to acknowledge how their work will be received, shared, and responded to as they use rhetoric to productively engage with the audience.
The original product then becomes less important to digital rhetoric than the response to it. The digital writer is writing to make connections and share their understanding of a topic, which cannot happen without negotiations from an audience. LeCourt (2024) explains that, “While production may begin the process, only consistent reflection, response, and circulation can support the kind of social activity that might undercut the information economy’s co-option of texts” (p. 182). Meaningful rhetorical connections are made when the author is able to acknowledge each part of the writing process that is different when working in digital spaces that allow for these connections to be built from people across the world instantaneously. The audience has even more stake in digital spaces because of the ease of sharing, adding to, or commenting on a writer’s work. Dieterle, Mehlenbacher, and Vie (2020) discuss how the act of circulating others’ writing can be considered writing in itself, as it involves rhetorical moves that create important public discourse. The writer, then, becomes anyone responding or reimagining another’s ideas. There is more opportunity for back-and-forth from an author to the audience to wider communities in digital spaces, which is something a writer must account for. There are an overwhelming number of avenues for digital writers to take, an idea that Sefton-Green (2022) explains through his pedagogy of how platforms function and how that changes the social context of any situation, even ones that aren’t online. So much of our lives are online, and the writing that we do in these spaces, what we produce, and how others connect to that, affects the identity of the individual writer and the communities in which they participate.
References
Dieterle, B., Mehlenbacher, A. R., & Vie, S. (2020). Confronting digital aggression with an ethics of circulation. In J. Reyman & D. M. Sparby (Eds.), Digital ethics: Rhetoric and responsibility in online aggression (pp. 197–213). Routledge.
Gallagher, J. R. (2019). Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. Utah State University Press.
LeCourt, D. (2024). Social Mediations: Writing for Digital Public Spheres. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for recomposition: Rhetorical velocity and delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2). http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/velocity.html
Sefton-Green, J. (2022). Towards platform pedagogies: why thinking about digital platforms as pedagogic devices might be useful. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 43(6), 899–911. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2021.1919999