About

Suguru Ishizaki is a scholar, designer, and educator specializing in communication and user experience design, with over 30 years of experience in both academia and industry. His current research focuses on Technology-Enhanced Learning for writing and Computer-Assisted Rhetorical Analysis. His professional background includes traditional visual communication design, visualization of complex information, and user experience design for enterprise applications. He is currently on the advisory board of Thunderhouse, LLC, and serves as the immediate past president of the IEEE Professional Communication Society. Before his current appointment in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University, Ishizaki was a senior staff engineer at Qualcomm, where he worked on research, development, and product management of early mobile applications. He was also a faculty member at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His academic credentials include a Ph.D. and M.S. in Visual Studies from MIT’s Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Art & Design from Tsukuba University. He is the author of 'Improvisational Design: Continuous Responsive Digital Communication' (MIT Press, 2003), and co-author of 'The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer’s Hidden Craft' (Erlbaum, 2004) and 'Arab Women in Arab News: Old Stereotypes and New Media' (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Multimedia
• Programming language
• Data science
• Psychology
• Human–computer interaction
• Mathematics education
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• From Sensory to Narrative: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Wine-Tasting Notes in International Contexts

  Journal of Business and Technical Communication · 2025-09-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Building Bridges Between Technical and Professional Communication and Translation Studies

  IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication · 2024-08-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this digitally driven era of globalization, 8 international professionals are increasingly faced 9 with the challenges of communicating with 10 speakers of nonnative languages in multilingual 11 contexts. Whether they are professional 12 translators, professional writers, or professionals 13 who are not specialized in translation or writing, 14 international professionals must draw on linguistic 15 and rhetorical knowledge to communicate 16 effectively across cultural and linguistic borders. 17 This Special Issue is a response to the increasing 18 need to develop knowledge surrounding 19 international professional communication

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Visualizing formative feedback in statistics writing: An exploratory study of student motivation using DocuScope Write & Audit

  Assessing Writing · 2024-03-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Recently, formative feedback in writing instruction has been supported by technologies generally referred to as Automated Writing Evaluation tools. However, such tools are limited in their capacity to explore specific disciplinary genres, and they have shown mixed results in student writing improvement. We explore how technology-enhanced writing interventions can positively affect student attitudes toward and beliefs about writing, both reinforcing content knowledge and increasing student motivation. Using a student-facing text-visualization tool called Write & Audit, we hosted revision workshops for students (n = 30) in an introductory-level statistics course at a large North American University. The tool is designed to be flexible: instructors of various courses can create expectations and predefine topics that are genre-specific. In this way, students are offered non-evaluative formative feedback which redirects them to field-specific strategies. To gauge the usefulness of Write & Audit, we used a previously validated survey instrument designed to measure the construct model of student motivation (Ling et al. 2021). Our results show significant increases in student self-efficacy and beliefs about the importance of content in successful writing. We contextualize these findings with data from three student think-aloud interviews, which demonstrate metacognitive awareness while using the tool. Ultimately, this exploratory study is non-experimental, but it contributes a novel approach to automated formative feedback and confirms the promising potential of Write & Audit.

  PublisherDOI

• Building Robust Long-Term Conservation Monitoring With Design Thinking

  2023-07-01

  articleSenior author

  This article reports on an on-going project that aims to develop a long-term (i.e., over 30 years) conservation monitoring plan for rare mesocarnivores on lands managed by the US Forest Service in the western US. The project employs a design thinking approach, which is relatively unknown in natural resource management, for the development of the monitoring plan. We report on our design process through the first three phases (empathize, define, and ideate), followed by a brief description of our current effort on prototyping. The early phases of the design process reveals that two touchpoints would present unique challenges in successfully implementing our plan: (1) instructions for data collection communicated through protocols and (2) the use of monitoring information for predictive decisions. Standardized template for protocols and decision support tools to address these challenges are suggested as potential solutions. A component content management approach is also suggested as a way to create a long-term monitoring that can be adaptive to changes in information over the time period that long-term monitoring is designed to cover. We conclude by postulating that the design thinking approach may be applicable to other natural resource management projects.

  PublisherDOI

• Visualizing Formative Feedback in Statistics Writing:A Case Study of Student Motivation Using Docuscope Write & Audit

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The DocuScope project

  Studies in corpus linguistics · 2023-06-05 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter overviews the history of the DocuScope project. In its inception, we sought a production theory underlying rhetorical composition and decision-making. Our pursuit of a theory led to the development of large-scale dictionaries of language patterns we have curated for over two decades. The major conceptual continua that have guided our curation efforts and major taxonomies are discussed, including the four types of polysemy we have had to address to ensure our dictionary patterns are as ambiguity-free as possible. We conclude by reviewing our recent efforts to apply the dictionaries for writing education on small textual samples, including single texts.

  PublisherDOI

• Computer-Aided Close Reading

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Data science

  The use of computational approaches for text analysis in humanities research was primarily driven by the opportunity to analyze large volumes of texts exceeding the analyst’s capacity to read. However, computational techniques have seldom been applied to supplement the close reading of single texts, as such reading has rarely been questioned as a process in need of supplementation. The authors challenge this premise by presenting an interactive visualization environment, DocuScope, designed to present textual information that both contributes to the interpretative efforts of the close reader and yet is not systematically accumulated from close reading. They first provide general background about DocuScope, discuss its lineage from earlier projects, and connect it to other chapters in this volume. They also present the theoretical framework that guided the design of the technology as well as their thinking. In the second half of the chapter, they demonstrate how DocuScope’s visualizations can be used to enhance the serial reading of persuasive texts using the analyses of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and two New York Times’ contrasting op-eds on the first impeachment of Donald Trump in September 2019.

  PublisherDOI

• Write & Audit: Teaching Genre Features of Statistics Writing with a Student-Facing Text Analysis Tool

  2022-07-01 · 3 citations

  article

  Based on a corpus analysis of writing data from undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics and data science at Carnegie Mellon, we have designed a computer-assisted course intervention for two writing projects in an introductory-level statistics course. Our approach uses DocuScope Write & Audit (W&A), a text visualization software, which was designed to allow student writers to inspect both their topical organization and the rhetorical experiences they create. This short paper provides a brief overview of the corpus study, then outlines our design and expectations for a proposed workshop study that examines the effectiveness on our intervention.

  PublisherDOI

• Computer-Assisted Rhetorical Analysis: Instructional Design and Formative Assessment Using DocuScope

  The Journal of Writing Analytics · 2021 · 10 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics education
  PublisherDOI

• Scalable Writing Pedagogy for Strengthening Cohesion with Interactive Visualization

  2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Human–computer interaction

  The current pedagogy on cohesion in writing relies primarily on traditional static charts to depict topical connections across sentences. However, since charts are manually generated, they are not practical for inspecting a text during the revision process. We have developed a visualization tool called OnTopic, designed to guide students' attention to their composing choices that support coherent writing. OnTopic uses natural language processing algorithms to dynamically visualize the topical structure of the student's draft and thereby help students' confront and learn to account for their composing decisions. This paper reports on a pilot study that evaluated OnTopic in a series of writing workshops. The results suggest that most students were able to successfully assess their writing from the perspective of topical structure, and develop a plan for specific revisions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David S. Kaufer

  19 shared

• Stacie Rohrbach

  Art Center College of Design

  14 shared

• Necia Werner

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared

• Marsha C. Lovett

  Carnegie Mellon University

  8 shared

• Andreas Karatsolis

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  8 shared

• Mollie Kaufer

  University of Maryland, College Park

  7 shared

• Pantelis Vlachos

  5 shared

• Janel Miller

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• IEEE Professional Communication Society (immediate past pres…