This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argumentative essays written by incoming first-year university students in comparison with the writing of upper-level undergraduate students and published academics. The findings reveal linguistic stance markers shared across the first-year essays despite…

Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers' difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences…

This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of…

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and…

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children (n = 33) and a group of younger,…

This article provides quantitative data to establish the relative, perceived burden of writing research articles in English as a second language. Previous qualitative research has shown that scientists writing English in a second language face difficulties but has not established parameters for the degree of this difficulty. A total of 141…

While longitudinal research within the field of writing studies has contributed to our understanding of postsecondary students' writing development, there has been less attention given to the discursive resources students bring with them into writing classrooms and how they make use of these resources in first-year composition courses. This…

The present study documents everyday adult writing by type of text and medium (computer or paper) in an "in vivo" diary study. The authors compare writing patterns by gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, age and working status. The study results reveal that (a) writing time varied with demographic variables for networkers, but these…

Thanks to the recent developments in the theory of academic discourse analysis, it is now increasingly accepted that negotiation of academic knowledge is intimately related to the social practices of academic communities. To underpin this position and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, this article analyzes a relatively wide spectrum of…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…

Studies of university writing assignments demonstrate inconsistencies in the elements examined, making it difficult to achieve a clear understanding of the range, frequency, and characteristics of assignments that students might encounter. In this research study, syllabi from one university college were analyzed to determine the types and…

The study examines the development of the registers of academic writing by African American college-level students through style and grammar: indirection inherent in the oral culture of the African American community and the paratactic functions of "because." Discourse analysis of 74 samples of academic writing by 20 African American undergraduate…

This study examines the extent to which a teacher's level of expertise in the subject of a technical paper affects the teacher's reading and evaluation of it. Four engineering teachers and four writing teachers were asked to read aloud the same three student papers and to say aloud their thoughts as they read. The engineering teachers read papers…

The article presents the cultural background, methodological design, theory, and results of a comprehensive research project where the doxa and textual norms of the judges at the national writing exam in Norway were studied. The background of the study is the quite comprehensive reforms in Norway of the way writing is taught in the upper secondary…

Investigates the discourse practices of the "affiliated professions" of software engineering design. Compares lists of design issues generated by students in computer science and computer communication to lists produced by experts associated with software engineering and by students entering an unaffiliated profession. Suggests that affiliated…