This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and…

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing…

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…

This article shares results from a multi-institutional study of the role of writing in college students' lives. Using case studies built from a larger population survey along with interviews, diaries, and a daily SMS texting protocol, we found that students report SMS texting, lecture notes, and emails to be the most frequent writing…

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…

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents' writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high…

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of "academic writing" present at these writing programs. Findings suggest…

This article reports the results of an interview-based study which investigated the citation behavior in the assignment writing of two second-language postgraduate business management students, Sofie and Tara. Discourse-based interviews were used to elicit the students' own perspectives on their citation behavior in two of their assignments.…

This empirical study surveyed academic staff at a Swedish university about their experiences and perceptions of the use of English in their academic fields. The objective was to examine how the influence of English in disciplinary domains might affect the viability of Swedish in the academic sphere and to investigate how it might disadvantage…

This article deals with how economists present their new knowledge claim in the genre of the research article. In the discipline of economics today, the claim is typically included not only in the obvious results/discussion section(s) but also in three other locations of the article: the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The present…

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors' identities in the manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in readers' active construction of author voice. Through a…

This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions…

Previous studies of the professional discourse of literary studies have focused solely on published scholarly articles and have produced contradictory evidence regarding the knowledge-building function of literary argument. In this study, 9 English department faculty members use a "think-aloud" procedure to read four lyric poems and compose a…

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented…

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…