First-Year University Writing by Laura Aull (with Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) offers a corpus-based analysis of incoming college student writing compared with expert academic writing in a 90-million-word online database of published academic texts. First, the book offers an institution history of why digital, corpus-based analysis has been rare in North American writing studies to date. Then, based on repeating rhetorical and linguistic features in over 19,000 student essays, the book outlines discourse features in student writing that do not match patterns of advanced academic argumentation. The book closes with data-driven recommendations for writing research, instruction, and assessment.

 

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