As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools become embedded in writing practices, researchers must refine methodologies for studying self-regulation in AI-assisted composition. While sociocognitive and co-regulation frameworks have effectively captured self-regulatory processes in human collaboration, they are insufficient for understanding how writers manage the dynamic and probabilistic nature of AI-generated text. This article introduces interplay as a methodological framework to analyze the recursive process of initiating, responding, adapting, and revising in human–AI writing interactions. Unlike co-regulation, where collaborators share communicative intent, interplay highlights the writer’s active role in interpreting and steering AI-generated content. Drawing on self-regulation theory, we propose an analytical framework that integrates traditional self-regulation categories (goal-setting, monitoring, and reflection) with interplay-specific coding (initiation, evaluation, acceptance, and adaptation). Through case analyses of human–AI writing exchanges, we demonstrate how interplay provides a systematic approach to studying agency, decision making, and regulatory strategies in AI-assisted writing. We argue that recognizing interplay as a distinct dimension of self-regulation advances both empirical research and pedagogical approaches to AI-mediated composition.

This article uses a novel theoretical frame—materio-cognitivism—to explore how digital writing processes change with time and experience. Researchers observed 10 second langauge writers as they completed two research writing tasks—one at the start of their first year of university and one near the end of university. Interviews and screen recording were used to track writing activity. Five key writing strategies were identified. Among the most improved writers, researchers identified a set of shared changes in how writing strategies were deployed. In particular, the most improved writers showed increased ability to sequence subtasks, to arrange digital interfaces, and to combine internal cognitive functions with the affordances of digital tools. These findings suggest what the development of writing processes might look like in digital environments, potentially informing both writing pedagogy and assessment.

This study investigated how reading medium (print vs. digital) and communicative purpose (informative vs. persuasive) shape writing processes and outcomes in integrative academic tasks. Eighty-one university students read three source texts in print or digitally and, after random assignment, produced either an informative or persuasive synthesis within a 2×2 between-subjects design. Keystroke logging recorded pausing across three writing stages, indexing planning, translation, and revision. Text quality was scored with holistic rubrics capturing discourse features and integration of sources. Reading medium significantly influenced pausing: students who read in print paused longer during writing, yet medium had no effect on overall text quality. Task purpose mattered: persuasive tasks yielded higher-quality formal writing, whereas scores reflecting level of source integration did not differ. No interaction between reading medium and task purpose emerged. When controlling for reading comprehension, working memory, and planning ability, the main effects of medium and task purpose remained, but period-specific pausing effects were no longer significant. Findings highlight distinct roles for reading medium and task purpose in shaping writing behavior and performance. The results support cautious causal interpretations and suggest that incorporating digital reading and varying task types may enhance academic writing in higher education, informing curriculum design and assessment.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

Combining keystroke logging, screen recordings, interviews, and text quality assessment in two mixed-methods studies with technical writers, this research (1) identifies defining variables of technical writing processes and (2) examines their correlations with and predictive power for text quality. Study 1, an exploratory investigation with 10 participants, identified 22 distinct writing behaviors under six categories of information searching, information reusing, content shaping, organization structuring, language styling, and layout designing during planning, translating, and reviewing sessions. These behavioral variables, together with time-related variables, were subsequently analyzed as “process indicators” in a comparative experiment with 43 participants across experience levels. Results of Study 2 revealed significant differences among experience levels in writing speed, planning duration, pause, search, reuse, content shaping, and structuring. Detailed planning and systematic content/structure editing were strongly associated with higher-quality texts. Building on these findings, we propose a process model of technical writing, explain its correlations with writing score, and depict process profiles of different experience levels. We also highlight the importance of information processing skills in enhancing writing efficiency, offering empirical guidance for technical writing instruction and professional training.

We report on a longitudinal case study (n = 9) about popularization writing skills in undergraduate interdisciplinary students. Writing skills were determined by analyzing components of the cognitive process model of writing proposed by Hayes. Keystroke logging and video observation were used to analyze the text construction process (the process level) in third-year writing. Genre knowledge (the control level) was analyzed through text analysis and assessment of first-year and third-year texts. Results showed that writing was highly individualized at the process level, including switches between processes, timing, number of edits, and reliance on the source text. At the control level, popularization genre knowledge did not significantly change over time and text quality remained low to average, suggesting a lack in genre knowledge. Choices in the writing process are, thus, not reflected in the quality of the writing product. These findings point to a need for explicit training in popularization discourse alongside academic discourse training.

This study explores how the scholarly writing practices of early-career academics in China create new “ecologies” of research writing. Using a literacy studies framing, we examine how productivity policies, including evaluation and incentivization, impact the writing practices of academics working in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), creating a set of spatiotemporal predicaments and uncertainties. We draw on interviews and multimodal journals obtained from 22 academics at Chinese universities. Findings reveal important practices among China’s HSS academics within the distinctive institutional and policy landscape of Chinese academia, including how they organize their space and time for writing, the significance and function of writing practices, and the ways in which boundaries are disrupted and negotiated. We show that writing is deeply intertwined with multiple spaces and times, forming an ecology of research writing within emergent and shifting assemblages. We emphasize the need for further theoretical and practical understanding of research writing in the context of Chinese universities.

This design-based study occurred within a writing methods course in an urban teacher education program. We designed an intervention to develop student teachers’ meta-composing strategies, critical thinking, and justice-oriented reflexivity by revising a teacher-as-writer course assignment to achieve two pedagogical goals: (1) synthesizing antiracist and pedagogical content from curated source texts, and (2) explicating racial literacy as future writing teachers of K-6 students. Using discourse synthesis as both an instructional and research method, we analyzed the synthesis outputs of student teachers during a writing assignment designed to communicate their learnings to an intended audience. Outputs included graphic organizers, planning documents, and a range of final products. We employed discourse synthesis to analyze source and synthesis texts through propositionalization, template formation, and thematic categorization, identifying idea unit origins, progression, or omission. Additionally, content and thematic analyses evaluated instructional strategies and materials to assess whether pedagogical objectives were met. Results indicated discourse synthesis instruction facilitated student engagement with antiracism content, such as historical events, systemic trends, and awareness of racist practices in schools. Findings also highlighted areas for improvement, including modifying source texts, revising the teacher-as-writer assignment, and reevaluating assessment practices in antiracist writing pedagogy.

This article reports on a qualitative assessment of intercultural competence (IC) in U.S. first-year writing (FYW) courses designed to increase intercultural exposure and interaction among domestic and international students. To measure students’ intercultural development via a series of reflective writings, we designed two innovative qualitative analysis tools: a grounded-theory coding scheme and a mapping procedure aligned to the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. Our results show that qualitative assessment of reflective writing reveals dynamic, complex IC development trajectories, displaying nonlinearity, nondiscrete phases, and development within phases. Specifically, we noted that reflective writing helped students engage with and become attuned to aspects of cultural difference. Affordances of the FYW context indicated that students strongly engaged the cognitive domain of IC, and that this domain appears to be activated by reflective writing.

The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of subordination. In order to capture more nuanced patterns in the development of L2 writing, this study measures the sophistication of subordination, considering subordination type (adverbialization, complementization, relativization) and finiteness (finite, nonfinite). Our natural language processing analysis of 6,566 timed impromptu essays using the Subordination Sophistication Analyzer 1.0 showed that higher-proficiency L2 learners used more subordination, and, importantly, their patterns of use differed by subordination type and finiteness. Whereas the amount of adverbialization and relativization increased along with proficiency regardless of finiteness, the use of complementization increased only for nonfinite clauses. The broader impacts of this study for education and assessment are discussed.

In this work, we explore the use of digital technologies and statistical analysis to monitor how Italian secondary school students’ writing changes over time and how comparisons can be made across different high school types. We analyzed more than 2,000 exam essays written by Italian high school students over 13 years and in five different school types. Four indicators of writing characteristics were considered—text length, text complexity, and two indicators of source use, all extracted using natural language processing tools—which provided insights into students’ citation practices over time and in different school contexts. In particular, we measured the portion of students’ essays that included text from source material as well as the amount of copied text that was not properly referenced. We found that student essays became shorter in length over time while also getting more complex. We also found that the tendency to copy uncited text in the essay decreased. High school curricula predict different writing strategies: essays written by students attending scientific and humanistic high schools are longer and less subject to incorrect citations. We argue that such text analysis enables the study of writing features in high school classes and supports the evaluation of curricula.

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality may not only comprise linguistic aspects but also the cognitive-functional power of a text. The presented study aims at exploring the functionality of students’ reporting texts in relation to general text-quality measures, using a corpus of accident reports written by German fifth- and ninth-graders (n = 277) prompted by a pictorial stimulus of a bike accident scenario. An online tool was developed in which 277 university students graphically reenacted the situation from one respective text according to the existence, position, and color of the involved elements. Thereafter, the match of the resulting spatial reconstructions with the original situation was assessed by two raters. While most subscales showed sufficiently high interrater reliabilities, the aggregated functionality score (α = .74) had medium-high correlations with other text-quality ratings and was comparably dependent on grade, education level, and linguistic family background. However, the correlational pattern, regression analysis, and factor analysis showed that the functionality score also contributed unique portions of variance to the assessment of writing skill that were not represented by rating measures. Moreover, the direct indication of whether a text allows for the reader’s adequate cognitive representation is evident. Altogether, the approach of indicating text functionality through practical understanding offers a sound, though empirically laborious, alternative for text-quality measurement. Results are discussed with regard to the didactical strategy according to which students can improve their writing when they observe whether others can make use of their texts.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers—narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned automated writing evaluation models in three conditions: (1) register-related factors alone, (2) linguistic features alone, and (3) the combination of these two. A total of 1006 essays ( n = 327, 342, and 337 for informative, narrative, and opinion, respectively) written by 92 fourth- and fifth-graders were examined. A series of hierarchical linear regression analyses controlling for the effects of demographics were conducted to select the most useful features to capture text quality, scored by humans, in the three registers. These features were in turn entered into automated writing evaluation predictive models with tuning of the parameters in a tenfold cross-validation procedure. The average validity coefficients (i.e., quadratic-weighed kappa, Pearson correlation r, standardized mean score difference, score deviation analysis) were computed. The results demonstrate that (1) diverse feature sets are utilized to predict quality in the three registers, and (2) the combination of register-related factors and linguistic features increases the accuracy and validity of all human and automated scoring models, especially for the registers of informative and opinion writing. The findings from this study suggest that students’ register knowledge and register-specific motivation add additional predictive information when evaluating writing quality across registers beyond that afforded by linguistic features of the paper itself, whether using human scoring or automated evaluation. These findings have practical implications for educational practitioners and scholars in that they can help strengthen consideration of register-specific writing skills and cognitive and motivational forces that are essential components of effective writing instruction and assessment.

Guided by argumentation schema theory, we conducted five psychological studies in the United States and China on arguments about vaccination. Study 1 replicated research about arguments on several topics, finding that agreement judgments are weighted toward claims, whereas quality judgments are weighted toward reasons. However, consistent with recent research, when this paradigm was extended to arguments about vaccination (Study 2), claims received more weight than reasons in judgments about agreement and quality. Studies 3 and 4 were conducted in the United States and China on how people process counterarguments against anti-vaccination assertions. Rebuttals did not influence agreement but played a role in argument quality judgments. Both political position (in the United States) and medical education (in China) predicted differences in argument evaluation. Bad reasons lowered agreement (Study 5), especially among participants studying health care. Political polarization apparently heightens the impact of claim side in the argumentation schema, likely to the detriment of public discourse.

Various forms of proofreading of student writing take place in university contexts. Sometimes writers pay freelance proofreaders to edit their texts before submission for assessment; sometimes more informal arrangements take place, where friends, family, or coursemates proofread. Such arrangements raise ethical questions for universities formulating proofreading policies: in the interests of fairness, should proofreading be debarred entirely or should it be permitted in some form? Using questionnaires and semistructured interviews, this article investigates where three university stakeholder groups stand on the ethics of proofreading. Content lecturers, English language tutors, and students shared their views on the ethics of various lighter-touch and heavier-touch proofreader interventions. All three parties broadly approved of more minor interventions, such as correcting punctuation, amending word grammar, and improving sentence structure. However, students were found to be more relaxed than lecturers and language tutors about the ethics of more substantial interventions at the level of content. There were outliers within each of the three groups whose views on proofreading were wide apart, underscoring the difficulty of formulating proofreading policies that would attract consensus across the academy. The article concludes by discussing the formulation and dissemination of appropriate, research-led proofreading guidelines and issues for further exploration.

We report on a college-level study of student reflection and instructor prompts using scoring and corpus analysis methods. We collected 340 student reflections and 24 faculty prompts. Reflections were scored using trait and holistic scoring and then reflections and faculty prompts were analyzed using Natural Language Processing to identify linguistic features of high, middle, and low scoring reflections. The data sets were then connected to determine if there was a relationship between faculty prompts and scores. Additional analysis was completed to determine if there was a relationship between scores and students’ GPAs. The corpus linguistics analysis showed that higher-scoring reflections used words that referred to the self, the writing process, and specific rhetorical terms. Additional analysis showed student GPAs did not correlate with holistic scores but that higher scoring reflections were from faculty who included learning goals on reflective writing prompts. Results suggest that teachers can de-mystify reflective writing by linking learning outcomes to textual tasks and that corpus linguistics methods can provide an understanding of how local learning goals are transmitted to students.

The stagnation of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Writing scores demonstrates the need for research-based instruction that improves writing for all students, especially English learners. In this article, we synthesize the literature on effective instructional practices for this diverse group of learners and describe how these strategies are leveraged in a teacher professional development program that has been previously shown to improve students’ argument writing. Then, we share results of a study that focuses on distinct subgroups of secondary English learners students to (a) determine their needs and challenges and (b) examine the impact of a cognitive strategies approach on rhetorical and linguistic aspects of writing at posttest. Results show English learners have considerable challenges with higher-order tasks involved in writing literary arguments and with the linguistic demands of academic writing before receiving the intervention. However, after receiving the intervention, using descriptive statistics and multiple hierarchical linear regression, we show that these students grew in the areas of presentation of ideas, organization, evidence use, and language use. For example, students designated as reclassified English learners (RFEP [Reclassified Fluent English Proficient]) and students who have even more limited English proficiency (designated as EL [English learner] here) show improvements in many aspects of writing, especially in their ability to write claims and use evidence. In contrast, improvements in language use components were more limited for both groups of learners. Moreover, some of the gains due to being in the treatment were significant enough to bring the average EL student close to parity or beyond their EO (English Only) / IFEP (Initial Fluent English Proficient) peers in the control condition at posttest. We conclude by discussing pedagogical implications for English learners.

The study of revision has been a topic of interest in writing research over the past decades. Numerous studies have, for instance, shown that learning-to-revise is one of the key competences in writing development. Moreover, several models of revision have been developed, and a variety of taxonomies have been used to measure revision in empirical studies. Current advances in data collection and analysis have made it possible to study revision in increasingly precise detail. The present study aimed to combine previous models and current advances by providing a comprehensive product- and process-oriented tagset of revision. The presented tagset includes properties of external revisions: trigger, orientation, evaluation, action, linguistic domain, spatial location, temporal location, duration, and sequencing. We identified how keystroke logging, screen replays, and eye tracking can be used to extract both manually and automatically extract features related to these properties. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate how this tagset can be used to annotate revisions made by higher education students in various academic tasks. To conclude, we discuss how this tagset forms a scalable basis for studying revision in writing in depth.

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I adopted a register-based approach to investigate academic English proficiency (i.e., specific set of language skills that support academic literacy) and general English proficiency (i.e., wide range of language skills undifferentiated by context that are measured by traditional assessments) as separate predictors of overall essay quality. In the study, students completed a general English proficiency assessment and an academic language proficiency assessment, and essays were coded for academic writing features at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Beyond the contribution of academic writing features and general English proficiency, academic English proficiency emerged as a significant contributor to essay quality. Findings suggest that academic English proficiency scores more precisely identified a subset of academic language skills that is relevant to essay writing. The article concludes by discussing implications for strategic writing instruction that articulates the key expectations of academic writing used in and beyond school contexts.

Research suggests that student development as writers requires a supportive environment in which they receive sustained opportunities to write. However, writing researchers in general know relatively little about the actual writing opportunities embedded in students’ language arts lessons and how students’ production of texts in class is framed. The present study analyzes 178 video-recorded language arts lessons across 46 secondary classrooms in Norway based on the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation. Specifically, we assess how often and in what situations students get an opportunity to engage in writing or are explicitly encouraged to write. We found that some writing assignments are short and fragmented, especially when students are merely recopying information from teachers’ materials. However, our analysis also provides detailed insight into how some teachers facilitate sustained, genre-focused, and process-oriented writing opportunities. These are powerful examples of successful writing instruction, and they suggest that when Norwegian language arts teachers prioritize writing, the opportunities to write are both sustained and scaffolded, the purpose of writing is explicit, and genre-specific assessment criteria are often used.

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter’s research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources.

Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, for example, biotechnology, climate change, and, more recently, geoengineering. The reporter’s framing of the issue is likely to influence readers’ perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, focusing primarily on the “stories” told about the issue. The current article, on the other hand, springs from an interest in writer behavior. I wish to investigate how news writers strategically exploit their rhetorical competence when reporting on contested issues, and I argue that text linguistics represents a fruitful approach to studying this process. It is suggested that genre features may serve as a basis for identifying key framing locations in the text, and that the notion of evaluation plays an important part in writers’ framing activity. I discuss these aspects through a case study involving six news reports on a geoengineering experiment.

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one another and demonstrate that expert human raters examine a number of different linguistic features in a variety of combinations when assessing writing proficiency and assigning high scores to independent essays (regardless of the scoring rubric considered). The writing styles in the four clusters can be described as action and depiction style, academic style, accessible style, and lexical style. The study provides empirical evidence that successful writing cannot be defined simply through a single set of predefined features, but that, rather, successful writing has multiple profiles. While these profiles may overlap, each profile is distinct.

New media are having a significant impact on science communication, both on the way scientists communicate with peers and on the dissemination of science to the lay public. Science blogs, in particular, provide an open space for science communication, where a diverse audience (with different degrees of expertise) may have access to science information intended both for nonspecialist readers and for experts. The purpose of this article is to analyze the strategies used by bloggers to communicate and recontextualize scientific discourse in the realm of science blogs. These strategies involve adjusting information to the readers’ knowledge and information needs, deploying linguistic features typical of personal, informal, and dialogic interaction to create intimacy and proximity, engaging in critical analysis of the recontextualized research and focusing on its relevance, and using explicit and personal expressions of evaluation. The article shows that, given the diverse audience of science posts, bloggers display a blending of discursive practices from different discourses and harness the affordances of new media to achieve their rhetorical purposes.

Based on eighth-grade writing assessment data from the 1998 ( N = 20,586) and 2007 ( N = 139,900) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), this study examines the relationships among students’ writing attitudes, learning-related behaviors, and gender in relation to writing performance. Overall, the effects of attitudes were slightly larger than the effects of learning behaviors on writing performance, and gender differences were more prominent in attitudes than learning behaviors related to writing. Perhaps the most surprising finding from the 2007 NAEP data was that females with the most negative attitudes toward writing outperformed males with the most positive attitudes (i.e., writing scores based on two measures of attitudes: females, 157 and 161; males, 151 and 149). Overall, a similar pattern was observed with learning behaviors and gender differences in writing scores. Furthermore, medium effect sizes of gender difference in writing scores (females scoring substantially higher than males) were present even though the students reported to be at the same level in terms of writing attitudes and learning behaviors. The present study demonstrates that gender disparity in students’ writing performance is persistent and strong; it cannot be explained by gender differences in attitudes or behavior alone or in attitudes and behavior combined.

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 that writing specialists have managed to permeate U.S. first-year writing assessment with certain progressive assumptions about writing and writing instruction, but they also indicate critical areas for revision, given such documents’ critical gatekeeping role at postsecondary institutions. The study also raises a broader question about the difficulties of rhetorically constructing “writing ability” in a way that is consistent with the contextualist paradigm dominant in contemporary writing studies.

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 school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.

Three studies examined the “myside bias” in reasoning, evaluating written arguments, and writing argumentative essays. Previous research suggests that some people possess a fact-based argumentation schema and some people have a balanced argumentation schema. I developed reliable Likert scale instruments (1-7 rating) for these constructs and conducted an evaluation of instrument validity and reliability. A myside bias in argumentative essays was predicted by the fact-based and balanced argumentation schema instruments using these individual-difference measures. Strength of opinion predicted the myside bias in generating reasons but not in writing argumentative essays. There was a weak but significant correlation between the myside bias in generating reasons and writing argumentative essays. In evaluating written arguments, the fact-based schema instrument predicted agreement and quality ratings for claims supported by factual but not nonfactual reasons. Ratings of the quality of rebutted arguments were predicted by the measures of individual differences in argumentation schemata.

This article proposes a novel approach to the investigation of student academic writing. It applies theories of metacognition and self-regulated learning to understand how beginning academic writers develop the ability to participate in the communicative practices of academic written communication and develop rhetorical consciousness. The study investigates how this awareness changes over time and how it relates to students’ perceptions of the writing task, metacognitive awareness of strategic choices, and evaluation of their writing. Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, journals collected throughout a semester from students of beginning academic composition were analyzed to determine qualitative changes. The data suggest a link between task perception and students’ conditional metacognitive awareness —their understanding of how to adapt writing strategies to specific rhetorical requirements of the task and why—and performance evaluation. Metacognitive awareness also seems to have a reciprocal relationship with self-regulation and students’ development of individual writing approaches.

Researchers studying technology development often examine how rhetorical activity contributes to technologies' design, implementation, and stabilization. This article offers a possible methodology for studying one role of rhetorical activity in technology development: knowledge consolidation analysis. Applying this method to an exemplar case, the author describes how explanations of Project Essay Grade (PEG), the first initiative to computerize student essay assessment, made knowledge available about this technology project. More specifically, technologist Ellis Page and his coauthors reworked a key explanatory argument, a justification of PEG's functioning, during the course of several decades, refining and clarifying its key contrasts and strengthening its presentation for generalist educators in particular. Analysis suggests that late presentations of the argument reveal that knowledge was successfully consolidated about a technical procedure Page and his coauthors called “rating simulation.” The conclusion discusses the key advantages and limitations of the method.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can serve as a locus of “emergent agency,” with a particular focus on the second-language writer. The data exhibit patterns in the students’ discourse such that earlier segments in the interactions tend to reflect uncertainty, confusion, negative self-evaluation, and negative other-evaluation. As the sessions progress, the authors note shifts in stance whereby students begin to propose candidate solutions to actual or perceived problems and evince more authorial direction. The authors demonstrate that the practice can serve as an effective pedagogical activity in which novice writers learn to navigate through challenges and obstacles associated with university-level reading and writing tasks.

This article presents research from a qualitative study of the way that reflective writing is solicited, taught, composed, and assessed within a state-mandated portfolio curriculum. The research situates reflective texts generated by participating students within the larger goals and bureaucratic processes of the school system. The study finds that reflective letters are a genre within the state curriculum that regulates the substance and tone of students’ reflections. At the classroom level, the genre provides a mode that students adopt with the assurance that their reflections will meet state evaluators’ expectations. At the bureaucratic level, the genre helps to continually validate the state’s portfolio curriculum through its strong encouragement of stylized narratives of progress. The study demonstrates the importance of understanding how large-scale assessments shape pedagogy and students’ writing.

This article investigates children's evaluation/selection of ideas in writing-related tasks. The critical dimension being considered was to what extent the communicative goal that defines argumentation establishes basic criteria with which children decide whether to include counterargument in a text. Data analysis focused on participants' decisions and, most important, the rationales they present for their decisions. Two constraints seem to drive evaluation/selection processes. First, the content constraint, whereby a writer focuses on agreement with the idea itself; second, the rhetorical constraint, defined as a writer's perception of an idea's value in increasing the acceptability of his or her point of view. Counterargumentation must be perceived as a valuable rhetorical strategy if specific counterarguments are to be incorporated into a text; otherwise, counterargumentation remains part of the process of selection/evaluation without becoming explicit in the product of such a process—the text.

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 on familiar and unfamiliar subjects. This method allowed direct comparison of the responses of (a) engineering teachers with relevant expertise in a paper’s subject, (b) engineering teachers without such expertise, and (c) writing teachers. The comparison indicates that technical expertise helps teachers evaluate validity and engage with the text but has a more ambiguous effect on evaluations of rhetorical appropriateness. The article also examines the teachers’ differing attitudes toward the importance of having technical expertise when evaluating and recommends approaches for teacher-training programs (in engineering and composition) based on the results.

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 schools, the kind of writing that is encouraged in the schools, the kind of tasks that are used at the national writing exam, and how writing should be assessed in the Norwegian upper secondary schools, as well as the national writing exam. The study is related to comparable studies internationally, first and foremost the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievements (IEA) study of writing.

The assessment of students' writing skills through essays is a common practice in educational institutions. Scoring of essays requires considerable judgment on the part of those who rate the response. When raters assign different scores to an essay, testing practitioners must resolve the discrepancy before computing an operational score to report to the examinee. This study investigated five forms of score resolution that were reported in a national survey of state department of education-testing agencies. The study examined the effect that each form of resolution has on the reliability of the resulting operational scores. It is shown that some methods of resolution can be associated with higher interrater reliability than can others. It is also shown that the choice of resolution can affect the magnitude of the reported score as well as the final passing rate of an assessment.

This study addressed the question, “How consistently do students perform on holistically scored writing assignments?” Instructors from 13 introductory writing classes at two colleges were asked to provide essay sets written by their students in response to the three to five most important writing assignments in their classes. In all, 796 essays were collected from 241 students. The study drew on a pool of 15 experienced judges to evaluate the essays. Each essay set was scored holistically and independently by 6 of the judges who either ranked or graded the essays in the set. All papers written by a particular student were scored by the same judges. Pairwise correlations of the scores assigned to each essay set were computed for each judge and then averaged across judges. The average of these correlations was 0.16, indicating very low consistency of holistically scored student performance from essay to essay. This result suggests that drawing conclusions from one or even a few writing samples is problematic.

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

This is a piece about language and how we evaluate the work of young writers as they learn to express themselves in writing. The authors' focus is on current reforms in writing assessment, including the brief life of the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) writing portfolios, and how they rarely address the vibrant role of language—the work and play of words—in students' writing. Through audio taped interviews with two elementary and two middle school students and their teachers, as well as the written artifacts in the students' portfolios, we analyzed the patterns of the students' writing and the comments of teachers and peers on their work. In this article, language in writing is metaphorically compared to “the clay that makes the pot,” emphasizing that young writers want to startle, want to engage readers with refreshing and surprising language—but few are provided the guidance for how to do it. The authors' central point is that writing revolves around criticism, but if the assessment stays on the surface and encourages word substitution over content revision, then the criticism may not be helpful in pushing the generative aspect of writing: the work of language.

Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

The relation between writing in formal schooling and writing in other social practices is a central problem in writing research (e.g., critical pedagogy, writing in nonacademic settings, cognition in variable social contexts). How do macro-level social and political structures (forces) affect micro-level literate actions in classrooms and vice versa? To address these questions, the author synthesizes Yrjö Engeström's systems version of Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory with Charles Bazerman's theory of genre systems. The author suggests that this synthesis extends Bakhtinian dialogic theory by providing a broader unit of analysis than text-as-discourse, wider levels of analysis than the dyad, and an expanded theory of dialectic. By tracing the intertextual relations among disciplinary and educational genre systems, through the boundary of classroom genre systems, one can construct a model of ways classroom writing is linked to writing in wider social practices and rethink such issues as agency, task representation, and assessment.

The research reported investigated how 32 undergraduate students in an upper-level sociology course wrote critiques and how their texts were evaluated by 4 professors in the discipline. Students represented different majors and education levels. Features associated with critique were tested for their relationship to the professors' summed holistic quality scores. Student's status as major and their educational level were also tested for their relationship to the summed scores. Results indicate that (a) students were more likely to receive higher scores if they found weaknesses in the source article, basing their judgments on disciplinary knowledge and employing an integrated text configuration, and (b) neither major nor educational level was a strong predictor of quality. Findings suggest that current pedagogy that promotes personal evaluation of texts may not lead to the type of writing valued in particular disciplinary communities, where evaluative commentary may be more linked to unique disciplinary standards.

Student writing in history courses, graded evaluation of that writing, and faculty interviews all reveal a contradiction between the stated and implicit aims of historical discourse. The explicit definition of writing in history is “argumentation”; the implicit expectation, however, is for narrative. This apparent contradiction highlights what the author argues is the central function of academic historical discourse: the establishment of an autonomous subject of meaning who is always speaking from outside history about a distant and objectified past. Students are rarely aware of the importance of this voice, even at an unconscious level, because faculty themselves fail to articulate for students the distinctive nature of their genre or the function of historical discourse generally. This project thus builds on previous studies in rhetoric by using the work of theorists of history to identify more precisely what it is in historical discourse that is hidden from student view—the autonomous, transhistorical voice.

This article takes the position that teaching writing effectively to diverse students of non-English background will require an examination of existing views about the nature of writing and a critical evaluation of the profession's ability to work with bilingual individuals of different types. In order to explain this view, the article is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the nature of bilingualism, identifies the population of students who can be classified as American bilingual minorities, and suggests that existing compartmentalization within the composition profession cannot address the needs of this particular population. Part 2 of the article reviews trends in current scholarship in second-language writing and points out that most of this research has focused on ESL students rather than on fluent/functional bilinguals. Finally, Part 3 lists and discusses a number of research directions in which the involvement and participation of mainstream scholars would be most valuable. In presenting an outline of questions and issues fundamental to developing effective pedagogical approaches for teaching writing to bilingual minority students, this final section argues that involvement in research on non-English-background populations of researchers who generally concentrate on mainstream issues would do much to break down the compartmentalization now existing within the English composition profession. It further argues that by using bilingual individuals to study questions of major theoretical interest, the profession will strengthen the explanatory power of existing theories about the process and practice of writing in general.

These studies investigated the degree to which prompts and topic types affect the writing performance of college freshmen. The students (N = 3,452) taking the 1989 and 1990 Manoa Writing Placement Examination (MWPE) were required to write in response to two types of topics (for a total of 6,904 essays): one in response to a reading passage and another in response to a question based on personal experience. Ten such prompt sets were used in this study. Study 1 indicated that the MWPE testing procedures were reasonably reliable and consistent across semesters but that student responses to individual prompts and prompt sets were significantly different from each other. Study 2 showed that if two topic types and a large number of prompts are involved, the differences that arise in the performance on prompts or topic types can be minimized by examining the students' mean scores and changing the pairings so that the prompt sets are more equitable in subsequent administrations.

In this article, interviews with a Vietnamese-speaking science student who has repeatedly failed a required English competency examination are presented. Topics relating to this examination include prompt type, essay content, rhetorical organization, student preparation for writing, and audience. Questions are raised regarding the purposes, development, and evaluation of writing competency tests.

This article describes episodes of concurrent metalinguistic and ideational thinking in the verbal reports of 23 adult ESL learners composing on two tasks, then relates these descriptions to claims about the value of composition writing for second language learning. Three kinds of thinking episodes, appearing in about 30% of the decisions reported by learners while composing, show potential value for incidental learning of the second language: (a) searching out and assessing appropriate wording, (b) comparing cross-linguistic equivalents, and, much less frequently, (c) reasoning about linguistic choices in the second language. Multivariate analyses indicated that the frequency of these thinking episodes is significantly related to learners' writing expertise in their mother tongue. Implications are drawn for refining Swain's 1985 notion of “comprehensible output” in view of other theories of cognitive learning and second language acquisition, a necessary preliminary to empirical assessment of this hypothesis.

Holistic reading is widely used to assess the proficiency of non-native-speaking (NNS) writers. However, ESL professionals, who have been profoundly influenced by the notion that attention to the NNS author's message is an integral part of teaching the writing process, have questioned how well native-speaking (NS) raters comprehend NNS texts, given that the task of decoding NNS prose is even further complicated by the time constraints of the holistic scoring process itself. This article describes a study that investigated the extent to which NS holistic raters comprehend NNS texts. After rating several practice compositions, subjects rated one of two qualitatively distinct essays, and then wrote recall protocols to test their comprehension. Data analysis revealed that readers of the better written text recalled significantly more than did readers of the less well written text, indicating that NS holistic raters attend to meaning when evaluating NNS writing proficiency.