The Naked Truth about the NakedThis: Investigating Grammatical Prescriptivism in Technical Communication

Ryan K. Boettger University of North Texas ; Stefanie Wulff University of Florida

Abstract

The decision to follow the demonstrative this with a noun phrase is important to students’ writing development. Previous research has emphasized when students should not attend this rather than studying why students make the choice. Using a corpus-linguistic approach, we investigated 1,999 instances of (un)attended this in student technical and academic writing. High shares of unattended this were found in both text types as well as in original and revised drafts.

Journal
Technical Communication Quarterly
Published
2014-04-01
DOI
10.1080/10572252.2013.803919
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Cited by in this index (7)

  1. Technical Communication Quarterly
  2. Technical Communication Quarterly
  3. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  4. Written Communication
  5. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Show all 7 →
  1. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
  2. Communication Design Quarterly

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