Laura Aull is the Director of the Writing Program and Associate Professor of English Language and Literature. Her research focuses on composition, applied linguistics, writing assessment, and writing analytics. She is the author of _First-Year University Writing_ and _How Students Write_, for which she received a National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her latest articles appear here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746049 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0741088318819472 https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/jwa/vol3/lang.pdf
This article proposes a functional taxonomy for the growing research specialization 1 of writing ... more This article proposes a functional taxonomy for the growing research specialization 1 of writing analytics (WA). Building on prior efforts to taxonomize research areas in WA and learning analytics, this taxonomy aims to scaffold a coherent and relevant WA research agenda, including a commitment to reflection, evidence-based propositions, and multidisciplinarity as the research specialization evolves. To this end, the article offers a conceptual and practical overview of WA in the following sections: history, theorization, implementation paradigms, data, digital environments, analytic processes and uses, assessment, ethical considerations, and ongoing challenges. This overview highlights current limitations and needed WA research as well as valuable opportunities for the future of WA.
Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing develop... more Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education—persuasive argumentative writing, and analytic explanatory writing—based on corpus linguistic analysis of late-undergraduate and early-graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à -vis stance markers that intensify and contrast.
Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also... more Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also highlights the prevalence of the most common genre in students' transition into advanced college writing, the argumentative essay. Consistent with most research in composition, and therefore most studies of general, first-year college writing, such research has primarily emphasized genre context. Other research, in international applied linguistics research and particularly English for Academic Purposes (EAP), has focused less on first-year writers but has likewise shown the frequent use of argumentative essays in undergraduate writing. Together, these studies suggest that the argumentative essay is represented more than other genres in early college writing development, and that any given genre favors particular discourse features in contrast with other genres students might write. A productive next step, but one not yet realized, is to bring these discussions together, in research that uses context-informed corpus analysis that investigates students' assignment contexts and analyzes the discourse that characterizes the tasks and genres students write. This study offers an exploratory, context-informed analysis of argumentative and explanatory writing by first-year college writers. Based on the corpus findings, the article underscores discourse as an integral part of the sociocognitive practices embedded in genres, and accordingly considers new ways to conceptualize student writing genres and to inform instruction and assignment design.
"Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, th... more "Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of students’ DSP essays, showing key differences between the writing of students who self-selected into a mainstream first-year writing course and that of students who self-selected into a preparatory course. Using both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-based text analysis, the examination provides information that can, in addition to validating student decisions, equip students with a rhetorically reflexive awareness of genre and offer an alternative to externally imposed writing assessment."
Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recu... more Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according
to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts. These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university
level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.
Research highlights the importance of stance in academic writing, and recent research
shows incr... more Research highlights the importance of stance in academic writing, and recent research
shows increasing emphasis on stance in undergraduate writing. Most studies of student writing focus on epistemic stance in terms of certainty and not generality; yet instructional materials suggest that developing writers need to learn to limit generalizations. This study examines the use of certain indefinite pronouns and extreme amplifiers that help indicate generality as a part of stance in three corpora: new college writing, advanced student writing, and published academic writing. The study shows two specific and shared rhetorical uses of generalization markers, emphasizing the wide applicability of a claim and projecting shared ideas. The study also shows clear differences in the frequency of generalizations used and the breadth or scope of generalizations made. Published academic writing contains the fewest generalization markers, while new college writing shows the most generalizations as well as generalizations that span large groups and periods of time. The findings suggest that in non-discipline specific essay writing, new college students' frequent use of generalization markers contrasts the more circumspect stance features in advanced student and published discipline-specific writing, posing questions for writing instruction as well as essay-based writing assessment.
Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has ... more Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and evidence expectations of different genres, and have bolstered valuable attention to genre awareness and transfer. In its attention to context and macro-level features, however, RGS has focused less on recurring linguistic patterns in written genres, which has contributed to two gaps in genre-based approaches to FYW: few large-scale analyses of first-year written genres, and little attention to language patterns in genre-based FYW pedagogy and research. This article aims to interrogate these gaps and offer a way beyond them, in three parts. First, it historicizes the institutional separation of U.S. rhetoric-composition and linguistics. Second, i...
Written by Laura L. Aull and John M. Swales, this essay examines the initial reviews of Swales’ G... more Written by Laura L. Aull and John M. Swales, this essay examines the initial reviews of Swales’ Genre Analysis (1990). The reviews are analyzed in terms of the reactions of reviewers to that volume shortly after its appearance, the disciplinary values, as enacted by the reviewers in the historical moment of publication, and the disciplinary values and readability expectations which seem to inform the reviewers' observations.
Writing assessment criteria often separate language and writing standards, reflecting an implicit... more Writing assessment criteria often separate language and writing standards, reflecting an implicit dichotomy between “writing” and “language” in which conventions and style can appear tangential to writing categories like argument and development of ideas. This article examines U.S. Common Core standards and student writing selected as exemplifying those standards in light of discourse-level features noted in applied linguistic and composition research. In so doing, it aims to help expose connections between organization, argument/claim development, style, conventions, and tone via patterns in academic writing. In this way, the article considers assessment standards and their use as opportunities to examine and clarify connections between the arguments students are encouraged to construct and the discourse options students have.
This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argume... more 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 differences in students’ educational context, with greatest distinctions emerging between first-year writers and all of the more advanced writers. The specific features of stance that point to a developmental trajectory are approximative hedges/boosters, code glosses, and adversative/contrast connectors. The findings suggest methodological and conceptual implications: They highlight the value of descriptive, corpus-based studies of incoming first-year writing compared to advanced academic writing, and they underscore the construction of academic stance—particularly via certain stance features—as a process of delimiting one’s stance in a way that accounts for the views of others.
Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to wr... more Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to writing placement in US post- secondary settings. However, to date, the theoretical underpinnings of DSP instruments have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on survey design principles, this study analyzes a corpus of thirty DSP questionnaires to identify the range of theoretical concepts underlying DSP questions, as well as the dimensions used to measure those concepts. Arguing that the validity of DSP in local contexts depends to a great extent on the initial theoretical and empirical basis of the instruments used to structure DSP processes, the researchers discuss the problems as well as the possibilities of the concepts and dimensions currently used in DSP questionnaires. Finally, they offer the example of one of their own universities’ DSP questionnaires, which is grounded in rhetorical genre theory, as a case study for how attending to questionnaire concepts and dimensions can contribute to the thoughtful design of locally situated DSP instruments.
This article proposes a functional taxonomy for the growing research specialization 1 of writing ... more This article proposes a functional taxonomy for the growing research specialization 1 of writing analytics (WA). Building on prior efforts to taxonomize research areas in WA and learning analytics, this taxonomy aims to scaffold a coherent and relevant WA research agenda, including a commitment to reflection, evidence-based propositions, and multidisciplinarity as the research specialization evolves. To this end, the article offers a conceptual and practical overview of WA in the following sections: history, theorization, implementation paradigms, data, digital environments, analytic processes and uses, assessment, ethical considerations, and ongoing challenges. This overview highlights current limitations and needed WA research as well as valuable opportunities for the future of WA.
Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing develop... more Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education—persuasive argumentative writing, and analytic explanatory writing—based on corpus linguistic analysis of late-undergraduate and early-graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à -vis stance markers that intensify and contrast.
Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also... more Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also highlights the prevalence of the most common genre in students' transition into advanced college writing, the argumentative essay. Consistent with most research in composition, and therefore most studies of general, first-year college writing, such research has primarily emphasized genre context. Other research, in international applied linguistics research and particularly English for Academic Purposes (EAP), has focused less on first-year writers but has likewise shown the frequent use of argumentative essays in undergraduate writing. Together, these studies suggest that the argumentative essay is represented more than other genres in early college writing development, and that any given genre favors particular discourse features in contrast with other genres students might write. A productive next step, but one not yet realized, is to bring these discussions together, in research that uses context-informed corpus analysis that investigates students' assignment contexts and analyzes the discourse that characterizes the tasks and genres students write. This study offers an exploratory, context-informed analysis of argumentative and explanatory writing by first-year college writers. Based on the corpus findings, the article underscores discourse as an integral part of the sociocognitive practices embedded in genres, and accordingly considers new ways to conceptualize student writing genres and to inform instruction and assignment design.
"Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, th... more "Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of students’ DSP essays, showing key differences between the writing of students who self-selected into a mainstream first-year writing course and that of students who self-selected into a preparatory course. Using both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-based text analysis, the examination provides information that can, in addition to validating student decisions, equip students with a rhetorically reflexive awareness of genre and offer an alternative to externally imposed writing assessment."
Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recu... more Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according
to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts. These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university
level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.
Research highlights the importance of stance in academic writing, and recent research
shows incr... more Research highlights the importance of stance in academic writing, and recent research
shows increasing emphasis on stance in undergraduate writing. Most studies of student writing focus on epistemic stance in terms of certainty and not generality; yet instructional materials suggest that developing writers need to learn to limit generalizations. This study examines the use of certain indefinite pronouns and extreme amplifiers that help indicate generality as a part of stance in three corpora: new college writing, advanced student writing, and published academic writing. The study shows two specific and shared rhetorical uses of generalization markers, emphasizing the wide applicability of a claim and projecting shared ideas. The study also shows clear differences in the frequency of generalizations used and the breadth or scope of generalizations made. Published academic writing contains the fewest generalization markers, while new college writing shows the most generalizations as well as generalizations that span large groups and periods of time. The findings suggest that in non-discipline specific essay writing, new college students' frequent use of generalization markers contrasts the more circumspect stance features in advanced student and published discipline-specific writing, posing questions for writing instruction as well as essay-based writing assessment.
Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has ... more Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and evidence expectations of different genres, and have bolstered valuable attention to genre awareness and transfer. In its attention to context and macro-level features, however, RGS has focused less on recurring linguistic patterns in written genres, which has contributed to two gaps in genre-based approaches to FYW: few large-scale analyses of first-year written genres, and little attention to language patterns in genre-based FYW pedagogy and research. This article aims to interrogate these gaps and offer a way beyond them, in three parts. First, it historicizes the institutional separation of U.S. rhetoric-composition and linguistics. Second, i...
Written by Laura L. Aull and John M. Swales, this essay examines the initial reviews of Swales’ G... more Written by Laura L. Aull and John M. Swales, this essay examines the initial reviews of Swales’ Genre Analysis (1990). The reviews are analyzed in terms of the reactions of reviewers to that volume shortly after its appearance, the disciplinary values, as enacted by the reviewers in the historical moment of publication, and the disciplinary values and readability expectations which seem to inform the reviewers' observations.
Writing assessment criteria often separate language and writing standards, reflecting an implicit... more Writing assessment criteria often separate language and writing standards, reflecting an implicit dichotomy between “writing” and “language” in which conventions and style can appear tangential to writing categories like argument and development of ideas. This article examines U.S. Common Core standards and student writing selected as exemplifying those standards in light of discourse-level features noted in applied linguistic and composition research. In so doing, it aims to help expose connections between organization, argument/claim development, style, conventions, and tone via patterns in academic writing. In this way, the article considers assessment standards and their use as opportunities to examine and clarify connections between the arguments students are encouraged to construct and the discourse options students have.
This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argume... more 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 differences in students’ educational context, with greatest distinctions emerging between first-year writers and all of the more advanced writers. The specific features of stance that point to a developmental trajectory are approximative hedges/boosters, code glosses, and adversative/contrast connectors. The findings suggest methodological and conceptual implications: They highlight the value of descriptive, corpus-based studies of incoming first-year writing compared to advanced academic writing, and they underscore the construction of academic stance—particularly via certain stance features—as a process of delimiting one’s stance in a way that accounts for the views of others.
Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to wr... more Over the last fifteen years, directed self-placement (DSP) has become a widespread approach to writing placement in US post- secondary settings. However, to date, the theoretical underpinnings of DSP instruments have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on survey design principles, this study analyzes a corpus of thirty DSP questionnaires to identify the range of theoretical concepts underlying DSP questions, as well as the dimensions used to measure those concepts. Arguing that the validity of DSP in local contexts depends to a great extent on the initial theoretical and empirical basis of the instruments used to structure DSP processes, the researchers discuss the problems as well as the possibilities of the concepts and dimensions currently used in DSP questionnaires. Finally, they offer the example of one of their own universities’ DSP questionnaires, which is grounded in rhetorical genre theory, as a case study for how attending to questionnaire concepts and dimensions can contribute to the thoughtful design of locally situated DSP instruments.
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to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts. These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university
level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.
shows increasing emphasis on stance in undergraduate writing. Most studies of student writing focus on epistemic stance in terms of certainty and not generality; yet instructional materials suggest that developing writers need to learn to limit generalizations. This study examines the use of certain indefinite pronouns and extreme amplifiers that help indicate generality as a part of stance in three corpora: new college writing, advanced student writing, and published academic writing. The study shows two specific and shared rhetorical uses of generalization markers, emphasizing the wide applicability of a claim and projecting shared ideas. The study also shows clear differences in the frequency of generalizations used and the breadth or scope of generalizations made. Published academic writing contains the fewest generalization markers, while new college writing shows the most generalizations as well as generalizations that span large groups and periods of time. The findings suggest that in non-discipline specific essay writing, new college students' frequent use of generalization markers contrasts the more circumspect stance features in advanced student and published discipline-specific writing, posing questions for writing instruction as well as essay-based writing assessment.
observations.
to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts. These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university
level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.
shows increasing emphasis on stance in undergraduate writing. Most studies of student writing focus on epistemic stance in terms of certainty and not generality; yet instructional materials suggest that developing writers need to learn to limit generalizations. This study examines the use of certain indefinite pronouns and extreme amplifiers that help indicate generality as a part of stance in three corpora: new college writing, advanced student writing, and published academic writing. The study shows two specific and shared rhetorical uses of generalization markers, emphasizing the wide applicability of a claim and projecting shared ideas. The study also shows clear differences in the frequency of generalizations used and the breadth or scope of generalizations made. Published academic writing contains the fewest generalization markers, while new college writing shows the most generalizations as well as generalizations that span large groups and periods of time. The findings suggest that in non-discipline specific essay writing, new college students' frequent use of generalization markers contrasts the more circumspect stance features in advanced student and published discipline-specific writing, posing questions for writing instruction as well as essay-based writing assessment.
observations.