Laura Aull
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
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0741088318819472
https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/jwa/vol3/lang.pdf
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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.