How Students Write: A Linguistic Analysis

by Laura Louise Aull

Broad generalizations about "people today" are a familiar feature of first-year student writing. How Students Write brings a fresh perspective to this perennial observation, using corpus linguistics techniques. This study analyzes sentence-level patterns in student writing to develop an understanding of how students present evidence, draw connections between ideas, relate to their readers, and, ultimately, learn to construct knowledge in their writing. Drawing on both first-year and upper-level student writing, the book examines the discourse of students at different points in their education. It also distinguishes between argumentative and analytic essays to explore the way school genres and assignments shape students' choices. In focusing on sentence-level features such as hedges ("perhaps") and boosters ("definitely"), this study shows how such rhetorical choices work together to open or close opportunities for thoughtful exchanges of ideas. Attention to these features can help instructors foster civil discourse, design effective assignments, and expose and question norms of higher education.

204 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Fredrik deBoer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still consider myself an academic, but I'm now more than four years removed from any formal position in academia, and it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever be back. My journey and its ultimate failure is all bound up in issues related to my mental illness, which I won't bore you with. But I also was unlikely ever to find success thanks to my permanent and ever-deepening estrangement from my field, known as rhetoric & composition or, my preferred term, writing studies. I had and have a laundry list of complaints about the field (and in fact have a book under contract about them), but the principle objection is that the field has abandoned a) empirical analysis of student writing and b) any interest in the actual nuts and bolts of student writing as it actually exists.

I certainly don't mean to rope Aull into my crankishness. But I found this book such a breath of fresh air, a work firmly within the field that is actually about student writing and how it works. It's ludicrous that such a subject could be rare in the field of writing studies, but it sadly is, as everyone else is running away from empiricism and language into more and more obscure theory, or into pop culture analysis, or into tired retreads of political analysis that was already made in other fields a decade ago. Here is a book from a scholar who bothers to ask what's actually happening in our writing classrooms, what our students are actually doing with their time, and why it matters. This is a work of clear-eyed and perceptive empirical observation about a topic that has immense importance in the university writ large but which most writing scholars seem totally uninterested in. I highly recommend it to anyone who teaches college writing and has an interest in what actually goes on when our students write, instead of articles about the semiotics of Harry Potter or "the mangle."

I met Aull at a couple conferences when we were both grad students and was impressed with her and her work. And now I find, years after it was published, that she's written exactly the book I hoped she would one day write.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a monumentally useful book for those interested in helping students improve their writing. I appreciate how the author really got into the weeds regarding what constitutes good writing.