Linguistic Features of Writing Quality

In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high-...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Written communication Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 57 - 86
Main Authors: McNamara, Danielle S., Crossley, Scott A., McCarthy, Philip M.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.01.2010
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects:
Cohesion
Competence
Comprehension
Computational Linguistics
Computer Generated Language Analysis
Computer Software
Connected Discourse
Difficulty Level
Educational Quality
Essays
Indexes
Linguistics
Mathematics
Rating Scales
Reading Comprehension
Scores
Scoring Rubrics
Sentence Structure
Studies
Syntactic Complexity
Undergraduate Students
Verbs
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Size
Word Frequency
Writing
Writing Tests
Written Language
essay quality
assessment
writing proficiency
cohesion
coherence
computational linguistics
ISSN:0741-0883, 1552-8472
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high- and low-proficiency essays can be predicted by linguistic indices of cohesion (i.e., coreference and connectives), syntactic complexity (e.g., number of words before the main verb, sentence structure overlap), the diversity of words used by the writer, and characteristics of words (e.g., frequency, concreteness, imagability). The three most predictive indices of essay quality in this study were syntactic complexity (as measured by number of words before the main verb), lexical diversity (as measured by the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity), and word frequency (as measured by Celex, logarithm for all words). Using 26 validated indices of cohesion from Coh-Metrix, none showed differences between high- and low-proficiency essays and no indices of cohesion correlated with essay ratings. These results indicate that the textual features that characterize good student writing are not aligned with those features that facilitate reading comprehension. Rather, essays judged to be of higher quality were more likely to contain linguistic features associated with text difficulty and sophisticated language.
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ISSN:0741-0883
1552-8472
DOI:10.1177/0741088309351547