Extraction of transforming sequences and sentence histories from writing process data: a first step towards linguistic modeling of writing

Producing written texts is a non-linear process: in contrast to speech, writers are free to change already written text at any place at any point in time. Linguistic considerations are likely to play an important role, but so far, no linguistic models of the writing process exist. We present an approach for the analysis of writing processes with a focus on linguistic structures based on the novel concepts of transforming sequences, text history, and sentence history. The processing of raw keystroke logging data and the application of natural language processing tools allows for the extraction and filtering of product and process data to be stored in a hierarchical data structure. This structure is used to re-create and visualize the genesis and history for a text and its individual sentences. Focusing on sentences as primary building blocks of written language and full texts, we aim to complement established writing process analyses and, ultimately, to interpret writing timecourse data with respect to linguistic structures. To enable researchers to explore this view, we provide a fully functional implementation of our approach as an open-source software tool and visualizations of the results. We report on a small scale exploratory study in German where we used our tool. The results indicate both the feasibility of the approach and that writers actually revise on a linguistic level. The latter confirms the need for modeling written text production from the perspective of linguistic structures beyond the word level.

Steamsational Writing

Providing young children with rich environments for writing has been a continuing quest for teachers in the early grades. This chapter investigates the use of Bee-bot robots as a means of creating a stimulating environment that engages second graders in the writing process and learning story grammar elements. Researchers met with the students weekly for an hour over six weeks. In the first week, students wrote an initial story and learned the basics of programming a Bee-bot robot. In subsequent weeks, students listened to a story set in the context of the Bee-bot mat, reviewed vocabulary words, planned a path for their robot, wrote a short story, and executed their robot program. There was a significant difference overall between the baseline story and the final story, and between the initial rating of each of the story grammar elements and the final rating of the elements, with the exception of Character.

Reflections of Writing Narratives

Writing becomes a catalyst for healing. When people transfer thoughts and feelings to paper or a computer, stressful emotional events in the mind and physical tension in the body often improve. While writing cannot take the place of a medical expert's evaluation, it can help the healing process. This narrative focuses on how students in a classroom, patients in a clinic, and anyone coping with uncertain times can use the writing process to share ideas, track symptoms, vent frustrations, compose prayers, or reflect on life.

Reflections of Emotional Truth Narratives

This narrative provides fictional examples based on factual experiences of patients who worked with a health coach and the story of a grieving daughter who experienced her mother's death. Factual truth focuses on facts, while emotional truth focuses on the emotions associated with a memory. Sometimes when life brings difficulties, discussing the emotional truth of events through the writing process can provide a coping mechanism for emotional trauma and insight of a path forward leading to better days.

Interlanguage of Error Analysis on Students Writing in Covid-19 Pandemic Era

This study aims to investigate the interlanguage of error analysis production on students writing. In writing process, there are general problem that occur such error from the interlanguage. This problem certainly getting worse during this Covid -19 pandemic era where the students only have limited direct or face to face English learning for one hour per week. Interlanguage is language used by second or foreign language when prosess of learning the target language. Data collected through documentation technique. The sample was taken using purposive sampling technique. There were five students as the sample. The framework of interlanguage and error analysis was applied in the process of data analysis. The results of this study indicate that the interlanguage of the students is influenced by 78% of language transfer, 10.5%of transfer of training and 10.5%of overgeneralization.

Review of the Discussion Section of Research Articles: Rhetorical Structure and Move

The discussion section forms an integral part in the writing process of a research article (RA). Research authors find it difficult to write and produce a well-structured discussion for their findings. The reason could be due to the unawareness of the main components (rhetorical moves) that shape this section. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a review of the studies that have been done to analyze the discussion section of RAs over the last 36 years. Also, this review seeks to examine the discussion section of RAs across various scientific disciplines and different types of journals. The review showed that the rhetorical structure of RAs discussion section witnessed some changes over the course of time. New moves such as Research Implications and Research Limitations started to be parts of the discussion section of RAs. In addition, it was revealed that differences in writing the discussion section can be varied broadly across disciplines such as soft sciences (e.g., applied linguistics, sociology, psychology) and hard sciences (e.g., engineering, chemistry, biology) and slightly across types of journals such as ISI and local journals. In conclusion, this paper offered several suggestions for further research to be conducted in the area.

Authoring support for Spanish language writers

Authoring support consists of (semi)automated aids to be used at different stages during the writing process. Language information, however, tends to be restricted to areas such as spelling and grammar checking or term banks, and text construction difficulties that writers face concerning the structure of particular genres, associated sentence formulations or genre-specific vocabulary have not received proper attention. An additional gap in the research is that this support is generally addressed to English language users. This paper addresses these concerns focusing on a particular genre: the company’s directors’ report, and on Spanish language writers writing in English. A custom-made monolingual corpus has been analyzed using Bhatia (1993, 2004) and Swales (1990, 2004) definitions of genre and move combined with theme characterization. Recurrent strings for each move/step, which are conventionally associated with each rhetorical unit, were identified and formulated as “meta-strings.” The bilingual glossary includes domain-specific items as well as move/step or genre-specific lexical and phraseological options, i.e., elements used irrespective of the business, places or people involved. The results are valuable by themselves, as an analysis of the genre, but also as the empirical basis for the authoring support tool that we present here, and as language training materials.

Wound and Travel – Sophocles’s 193 Philoctetes and Homer’s Odyssey in Inflammation du verbe vivre (Inflammation of the Verb To Live) by Wajdi Mouawad

In her article, the author analyses an example of a text and its staging brought about by the sudden death of a member of the playwright’s creative team. In his solo performance Inflammation du verbe vivre (Inflammation of the Verb To Live), created at the Paris Théâtre National de la Colline in 2015, Canadian-Lebanese playwright, director and actor Wajdi Mouawad interwove the ancient Greek literary and mythological heritage with a personal confession about the loss of his friend and professional colleague Robert Davreu, upgrading it with a socially critical depiction of the situation in today’s Greece. The performance was made as the penultimate part of a staging cycle of Sophocles’s seven preserved tragedies under the common title Le dernièr jour de sa vie (The Last Day of his Life). Mouawad had intended to direct the cycle in new translations by Davreu. Mouawad thus connected the process of mourning the death, which stopped the project, with the documentation of the writing process of the text that he later also directed and performed in the form of a peculiar theatre elegy. He fused the character of Philoctetes with the character of Odysseus; not the Odysseus from Sophocles’s tragedy who plots to steal Philoctetes’s bow, but the one from Homer who seeks his way home to Ithaca for ten years after the conquer of Troy and visits Tiresias’s shade in the underworld.