Combining user needs, lexicographic data and digital writing environments

The past decades have seen dramatic improvements to dictionary content and format. Yet dictionaries – both paper-based and digital – remain disappointingly underused. As a result, it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to train people in dictionary-consultation skills. Another solution would be to build lexicographic resources that require little or no instruction. In this paper, I present the ColloCaid project, whose aim is to develop a lexicographic tool that combines user needs, lexicographic data and digital writing environments to bring dictionaries to writers instead of waiting for them to get the information they need from dictionaries. Our focus is on helping writers produce more idiomatic texts by integrating lexicographic data on collocations into text editors in a way that does not distract them from their writing. A distinguishing characteristic of ColloCaid is that it is not limited to providing feedback on miscollocations. It also aims to ‘feed forward’, raising awareness of collocations writers may not remember or know how to look up. While our initial prototype is being developed specifically for academic English, the implications of our research can be broadened to other languages and usages beyond academic.

Towards an enhanced view of doctoral writing environments: Learning alliances to reconceptualise practice

As doctoral enrolments have soared in many countries around the world, considerable attention has been devoted to how an increasingly diverse candidature can succeed in thesis writing. Along with supervisory guidance during the student’s research project, various publications have emerged to help students with thesis writing requirements. However, neither necessarily helps students become expert writers as supervisors tend to focus on content discussions, and self-help books attend to the more surface or mechanical features of writing. Along the way to a finished thesis, students can become mired in uncertainty about what they are discovering – intellectually stuck – and then lose confidence in their ability to express themselves within an academically accepted writing style. Indecision hampers student progress as they struggle with appropriate ways to reveal the insights they are gaining during research. Yet, generic, group-oriented, doctoral writing programmes can provide a powerful means for students to appreciate key features of the doctoral writing genre and overcome intellectual hurdles. This paper explores how an understanding of threshold concepts and the use of cultural, social and linguistic tools can mediate students’ emerging knowledge of how to become proficient and successful thesis writers.

A Rule-Based Decision Support System for Authoring Technical Instructions

The objective of this research is to investigate the viability of a decision support system for technical instruction authors who write instructions in free text. The foundation for the decision support system relies on mapping computational linguistic metrics to guidelines for authoring technical instructions. For example, the guideline Limit each sentence to 25 words or fewer maps to the computational linguistic metrics Word Count. As another example, the guideline Begin each step with a command (an imperative verb) maps to the Location of first imperative verb metric. Testing the decision support system shows its effectiveness and suggests a need to expand the computational rule-base to include even more guidelines. Doing so can further enhance the usability of the decision support system in writing environments. Faculty and students in academia and employees in industry need such a system to improve the quality of written instructions, accelerate revisions, and enhance productivity. In summary, a rule-base for providing feedback to technical authors has been investigated and established. With this rule-base as a foundation, a decision support system has been developed and tested, and the source code has been made publically available.

What Online Writing Spaces Afford Us in the Age of Campus Carry, “Wall-Building,” and Orlando's Pulse Tragedy

Theorizing about twenty-first century writing spaces, the authors argue that online writing environments offer particular affordances to writing teachers when navigating challenging subject matter at complex, political moments. Alongside narrative theorization, the authors provide stories about their writing experiences alongside their students, while offering strategies for complicating and extending our field's discussions of the possibilities for online writing in the age of massive online open courses. The authors conclude that, while online spaces cannot offer “safe spaces” for writing instruction, they may offer “braver” spaces as students and instructors alike grapple with challenging, political landscapes.

Narrative Writing in Digital Formats: Interpreting the Impact of Audience

Digital writing has enabled students to write for a variety of authentic audiences, both in and out of the classroom. As they consider audience, students shoulder a cognitive burden that they must juggle in addition to the task of composition. At the same time, writing provides students with opportunities to craft and express their identities. The ways that identity formation and cognitive load intersect may be particularly complex in digital, online writing environments, as students gain the ability to share and receive feedback from global and local audiences. In this counterbalanced experimental study, 86 seventh- and eighth-grade students responded to two narrative prompts. One prompt was written for the teacher and the other was written for the teacher and peers in an online forum. We examined student writing fluency, mechanical errors, academic word use, and setting. Students were found to be more likely to set narratives in private settings when writing for an audience that included peers. We discuss this finding from cognitive and sociocultural perspectives and how it might inform networked communication research.