Linguistic properties of writing prompts have been shown to influence the writing patterns contained in student essays. The majority of previous research on these prompt-based effects has focused on the lexical and syntactic properties of writing prompts and essays. The current study expands this research by investigating the effects of prompt…

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one…

The study applied the Multi-Dimensional analysis used by Biber (1988) to examine the functional parameters of essays. Co-occurrence patterns were identified within an essay corpus (n=1529) using a linguistic indices provided by Co-Metrix. These patterns were used to identify essay groups that shared features based upon situational parameters.…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…