A Left Turn: Automated Feedback & Activity Generation for Student Writers

Writing is key to educational and workplace success. The majority of computer-based writing support applications target K-12 students and offer standard feedback concerning the U.S.centric, 5-paragraph, expository essay genre, which is typically taught to developing writers and used on standardized tests. This writing demo takes a “left turn”. By “left turn”, we mean that this demo is illustrating a new writing support concept. In contrast to most systems that provide only feedback, this demo illustrates how guided activities can be automatically generated as a complement to relevant writing feedback driven by natural language processing (NLP) methods. Further, the demo is intended to handle a wide range of writing genres in postsecondary academic settings. The demo feedback and activities illustrated in this paper are ideas that are intended to promote postsecondary students’ engagement with writing assignments, and address writing domain knowledge that is critical for producing higher quality postsecondary writing assignments across writing genres and academic disciplines.