A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall Humor component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also scored for overall writing quality by human raters, which correl...

This study investigated the accuracy of scores assigned by self-, peer-, and teacher assessors over time. Thirty-three English majors who were taking paragraph development course at Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan and two instructors who had been teaching essay writing for at least two years at university, participated in the study. After receiving instructions on paragraph development, part...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of two types of paragraph on EFL learners’ written production. It addressed the issue of how three aspects of language production (i.e. complexity, accuracy, and fluency) vary among two types of paragraphs (i.e. paragraphs of chronology and cause-effect) written by EFL learners. Thirty intermediate level learners of English participate...