Good scientific writing is a skill researchers seek to acquire. Textbook literature provides guidelines to improve scientific writing, for instance, “use active voice when describing your own work”. In this paper we investigate to what extent researchers adhere to textbook principles in their articles. In our analyses we examine a set of selected principles which (i) are general and (ii) verifi...

BACKGROUND Oral therapies and chemodenervation procedures are often unrewarding in the treatment of focal, task-specific hand disorders such as writer's cramp or primary writing tremor (PWT). METHODS A portable writing orthotic device (WOD) was evaluated on 15 consecutively recruited writer's cramp and PWT subjects. We measured overall impairment at baseline and after 2 weeks of at-home use w...

Objective: This study examined the relationship between ADHD and writing performance. Method: Students in Grades 3 to 7, 84 with ADHD and 135 age and gender-matched controls completed a writing task (including process logs), and measures of, working memory and attention. Results: Students with ADHD wrote texts of similar length but with poorer structure, coherence and ideation. 6.7% of the vari...

Online review has become an important repository for consumers to make online buying decisions. However, writing online reviews is a voluntary behavior lacking guidelines and it is hard to guarantee the review quality generated. How to improve online review quality has become a challenge to online retailers and review aggregators. In this study, we explore the design of review writing interface...

BACKGROUND Coronary heart disease (CHD) is typically associated with many cardiovascular risk factors (e.g., elevated blood pressure), low health-related quality of life, depression, anxiety and psychological stress. Expressive writing (EW) has shown beneficial effects on such variables in both people from the community and in patients with a variety of chronic illnesses. However, no study to d...

Using computer keystroke logs, this study investigated how writing skill affected L2 writers’ pausing patterns to gain insights into their management of the cognitive writing processes. The 59 participants, 29 in the more-skilled group and 30 in the less-skilled group, were recruited from a college English course at a key Chinese university. The two groups completed an argumentative essay in a ...

An important topic in writing research has been the use of cohesive features. Much of this research has focused on local and text cohesion. The few studies that have studied global cohesion have been restricted to first language writing. This study investigates the development of local, global, and text cohesion in the writing of 57 s language (L2) university students and examines the effects o...