Write & Audit: Teaching Genre Features of Statistics Writing with a Student-Facing Text Analysis Tool

Abstract

Based on a corpus analysis of writing data from undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics and data science at Carnegie Mellon, we have designed a computer-assisted course intervention for two writing projects in an introductory-level statistics course. Our approach uses DocuScope Write & Audit (W&A), a text visualization software, which was designed to allow student writers to inspect both their topical organization and the rhetorical experiences they create. This short paper provides a brief overview of the corpus study, then outlines our design and expectations for a proposed workshop study that examines the effectiveness on our intervention.