Beyond proficiency

Abstract

Many studies have investigated the correlations between linguistic features and human judgements of writing quality. These studies usually investigate either proficient student writing or exceptional literary writing. The current study attempts to bridge these two perspectives by comparing proficient writing to award-winning exceptional writing using movie reviews written by bloggers and Pulitzer Prize winners. A range of linguistic features representing syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and lexical cohesion were analyzed using both automated and interpretive methods. It is found that some, but not all, of the trends seen in writing development studies continue on to exceptional writing, with lexical sophistication and lexical cohesion through conceptual associations making the largest contributions to the differences between proficient and exceptional writers.