The Long and Winding Road: Investigating the Differential Writing Patterns of High and Low Skilled Writers

We investigate how writing proficiency relates to the flexible use of cohesion. Forty-five students wrote 16 essays across 8 sessions. Natural language processing techniques were used to calculate the cohesion of each essay. Random walk and Euclidian distance measures were then used to visualize and classify students’ flexibility in cohesion across the essays. Results revealed that students who were more flexible in their cohesion also had...