Edited by David West Brown and Danielle Zawodny Wetzel
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 109] 2023
► pp. 191–212
The recent addition of Write & Audit, to the DocuScope family offers the promise of helping students revise their own texts by providing early feedback before submitting a draft. This potential is examined in the context of proposal writing, a quintessential example of genre writing. Actual standards brought to bear on students’ drafts were developed from a long-standing proposal writing course and applied to a small, stratified sample of proposals in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Early feedback focused on the element of proposal themes using Write & Audit’s analysis of topical progression and information focus, and a template for early feedback was developed. The strengths and limitations of Write & Audit as an early feedback machine are examined with the conclusion that it may indeed have the potential to provide early feedback to writers working in specific genres, helping them to see what they have done and what they might still want to do before turning in a draft.