Computational Linguistic Assessment of Genre Differences Focusing on Text Cohesive Devices of Student Writing: Implications for Library Instruction

This study examined two major academic genres of writing: argumentative and technical writing. Three hundred eighty-four undergraduate student-produced texts were parsed and analyzed through a computational tool called Coh-Metrix. The results inform the instructional librarians that students used genre-dependent cohesive devices in a limited way to write research papers.