Writing and New Technologies
WHAT MAKES A TEXT WELLWRITTEN? SCRIPTOR: A TOOL TO DEVELOP ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS
Marco Bianchi¹, Johanna McElwee², Sonja Entzenberg³
¹Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden ²Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden ³Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
In 2011, the Language Workshop at Uppsala University, Sweden, was asked to develop support in academic writing in English for international students. It was decided that the focus of this support should be on the often invisible skills that students are expected to master without having received any formal instruction in them, such as genre knowledge, but also general writing skills. As a result, we have developed a text database called Scriptor, which consists of exemplary student texts, representing different text types and different academic disciplines. These texts have been tagged with comments explaining what makes them good texts. In other words, rather than focusing on what does not work in a text, our approach is to make visible the strategies that make a text wellwritten and able to meet the conventions of academic writing. We intend Scriptor to be an aid both for students in their writing and also for teachers supervising student writers. In our presentation we will explain the background to the text database, the pedagogical principles that form the base for the project, and also show what Scriptor looks like and how we hope students and teaching staff will use it.