An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British higher education

This project aims to identify genres of assessed writing at university level, and to investigate textual variation across disciplines and years of study in the context of academic conventions and tutor expectations of student writing.
Academic tutors in a wide range of disciplines will be consulted, and about 3,000 samples of proficient student writing will be collected at the participating universities. These will be categorised into broad genres, following tutors' advice together with evidence provided by assignment titles, course documentation and departmental naming practices. The assignments in these broad genres will be entered into a database and will undergo multidimensional analysis to identify the key linguistic features of each genre. In the final year of the project, typical samples will be subjected to closer textual analysis, and the database will be prepared for archive deposit as the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.
The outcome of the project will be a detailed description of the major genres of assessed student writing, identifying their social purpose, typical organisational patterns and key linguistic features. The findings will inform the teaching and assessment of academic writing in higher education.