Tech Comm Portfolio
Overview
This web report details the research, methodology, results, and conclusions of a content analysis I conducted on my own writing. My research questions were:
Was my high school writing significantly more formal than my college writing?
Is my writing in college significantly higher in clarity than my writing in high school was?
Project Sample
Process
I assessed a total of 31 texts for formality and clarity: 10 writing samples (17,009 words) from my high school technical writing courses and 21 documents I authored in my university technical communication coursework (17,015 words).
Using TagAnt and AntConc, and Microsoft Excel, I examined each writing sample for the following grammatical and syntactical features:
Self-mentions
Anaphoric demonstratives
Passive voice
Sentence length
More specifically, to test for formality, I recorded the frequency of first-person pronouns referring to the author(s) and the percentage of anaphoric demonstratives unattended. To quantify the clarity of my writing, I measured how long each sentence was and calculated the ratio of sentences written in passive versus active voice.
Results
My results yielded statistically significant differences in self-mentions, passive voice, and unattended anaphoric pronouns between high school and college. Specifically, I used fewer unattended anaphoric pronouns and less passive voice in college, but I used more self-mentions in college. Additionally, there was not a significant difference in sentence length between my high school and college writing samples, so I could not draw effective conclusions to answer my research questions.
I conducted this study in TECM 4500: Content Analysis for Dr. Jordan Smith at the University of North Texas. To read my full content analysis, download the report below.
Takeaways
Research Conclusions
R1: Is my high school writing significantly more formal than my college writing?
Since the results of my data synthesis for self-mentions and unattended anaphoric pronouns are statistically significant, I can validly assume that I used significantly fewer self-mentions and significantly more unattended this in high school. However, unattended this is an example of informality; attended this supports formal tone and reduces ambiguity (Swales, 2005). Thus, based on this criteria of this study, my high school technical writing samples are not necessarily significantly more formal than my college writing.
R2: Is my writing in college significantly higher in clarity than my writing in high school?
As evident in Figure 3, there is statistically significantly less passive voice in the university corpus than the high school one; thus, I can conclude that I use significantly less passive voice in my technical writing today than I did in high school. On the other hand, there was not a significant difference in the proportion of short sentences in the samples, so I cannot claim to use shorter or longer sentences now than I have in the past. Therefore, based on these two criteria, my writing in college is not significantly more clear than my technical writing was in high school.
Reflection
Even though I didn’t emerge from this study with my research questions wholly conclusively answered, I still learned that I use significantly less passive voice and significantly fewer unattended anaphoric pronouns than I did in high school. I was particularly interested by the reduced frequency of unattended this since it’s not a grammatical feature I’ve consciously focused on reducing in my writing. Going forward, I plan to:
Be more conscious of sentence length and shorten my sentences for clarity
Be aware of unattended anaphoric demonstratives and attend them when possible
Remember that my writing is improving, even when I don’t notice a tangible difference