MUCH
The Malm University-Chalmers Corpus of Writing as a Process
Purposes
To build a drafts corpus to
facilitate the study of writing
processes from different
perspectives; to study features,
such as feedback, argumentation
techniques and rhetorical
structures; and to use the corpus
for the teaching of academic
writing
The corpus
Pilot version of 500,000 words
made up of three drafts of:
400 student texts
50 PhD student texts
Peer and teacher comments
Self-reflective comments
Complete corpus:
approximately 1.2 million words
Our contribution Challenges
The MUCH corpus: The unique design presents
includes multiple drafts of several challenges, for example:
student texts How do we structure and
tags both writing and format the corpus to fit
feedback processes current archiving standards?
tags both rhetorical and What kind of of metadata
linguistic structures should be included?
brings together composition What kind of interface best
studies, EFL studies and serves the researcher and
corpus linguistics user community?
To what extent can existing
Tagging a feedback sequence
tagging systems be used, and
1. First draft, PhD
student 2. Comments from what new tags need to be
Long chain n-3 poly- two PhD students devised for our material?
saturated fatty acids A: I think it is better
(LC n-3 PUFA), to define them. The team
B: Are these known
especially EPA and
DHA found in by your readers?
Andreas Eriksson, Chalmers, Gothenburg
Damian Finnegan, Asko Kauppinen, Maria Wiktorsson,
Anna Wrnsby, Malm University, Malm
Peter Withers, MaxPlanck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
3. Revised draft (changes underlined)
Long chain n-3 polysaturated fatty acids (LC
Nijmegen
Contact: andreas.eriksson@chalmers.se,
n-3 PUFA), especially EPA (eicosapentaenoic anna.warnsby@mah.se
acid) and DHA (docosapentaenoic acid) Funding: the initial phase of the project is supported by
found in the Crafoord Foundation, Lund, Sweden