I came across this review article on writing tools published in 2019, and wanted to make some quick notes to come back to in this post. I’m following the usual format I use for article notes which summarizes the gist of a paper with short descriptions under respective headers. I had a few thoughts on what I thought the paper missed, which I will also describe in this post.
Reference:
Carola Strobl, Emilie Ailhaud, Kalliopi Benetos, Ann Devitt, Otto Kruse, Antje Proske, Christian Rapp (2019). Digital support for academic writing: A review of technologies and pedagogies. Computers & Education 131 (33–48).
Aim:
- To present a review of the technologies designed to support writing instruction in secondary and higher education.
Method:
Data collection:
- Writing tools collected from two sources: 1) Systematic search in literature databases and search engines, 2) Responses from the online survey sent to research communities on writing instruction.
- 44 tools selected for fine-grained analysis.
Tools selected:
Academic Vocabulary
Article Writing Tool
AWSuM
C-SAW (Computer-Supported Argumentative Writing)
Calliope
Carnegie Mellon prose style tool
CohVis
Corpuscript
Correct English (Vantage Learning)
Criterion
De-Jargonizer
Deutsch-uni online
DicSci (Dictionary of Verbs in Science)
Editor (Serenity Software)
escribo
Essay Jack
Essay Map
Gingko
Grammark
Klinkende Taal
Lärka
Marking Mate (standard version)
My Access!
Open Essayist
Paper rater
PEG Writing
Rationale
RedacText
Research Writing Tutor
Right Writer
SWAN (Scientific Writing Assistant)
Scribo – Research Question and Literature Search Tool
StyleWriter
Thesis Writer
Turnitin (Revision Assistant)
White Smoke
Write&Improve
WriteCheck
Writefull
Inclusion criteria:
- Tools intended solely for primary and secondary education, since the main focus of the paper was on higher education.
- Tools with the sole focus on features like grammar, spelling, style, or plagiarism detection were excluded.
- Technologies without an instructional focus, like pure online text editors and tools, platforms or content management systems excluded.
I have my concerns in the way tools were included for this analysis, particularly because some key tools like AWA/ AcaWriter,
Writing Mentor, Essay Critic, and Grammarly were not considered. This is one of the main limitations I found in the study. It is not clear how the tools were selected in the systematic search as there is no information about the databases and keywords used for the search. The way tools focusing on higher education were picked is not explained as well.