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A Word from Andrea Lunsford

Research I (and lots of others) have done shows that you and other student writers are probably already engaging new literacies outside of school, thinking in sophisticated ways about the worldwide audiences you can address. You are becoming keenly aware of the need to adjust your messages according to your audience, purpose, and context.

In other words, you are learning to take a rhetorical perspective that rejects either/or, right/wrong, black/white approaches to writing in favor of asking what choices will be most appropriate, effective, and ethical in any given writing situation, using any genre and medium.

Today, nearly thirty years after I started writing textbooks, I am more optimistic about students and student writing than ever. Writer’s Help 2.0 seeks to serve you as a ready reference that will help you make appropriate grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical choices. Beyond this immediate goal, though, I hope it will help you understand and experience for yourself the multiple ways in which truly good writing always means more than just following any set of rules. Truly good writing means using conventions for specific purposes and with specific audiences—and using them in ways that will bring readers and writers to spirited conversation as well as to mutual understanding and respect.

Research behind Writer’s Help 2.0, Lunsford Version

Every handbook I’ve written has been informed by research on student writing, including the following studies:

The Twenty Most Common Errors

What teachers think of as “good” writing changes over time, so in the 1980s my late coauthor Robert Connors and I gathered and analyzed a nationwide sample of more than twenty-one thousand marked student essays. Our analysis revealed the twenty errors that most troubled students and teachers at that time (spelling was by far the most prevalent error then) as well as the organizational and other big-picture issues of greatest concern to teachers. Our goal was to put error in its place, presenting the conventions of writing as rhetorical choices a writer must make rather than as a series of rules that writers must obey. Learn more about conventions here.

The Top Twenty

For a nationwide study in 2006, Karen Lunsford and I replicated the research Connors and I had done more than twenty years earlier. Our results produced this Top Twenty list. In addition, we found that students are writing much longer essays than they were in the 1980s and that they are tackling more demanding topics and assignments, usually focusing on argument.

Perhaps most intriguingly, from comparing student writing in this study with the writing available in historical studies, we learned that the number of errors per one hundred words of writing has not gone up but has remained constant over the last century. Student writers today are not making more mistakes, they are making different ones—especially having to do with documenting sources. And while spelling errors have decreased dramatically with the use of spell checkers, the number of “wrong word” mistakes has risen—partly because of spell checkers suggesting wrong words!

The Stanford Study of Writing

During and after the Top Twenty study, I conducted a five-year longitudinal study of both in-class and out-of-class writing (in any medium or genre), analyzing the writing of 189 writers. Again I saw longer pieces of writing and more analytical topics along with extracurricular writing of all kinds, from blog posts and emails to multimedia presentations and even a three-hour “hip-hopera.” The student writers I talked to were aware of themselves as writers and rhetors, conscious that they could reach worldwide audiences at the click of button; intrigued by new questions about who “owns” texts; and convinced that good writing is, as they told me over and over, “writing that makes something happen in the world.”

Multimodal assignment survey

In 2013, I surveyed writing teachers across the country, asking them whether they gave multimodal writing assignments. Some 80 percent of the teachers surveyed said that they do give multimodal assignments, including blogs, wikis, illustrated storybooks, podcasts and other audio essays, video essays, film, tweets, animated smartphone mini-lessons, pitch proposals for new apps, PechaKuchas, and digital research projects, to name just a few. Traditional academic print texts are probably still the most common assignment across the disciplines on college campuses today, but that scene is rapidly changing. For some ideas about how to respond to multimodal college assignments, see Presentations and Communicating in Other Media.

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