The Technical Writing Project
A corpus of technical, scientific, and professional writing for students, researchers, and teachers.
University undergraduates have little access to customized, discipline-specific writing instruction.
The TWP seeks to improve the quality of this instruction in technical, scientific, and professional writing.
The TWP team has inventoried and converted 5,810 texts of student technical writing. These texts represent a variety of text types—job materials, instructions, white papers, briefing notes—that were produced by 871 undergraduates who represent over 40 different academic majors.
This functionality allows students, instructors, and researchers to develop their own language hypotheses and explore the texts on 26 different metadata:
- The writer’s gender, native speaker status, ethnicity, academic major, and academic classification.
- The text’s type, broad classification, length, tokens and word types, and draft version (original or revised).
- The context influencing each text’s construction, including the writer’s classroom instructor as well as the time and day of the course where the text was assigned
Meet the creators
Ryan Boettger, PhD
Ryan Boettger is an associate professor of professional and technical communication at the University of North Texas. His research areas include curriculum development and assessment, data-driven learning, STEM writing, and technical editing. Professionally, he worked as a technical editor for the Texas Army National Guard and as the managing director of a grants office at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He is the former editor of the Professional Engineering Communication book series (Wiley-IEEE).
Stefanie Wulff, PhD
Stefanie Wulff is an associate professor of corpus linguistics at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on variation in native and learner language, student writing, and second language acquisition. She has published numerous research articles and the book, Rethinking Idiomaticity: A Usage–based Approach (Continuum). She is co-editor of the Cognitive Linguistics in Practice book series published by John Benjamins as well as the editor of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (de Gruyter Mouton).
Data-driven leaning resources
Access the student and instructor resources for the seven data-driven learning modules developed, piloted, and refined in STEM-based and technical writing classrooms.
Publications & presentations
Access the most recent research published out of TWP and learn about our in-progress research.