People frequently struggle with comprehending the text they read and require more intensive support to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. Some find it perplexing observing all the elements and constituents of the paragraph theory. Good readers, however, can understand what a paragraph is by studying the conjunction relationships between…

This study compared syntactic complexity between undergraduate students' research papers and published research papers. A 2 (Groups: experts, students) × 4 (Sections: introduction, methods, results, discussions) mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on each of the following variables: T-unit length, clause density, the…

The literature on the topical organization of essays suggests that there are four possible types of progression from the topic of one clause to the topics of the following clauses. These are parallel, sequential, extended parallel, and extended sequential progressions. Essay writers' ability to create cohesion and coherence can be evaluated on the…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…