Increasingly, students are expected to write about mathematics. Mathematics writing may be informal (e.g., journals, exit slips) or formal (e.g., writing prompts on high-stakes mathematics assessments). In order to develop an effective mathematics-writing intervention, research needs to be conducted on how students organize mathematics writing and…

This study examined the relationship of different measures of syntactic complexity with rated quality for two genres of text produced by middle school students. It was hypothesized that different measures would be associated with distinct aspects of syntactic complexity; words per clause with greater use of structures more typical of expository…