Two samples of college student writing, paragraphs from freshman compositions, are analyzed for presence or absence of two characteristics of literate prose, decontextualization and autonomy. Writing is decontextualized and autonomous when whatever is needed for its comprehension is included in the words of the text, and comprehension is not…

A survey of 34 professors teaching English as a second language in 20 Japanese universities elicited information about common errors in student writing. In open-ended questions, respondents identified 40 student error types, which were grouped into 18 categories. The most common problem category was sentence development, and other high-frequency…