Although writing is an integral part of education, there is limited knowledge on how assigned topics influence writing quality both in terms of micro-level linguistic features and macro-level subjective evaluations by human judges. We addressed this question by conducting a study in which 44 students wrote short essays on three different topics: traditionalacademic-based topics such as the ones used in standardized tests,personalemotional experiences, andsocially charged topics. The essays were automatically scored on five linguistic dimensions (narrativity,situation model cohesion,referential cohesion,syntactic complexity, andword abstractness). They were also manually scored by human judges based on a rubric focusing on macro-level dimensions (i.e., introduction, thesis, and conclusion). The results indicated that topic-related differences were observed on both the rubric-based and linguistic assessments, although there were weak relationships between these two measures.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Psychology, Institute for Intelligent Systems, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA

   Nia Dowell, Sidney K. D’Mello, Caitlin Mills & Art Graesser

Editors and Affiliations

1. EECS Department/ISIS, Vanderbilt University, TN 37235, Nashville, USA

   Gautam Biswas

2. Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birmingham, U.K.

   Susan Bull

3. School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, 1 Cleveland Street, 2006, Sydney, Australia

   Judy Kay

4. College of Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, 8140, Christchurch, New Zealand

   Antonija Mitrovic

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