The impact of using computer assisted writing systems in the writing process of university students

Abstract

The academic literacy initiatives focus on the didactics of academic discourse genres and the phases of the writing process. In this context, the aim of this paper is to determine the impact of the recommendations offered by an automatic system designed to assist during the drafting process, arText, in the texts reviewed by university students. For that purpose, the proposed recommendations and the recommendations applied by students in 117 texts have been revised qualitatively and quantitatively, as well as the assessments of such students on the received recommendations. The results indicate that more than half of the recommendations are employed, resulting the most frequent those related to the sentence length and discourse connectors, and the less productive those referred to verbal forms and subjective signs.  The main conclusion of this study is that computer assisted writing systems contribute to the improvement of writing in the university.