College of Arts & Sciences

Fundamentals of Academic Writing

Writing Diagnostic, Self-Assessment and Reflection
Instructions
1. Open your diagnostic essay. Copy all the text to your clipboard (not the instructions).
2. Complete the Writing Diagnostic table
a. Click on the link in the Tool column
b. Follow the instructions
c. Write your answer in the My Text column
3. Reflect on your analysis results. What are some areas in which you are already strong and which areas can you improve in?

Class slides with instructions here.

Category Measurement Tool Instructions My Text Comments

Paste your text. Select the default “GSL +
AWL”. There is no minimum % you should
Academic
have, but for general undergraduate
Word List: ___%
What percentage of your total words appear academic texts, a normal proportion is
Proportion
in the AWL (look for “Total for AWL” under around 5 to 8%.
EAP Foundation the “TOTAL” column)?
Vocabulary
vocab profiler On the same page, keep scrolling down to
see which of your words are in the AWL.
Academic
Remember, the higher the sublist, the
Wordlist:
1. Scroll down. less frequent the word.
Sublists
2. How many sublists do your words
appear in and what is the highest list?
Mechanics Readability and Analyze My 1. Click READABILITY Average grade level: _ Don’t be alarmed if your grade level is
Complexity Writing 2. Click ANALYZE TEXT again not “13”. Shorter academic writing can
Grade Fry Readability level: _ often be in the 11-12 grade range.
If the website
doesn’t work in Raygor Readability level: _ Fry readability uses sentence length and
Chrome: use syllable length to measure complexity.
another browser
like Edge or Raygor uses sentence length and
Firefox character length to measure complexity.
 College of Arts & Sciences
Fundamentals of Academic Writing
Category Measurement Tool Instructions My Text Comments
Lexical density measures the proportion
of content words (removes functional
words like “the” / “does” / “have” / is” /
etc.) to total words. Higher lexical
1. Click LEXICAL DENSITY Lexical Density for entire text: density means more content words and
Analyze My 2. Click ANALYZE TEXT again __% fewer grammatical functional words,
Lexical Density
Writing which results in a denser text.
Percentage of nouns: __%
Typically, academic writing has a high
percentage of nouns and noun phrases,
so lexical density is usually higher than
other genres like journalism or fiction.

1. Click PASSIVE VOICE

If the number is unusually low (<10%) or
Analyze My 2. Click ANALYZE TEXT again _% of sentences look like they
Passive voice high (>20%), you may be under- or over-
Writing 3. Look for the results in blue, just above might be passive
using the passive voice.
the list of example sentences.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT can offer useful automated feedback on your writing, but you need to be careful as it can produce incorrect information. For example,
when we tested counting the AWL vocabulary with ChatGPT, it was completely inaccurate and even included “VinUni” as an AWL word. FoAW
instructors’ philosophy about using generative AI to improve your writing is that it is ethical and helpful to use AI to identify and highlight areas for
improvement but having the tool re-write extensively for you, without input, may cross into unethical behavior. Here are some commands which
may complement the text analysis tools above. We are still experimenting with this, so if you have any other useful prompts, please share them!

Purpose ChatGPT prompt – paste this into ChatGPT Comments

Avoid pasting your essay with each command. It is useful to give ChatGPT a role, in this case an expert
You are an expert academic writing tutor. I will paste a text for
Tell ChatGPT to wait to answer your follow-up academic writing tutor. This helps make the tone more
you to analyze. Do not answer anything yet - I will tell you what to
questions until after you paste your essay. appropriate. Also, this prompt means you only need to
do after I paste the text.
DO THIS FIRST! paste your essay once then use multiple follow-up prompts.
Identify the cohesive devices I used. Evaluate them.
It tends to be balanced and identify the positive things as
OR
Give feedback on your range of cohesive well as things to improve. In our experience, though, it is
Identify the cohesive devices I used. For each category, evaluate
devices unreliable. If you paste the same prompt twice, you will get
the cohesive devices I used in my text and then suggest some
two very different evaluations of your cohesive devices.
improvements to make my writing more academic and refined.
 College of Arts & Sciences
Fundamentals of Academic Writing
Evaluate my sentence complexity, particularly subordinate In our experiments, ChatGPT was inconsistent in repeated
Evaluate sentence complexity and variety. clauses, passive voice, and other complex structures. Suggest queries and the number of sentences that it identified
some improvements. changed each time. Use with caution.

Identify grammatical errors but do not correct Identify and highlight the grammatical mistakes in this text. Do not
It is complicated to get formatted text in ChatGPT, but this
them. Emphasize in bold so they are more correct them. The output text should be in markdown and use
markdown command clearly shows the issues.
noticeable. bold font to highlight the grammatical errors.

Although it is tempting to have ChatGPT correct the

Like above but without the bold text and Identify the grammar mistakes in my essay but do not correct the mistakes for you, this will not help you learn from your
more information about what the mistakes for me. Describe what the problems are and use mistakes and prevent you from making them again in the
grammatical errors are. examples from my text. future. We suggest asking ChatGPT to identify but not
correct them for you.

Based on the text I initially pasted, suggest some improvements to There will likely be some overlap with the previous
Improve academic style
make my text more academic in style. responses above, but it may be a nice summary for you.

Hedging Evaluate the hedging language I used in my text. It’s not the best, but not the worst either.
Not as robust of an analysis as AnalyzeMyWriting.com. In
Lexical density and vocabulary suggestions Analyze the lexical density of this essay. our experiments, it missed a lot of content words so use the
results with some caution.
You will see some duplicates that you actually used in your
Suggest some academic vocabulary and phrases which are
Expanding your vocabulary on this topic essay, but there will be some new words/phrases which
relevant to the topic in my essay.
may be useful.
One of the nice things about a large language model like
Highlight some good collocations in my text and suggest some
Collocations ChatGPT! Collocations can be the hardest thing to learn on
improvements in my collocations.
your own, so this is like having a personal tutor.

🤔 Overall reflection 🤔. After using these tools and reflecting on their output, note down (bullet points are fine) some positive things you discovered
about your writing and some areas in which you can improve. You can use this to help you in the diagnostic writing reflection task in
FeedbackFruits.
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