Lunsford_TopTwenty


	New research and major new discoveries about student writing

	In 2005 and 2006, Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen Lunsford collected writing samples from first-year composition students from across the country to update The St. Martin's Handbook's groundbreaking 1986 research into the most common errors in student writing. The results show major changes in what and how students write. Andrea Lunsford explains:


	"First, with the help of technology, spelling errors have dramatically declined. But the study also found that wrong-word errors--for example, the kind that result when a student spells definitely incor- rectly and allows a spell-checker to change it to defiantly--are the new number one error. Second, new problems related to research and documentation appear in the top twenty today. In 1986, no docu- mentation mistakes appeared in the top twenty because students were writing personal narratives or were doing close readings of a literary text. Today, students are writing research-based essays and arguments, which demand at least some use of sources--and hence a completely understandable increase in errors related to the use of those sources.

	Perhaps most importantly, the research points out that students today are writing longer, more complex work for their college courses (more than twice as long, on average, as essays written in 1986)--without a significant increase in the rate of error.”