We present initial investigation into the task of paraphrasing language while targeting a particular writing style. The plays of William Shakespeare and their modern translations are used as a testbed for evaluating paraphrase systems targeting a specific style of writing. We show that even with a relatively small amount of parallel training data, it is possible to learn paraphrase models which...

This paper presents ReadWriter, a novel blogging interface that enables task automation and offers on-demand writing feedback. Bloggers can express any writing-related help requests in natural language inside double brackets. ReadWriter interprets a blogger’s requests and assigns them to a diverse group of contributors: software search agents, an anonymous crowd, the blogger’s social connection...

The implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization have made teaching it a challenging task for a large group of practitioners in academic setting. One such feature of academic writing susceptible to cultural mentalities is metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing p...

Being expert in establishing cohesion and coherence in writing is not an easy task. The EFL learners are to pass through very long, uneven paths such as précis exercise to achieve this skill. The present study was launched to explore the effect of précis writing on the creation of a compact text. To this end, a true-experimental method of research with the pretest-posttest control design was em...

Persian  learners  of  English  often  avoid  attending  to  audience  considerations,  which  brings them  lower  scores.  The  present  study  was  conducted  in  a  major  university  in  Iran  to  help Persian learners develop a sense of audience awareness in writing. Thirty five Persian students of English  were trained  with a focus on process-oriented instruction. The intended task was a...

Information seeking does not occur in a vacuum but invariably is motivated by some wider task. It is well accepted that to understand information seeking we must understand the task context within which it takes place. Writing is amongst the most common tasks within which information seeking is embedded. This paper considers how writing can be understood in order to account for embedded informa...