It’s clear that short and long essays are very broad notions.
suggests that a possible tendency to reward longer texts could be minimized through the training of raters with responses at each score level that vary in length. However, and both compared the holistic scoring of experienced vs. novice raters and – contrary to expectations – found that the correlation between essay length and scores was slightly stronger for the experienced group. Thus, the question of whether professional experience and training counteract or even reinforce the tendency to overvalue text length in scoring remains open.
Compared to the amount of research on the role of essay length in human and automated scoring in large-scale high-stakes contexts, little attention has been paid to the relation of text length and quality in formative or summative assessment by teachers. This is surprising considering the relevance of the issue for teachers’ professional competence: In order to assess the quality of students’ writing, teachers must either configure various aspects of text quality in a holistic assessment or hold them apart in an analytic assessment. Thus, they need to have a concept of writing quality appropriate for the task and they need to be aware of the construct-relevant and -irrelevant criteria (cf. the lens model; ). To our knowledge, only two studies have investigated the effect of text length on holistic teacher judgments, both of which found that longer texts receive higher grades. found significant main effects of text length (long, medium, short) and spelling errors (many, few) on holistic teacher judgments. reported effects of handwriting quality and text length on grades.
The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.
How long should a long essay be?Kate:
Once there was a semi-barbaric king who used his riches to get whatever he and himself wanted. The king decided to make a coliseum the would determine the fate of a criminal accused of committing a crime. After the king had made the laws for his entertainment it was announced to him by a bystander that his lovely daughter that he loved greatly, had fallen in love with someone “unworthy”. The princess loved, the man she loved by knowing he was handsome, strong, and the most brave someone could be. The king had been filled with rage when he heard of it’s knowability. It took the king merely the blink of an eye to order the young man that his daughter swooned over to be sent to prison. A date was set for the man's trial in the king's coliseum. The king had interviewed every worthy woman to marry the prisoner, and choose the maiden the princess had hate with burning passion. The princess had paid the worker to tell her what door the tiger was going to be
Whereas research on the text length effect on classroom writing assessment is scarce, a considerable body of research has investigated how other text characteristics influence teachers’ assessment of student texts. It is well-demonstrated, for example, that pre-service and experienced teachers assign lower grades to essays containing mechanical errors (; ; ; ). found that pre-service teachers’ judgments were affected by errors in punctuation, grammar and spelling, even though they were explicitly instructed to grade on content alone. More recently, showed that high quality essays containing more structural, mechanical, spelling, and grammatical errors were assigned lower scores than texts without errors even in criteria relating solely to content. Teachers failed to distinguish between formal errors and the independent quality of content in a student essay. Similarly, , found that lexical features and spelling influenced not only holistic teacher judgments of students’ writing in English as a second or foreign language, but also their assessment of other analytical criteria (e.g., grammar). Even though these studies do not consider text length as a potential source of bias, they do show that construct-irrelevant aspects influence judgments of teachers.
Next, you should formulate your the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:
In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.
A (very long) essay on political communications, French style
Text length may be considered especially construct-relevant when it comes to writing in a foreign language. Because of the constraints of limited language knowledge, writing in a foreign language may be hampered because of the need to focus on language rather than content (). , in a review of differences between writing in a first and second language, found that writing in a second language tends to be “more constrained, more difficult, and less effective” (p. 668) than writing in a first language. The necessity of devoting cognitive resources to issues of language may mean that not as much attention can be given to higher order issues such as content or organization (for details of this debate, see , p. 36 f.). In that context, the ability of writing longer texts may be legitimately considered as indicative of higher competence in a foreign language, making text length a viable factor of assessment. For example, showed that the main predictors of the content score in English foreign language essays were first, organization and second, essay length.
[PDF] Writing the Long Essay – Outline Overview AP US History
Subsequently, has been defined in a variety of ways. One definition is a "prose composition with a focused subject of discussion" or a "long, systematic discourse".It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. , a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject. He notes that "the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything", and adds that "by tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece". Furthermore, Huxley argues that "essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference".These three poles (or worlds in which the essay may exist) are:
Is a Long Essay Always a Good Essay
This paper comprises two studies investigating the role of essay length in foreign language assessment using an interdisciplinary perspective including the fields of foreign language education, computer linguistics, educational research, and psychometrics. Study 1 presents a secondary analysis of a large-scale dataset with = 2,722 upper secondary school students in Germany and Switzerland who wrote essays in response to “independent writing” prompts of the internet-based Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL iBT). It investigates the question of how several indicators of students’ English proficiency (English grade, reading and listening comprehension, self-concept) are related to the length of their essays (word count). It further investigates whether or not essay length accounts for variance in text quality scores (expert ratings) even when controlling for English language proficiency and other variables (e.g., country, gender, cognitive ability). A weak relationship of proficiency and length as well as a large proportion of variance in text quality explained by length beyond proficiency would be in favor of the judgment bias assumption.