Getting a grip on academic writing processes with the Writing Machine

Despite efforts in many higher education programs to develop students’ writing skills, lecturers often complain about the quality of student writing. To turn students into better writers, we have developed the digital platform The Writing
Machine (https://academischschrijven.nl/en/). With the Writing Machine, we aim to enhance students’ self-regulated writing skills, which is essential in writing education (Graham & Harris, 2018). For students to become good writers, they must be able to set goals, monitor their progress, and persevere when things
get difficult (Sala-Bubaré & Castelló, 2018). However, this is where things often go wrong, e.g. students put off writing until the last minute, they do not set goals and they find it difficult to persevere when the going gets tough. With the
digital tools of the Writing Machine, we shifted the focus in academic writing instruction from the product to the underlying writing processes by: (1) orienting with knowledge clips, (2) goal setting with the quiz "What kind of writer
are you?", (3) process feedback with keystroke logging (Vandermeulen et al., 2020), and (4) (peer) assessing texts with comparative judgment. Over the past two years, we have tested the Writing Machine with approximately 300 students
at two Dutch universities. In this presentation we will introduce the four main components of the Writing Machine and how we integrated these
into our academic writing courses. We will also discuss the results of the qualitative and quantative user evaluation we performed with our students. This way we hope to give insight into how we try to give our students a better grip on
their writing processes.