No Comment: Linguistic Predictors of Comments on a Freshman Seminar Blog

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 8: What Counts as Writing? Tattoos, Graffiti, Blogs, and Other Sites of Display

Abstract

This paper’s objective was to determine the linguistic characteristics of blog posts that received peer comments in order to further scholarly work on narrator-audience relationships and to inform educators who design freshman curricula. The paper grew out of a three-year collaboration with an educational opportunity program at a public university. In this partnership, I developed a blogging network and led blogging workshops for freshman seminar students. Looking back on the students’ writing I wondered why some posts received more comments than others? I used a mixed methods approach and determined that the rate of intensifying and psychological state words per post predicted peer comments. These findings have implications for scholars of narrator-audience relationships and for educators designing interactive writing curricula.

Authors

• Philip Kreniske, The CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College

• Krystie Casallas