Number of Words Versus Number Ideas: Finding a Better Predictor of Writing Quality

This study examines the relation between the linguistic features of freewrites and human assessments of freewriting quality. This study builds upon the authors’ previous studies in which a model was developed based on the linguistic features of freewrites written by 9th and 11th grade students to predict freewrite quality. The current study reexamines this model using number of propositions as a predictor instead of number of words because the number of propositions was expected to be a better proxy for number of ideas in contrast to simple text length. The results indicated that there were only slight advantages for using a measure for number of propositions, indicating that from an artificial intelligence perspective, the number of words was the better measure.