Syntactic complexity in written expression of LD college writers

Abstract

Thirty-three college students enrolled in a special LD program at a small liberal arts college were compared with thirty-three non-LD peers in the syntactic complexity of their writing when asked to write an expository essay on an assigned topic within a 30-minute time limit. The essays after being scored holistically were then prepared for computer scoring based on T-units using the Syntactic Density Scoring procedure (SDS). This program was designed to assess syntactic complexity or degree of embeddedness as one important aspect of good writing. The SDS was comprised of 10 variables which were assigned different weights and then used in calculating the SDS. LD college writers did not differ significantly on the SDS or the corrected SDS (CSDS) score. However, they did differ on two of the variables thought to be more sensitive measures of syntactic complexity, the number of subordinate clauses per T-unit and the main clause word length. The results of the factor analysis confirmed that the SDS provides supplementary information to other written expressive language tools presently used. Limitations of this procedure are discussed and recommendations for refinement of the SDS and its potential in the future are described.