SCIENTIFIC PROOF AND CASE STUDIES: THE EFFECT OF FREQUENT WRITING ON ONE'S WRITING SKILLS

"Frequent writing improves one's writing skill" is a hypothesis that has long been accepted as truth without any solid evidence. But is it true? Has any teacher or student kept track of all their writing works with grades? What affects one's writing skills? What kinds of role do factors such as gender, language fluency, ethnicity, and other demographic data play in writing improvement? No one has ever been able to answer these questions due to various reasons. The most compelling reason was the difficulty of collecting writings from people of diverse background and demographic information and yet ensuring the objectivity of the scoring standards as if all of them had been graded by one expert scorer. This paper illustrates the effect of frequent writing practices on the overall quality of writing using the unique tool called MyAccess. MyAccess is an instructional writing tool that can grade any student's essays in a couple of seconds and return the holistic and five different domain scores as well as specific feedbacks on how a student can improve his/her essay. The massive amount of data from students in multiple grades and English proficiency levels with different genders and ethnic background has been collected and analyzed to test the long-time unchallenged hypothesis.