Understanding social justice features in statistics writing

Abstract

In this chapter, we present a DocuScope case study of undergraduate writing in two statistics courses, with special attention to language use viewed through a social justice lens. Our analysis reveals how language clusters can help us understand the presence of academic terms, metadiscourse, and reasoning patterns, across both courses and how these can be used to leverage critical analysis. Based on our case study, we propose that a social justice framework for language analysis holds the potential to reformulate the rhetorical approach offered by DocuScope in ways that can encourage fair and equitable language use.