What linguistic features are indicative of writing quality?

A case of argumentative
essays in a college composition program. (Taguchi, N.; W. Crawford; D.Z Wetzel)
Studies have investigated identifiable features that distinguish more or less proficient
essays in academic context. Some features that have been considered are lexical
features, grammar and clause-level complexity, syntax complexity, verb phrase complexity,
lexical diversity among other. But non of the previous studies have the consistency to
answer the main question of the study: can specific linguistic features be identified as
indicatives of more proficient writing?
The study analyzed 850-1300 words essays written by incoming international students in a
private university in the Unites States. These students were all about 18-year-old
nonnative speakers of English. The first language of the students were Korean, Hindi,
Chinese, Thai, Spanish, Russian, German and French. They read two source text with
contrasting views on a controversial topic and choose one point of view and argued for it.
The essays were scored based on 5 categories: organization, vocabulary, mechanics,
language use and content, being the last two categories with the higher score used as
measures of comparison.
The result of the analysis showed differences and some similarities. Certain clausal
features were similar in higher- and lower-rated essays, like that-clause noun/adjective
complements and wh-relaive clauses. Regarding to subordinated conjunctions, they were
more frecuently used in the lower-rated essays. The counts of phrase-level complexity
features like pre-quantifiers, pre-qualifiers, post-determiners, demonstratives determiners
and couble conjunction were very similar in both higher and lower- rated essays. The
greatest diferences were found in attibutive adjective and post-noun modifying
prepositional phrases and text reference, where higher-rated essays used the name of the
autor more times than the lower-rated essays.
The conclusin of the study showed that there are features that can be identified to
indicate a higher scored essay. These are the references to the author and the text source
itself, and the noun phrase modification feature. There are also, subordination meaures did
no give a clear indication of higher score essay writing. The authors claimed that the study
has also limitations that can be overcome, such as the size of the corpus and the inclusion
of more linguistic features into the analysis. It is also suggested that writing teacher may
benefit from the study, by focusing on reference to source text in argumentative essays as
a way to improve the way writers ideas are presented and separated from the texts ideas,
facilitating the comprehension when reading the essay.