2021 Dietrich College Year in Review

Research and Scholarly Work

How Statisticians Write and Why

David Brown , associate teaching professor of English, and Michael Laudenbach , a rhetoric Ph.D. candidate, investigated how statistics students write by compiling a corpus of over 900 student papers. The pair used DocuScope — a text analysis tool created by Department of English professors David Kaufer and Suguru Ishizaki — to tag rhetorical and lexicogrammatical patterns in each paper. The statistical analyses identified differences between novice versus expert papers and client-facing versus academic papers. The researchers hope to translate their discoveries into training materials for teaching assistants. Read more about Brown and Laudenbach’s study .

Henry Posner III , chairman of Railroad Development Corporation (RDC) and adjunct professor in the Department of History, demonstrated his vision for a rail-based mass transit system in the United States. For the pilot project, Pop-Up Metro, an RDC affiliate, imported remanufactured passenger railcars from Britain to Rockhill Furnace in Pennsylvania. For the demonstration, Posner assembled a team of CMU affiliates involved in his course, “The American Railroad-Decline and Renaissance in the Era of Deregulation,” led by

Posner Lays Track for Future of Rail Transit

his teaching assistant Meg Richards . Watch a video of the battery train .

(from left) Meg Richards, Owen Sahnow and Henry Posner III.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 8

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