Can I use headings in my essay? Section headings, macrostructures and genre families in the BAWE corpus of student writing

Working in a university writing centre or a university EAP programme can be daunting when students appear for help in the hope that the tutor will have some idea about writing in their disciplines. Well- stocked centres will have local assignments on fi le from across disciplines, but many tutors fi nd themselves relying on disciplinary norms they are familiar with, or contacting subject tutors for guidance. While some departments provide clear instructions in handbooks, in others there is greater variety, and asking three different subject tutors may yield three different answers. Descriptions of writing across many disciplines, based on actual student assignments, are virtually non- existent. Our investigation of genres of assessed university student writing aims to make a contribution to this area. This project (ESRC 000-23- 0800, 2004–2007) includes the development of a corpus of 2,761 successful (i.e. awarded good marks) student assignments from across four disciplinary groups and years of study, which is now available to mine for descriptions of university student writing.