micusp

About the Project

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers is a research project by the University of Michigan's English Language Institute. Launched in 2004, the project is still underway, and we are now actively developing the corpus. Our goal is to compile a large selection of writing samples, totaling 1.6 million words written by students at various stages of undergraduate and graduate level study.

Micusp Mission

The Micusp database will be used to systematically study linguistic features of academic writing. This project is the first of its kind in North America, and the finished corpus will serve as a valuable resource for testers and teachers of English as a second language and for researchers who are studying and teaching academic writing. While there are a number of existing research projects examining academic writing at a professional level (based, for example, on published papers) as well as at the undergraduate level, Micusp will serve to fill the gap in resources pertaining to graduate level study.