ABSTRACT
As others have pointed out-most notably Pemberton (2010)—few published studies of writing center talk have incorporated empirical research, particularly quantitative methods. Here in Aboutness, I used the empirical, quantitative approach of corpus analysis to understand the aboutness of tutors’ and student writers’ talk in the 47 conferences comprising the study’s specialized corpus. Because it allows the objective examination of a large amount of talk, corpus analysis is a powerful and useful method to understand aboutness, especially when combined with the macrolevel view from discourse analysis. In this chapter, I discuss how researchers have used two types of corpus analysis to characterize a given register-a variety of discourse used in a particular context and with a particular purposeand to compare registers. Dividing the review into studies outside the field of writing studies and studies within, I also discuss how researchers have used corpus analysis to facilitate language learning, to compare registers of instructional discourse, and to understand conventions of academic and disciplinary writing.
