Schrijfstrategie voor een heldere en gepaste stijl: Beter Nog Even BijSchaven'

The scientific consensus is that not only language teachers should pay attention to students’ writing skills. This can be challenging for teachers who were educated in the Social Sciences or biology and are not language instructors. This paper presents a didactic model for one aspect of writing: style. The model consists of five style principles that together lead to a clear (understandable, reader-friendly) and appropriate (e.g., not too informal) writing style. The research takes as a starting point an English-language model for style developed at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). As a first step, we analyse a corpus of sentences rewritten by 62 students at TU Delft after completing their instruction on writing style. Our analysis shows that the students were able to apply a style principle in 84% of the rewritten sentences. We interpret three patterns in the data as areas for improvement in the instruction. As a second step, we evaluate the design principles of the model developed at TU Delft for the new context. Based on these two steps, we present a didactic model for writing style for the Social Sciences and biology. It is a strategy that allows a student or teacher to evaluate a text’s style using five style principles, remembered by the acronym ‘Beter Nog Even BijSchaven’ (‘Better ReVise A Little’).