Principles of Persian Writing and Editing in Students’ Writing: A Case Study of Salman Farsi University Students

Students face difficulties in writing often due to lack of knowledge in the principles of writing. Such deficiencies are rooted in numerous factors. One of the most important factors is undoubtedly lack of appropriate and sufficient education in pre-university courses. On the other hand, the evaluation of this skill is somewhat subjective and finding a way to accurately measure it seems necessary. The purpose of this research was to find the strengths and weaknesses of Persian writing skills of students of different academic fields and to design a tool to measure Persian writing. This applied research was carried out in a descriptive-survey way. The participants of the study were students of English language teaching, Persian literature, electrical engineering, psychology, mathematics, urban planning and engineering sciences of Salman Farsi University. The participants in this study were 103 undergraduate students who were randomly selected based on available sampling. In order to carry out this research, students were given a topic "Describe your university" and they were asked to write a text about it in at least four paragraphs. Then the researchers evaluated the texts based on the style sheet and the scores of the students of different fields were compared. In the end, data analysis was carried out using SPSS version 21. The results of the research showed that there is a significant difference between the average scores of students' writing ability, the average scores of students in terms of writing norms and their writing skill scores. The subject in high school does not affect the level of students' writing skills. There is no significant difference between the average scores of writing skills in terms of linguistic and literary elements and the content of students' writing. There is also no significance difference between the writing skills of male and female students, the age of students with their level of writing skills and the level of writing skills of sophomores compared to freshmen in the university.