Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers
Need help with your writing? MICUSP gives you great examples of well written papers (they all got an A or A-) from 16 different departments, so you can improve your writing skills.
Welcome to MICUSP!
The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) is a collection of around 830 A grade papers (roughly 2.6 million words) from a range of disciplines across four academic divisions (Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Biological and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences) of the University of Michigan (U-M), Ann Arbor. MICUSP was created by a team of researchers and students at the U-M English Language Institute (ELI).
The recommended citation for MICUSP is: Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers. (2009). Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan.
- Search and browse MICUSP online now!
The MICUSP Simple search and browse interface provides free access to the full set of 829 MICUSP papers. It is designed to be simple and user-friendly and mainly targeted to EAP/ESL teachers and students. We are also working on a more advanced interface which addresses the needs of corpus researchers.
If you have questions or comments on MICUSP, please email us at micusp-help@umich.edu.
The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan (UM), who hold the copyright. The corpus has been developed by researchers at the UM English Language Institute. The corpus files are freely available for study, research and teaching. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. For further information about copyright permissions, please contact Dr. Ute Römer at elicorpora@umich.edu.
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These tutorials show you how to use MICUSP Simple and how to browse for and search in MICUSP papers.
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A short history of this project.
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Read about what types of academic student papers are included in MICUSP and how we labeled them.
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These small MICUSP-based research projects provide interesting facts about some key features of advanced student academic writing. They tell you, for example, how students who all received an A for their papers connect sentences or how they use so-called “scare quotes”.
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What should you know about academic writing? Read some interesting studies here.
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Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
Use MICASE Online to look up words and phrases that you have trouble with or don’t understand.
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Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers
Need help with your writing? MICUSP gives you great examples of well written papers (they all got an A or A-) from 16 different departments, so you can improve your writing skills.
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The John Swales Conference Corpus
If you need to present your paper in English at a conference, or you just want to improve your presentation skills, click here.
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The Generation 1.5 Project
If you are an undergraduate Korean or Chinese student, you can help us with an important study by submitting an essay you have already written. Click on Contribute to Generation 1.5 below.
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Corpus Training and Research
On these pages you find information about our research activities and training we provide in corpus analysis.