Research Project The initial interest and spark of this project begins with asking, “What is exceptional writing?” My mentor is interested with what goes into good writing and ultimately how could a computer determine whether a piece of writing is good writing, bad writing, or exceptional. There are so many factors in writing where do we start. Why not start at the beginning? What makes a good lead? How do writers entice people to read their work? With the help of a graduate student, Annie Louie, who has been working on collecting and analyzing a corpus of exceptional writing from science articles in the New York Times, we plan on analyzing and parsing our way through thousands of leads from different domains. With information we learn from these leads we plan on doing a study on Mechanical Turk in which will probably ask them about ratings of words, how they feel about leads in general (whether or not they will keep reading), and possibly looking at non-literal language. By the end of the summer we hope to have successfully annotated this corpus of articles that people will be able to use to do further research in this area. Although there are some specifics that need to be worked out I am excited to be working on this project. These first two weeks of research were expository and chance for me (and the other research students on the project) to get familiar with the data and the NLP tools. This third week is when the group of us on this project will split off and do our own things. 