Schreiben vs. tippen – eine explorative Studie zur analogen und digitalen Kommasetzung von Mathematikstudierenden

The present study explores the use of commas by students who did not receive explicit orthog-raphy instructions during their studies, comparing handwriting and keyboard typing as writing mediums. Twenty-two mathematics students participated in the study and were presented with two texts containing similar comma-sensitive passages via a dictation app. They then had to either handwrite or type these texts. The qualitative and descriptive statistical results show minimal differences regarding the writing medium: in the handwritten part, there are only more extreme variations in the correct placement of commas, both upwards and downwards. The evaluation of comma categories and type of comma-sensitive structures provided particu-larly interesting findings: in both writing conditions – handwriting and keyboard typing – prepositional groups were strikingly often separated by commas, seemingly for emphasis or as insertions. Syntactic Vorfeld structures were irregularly comma-sensitive; in some cases, espe-cially infinitive groups were not correctly separated by commas.