Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to L2 creative writing not only in language classrooms but also in various disciplinary settings, in this case, an English scriptwriting module for Chinese university students doing Communication Studies. This text-based L2 writing study investigates the stylistic characteristics emerging from 54 pieces of film scripts written in English submitted by the students upon completion of the module. The above investigation is done through comparison of the student scripts to 16 selected professional English film scripts representing different genres. The particular pedagogical approaches for this scriptwriting module are briefly explained. Nevertheless, the study is corpus-driven. It utilises Keyword analysis (Scott, 2015) and Key Semantic Domain analysis (Rayson, 2008) to locate noticeable ideological and discoursal features of the student scripts particularly concerning: the attempts at dramatic tension; effort at visual details; and deviation from conventions of scriptwriting in English. Two focal students were selected to see the trajectories of changes regarding individual writers' textual features throughout the workshops to the final film script. The above is facilitated by Cluster analysis which reveals ‘local textual functions' (Mahlberg, 2007). In addition, qualitative interpretation of the focal students' writing and their reflective comments was also performed. The results hold pedagogical implications particularly regarding: the modelling of certain stylistic aspects of English scriptwriting; and the design of more targeted future ESL/EFL scriptwriting course in China.