His main interest area is the development and use of natural language processing tools in assessing writing quality and text difficulty.
Along with Cumming, Hyland, Kormos, Matsuda, Manchón, Ortega, Polio, Storch and Verspoor he is considered one of the most prominent researchers on second language writing.
Crossley obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in history at the California State University of Northridge in 1999.
In the same year he obtained a Teaching English as a second or foreign language certificate at the University of Memphis.
In his research he focused on coherence, cohesion, latent semantic analysis, hypernymy and readability.