Green Squiggly Lines:

Integrating Micro- and Macro-Levels of Response: The Place for Student Voices?

It is within the green squiggly lines of Microsoft Word-or perhaps better yet over the green squiggly lines of Microsoft Word-right click (long sentence-no suggestions)-that I want to suggest that students and professional writers are already writing in the space between the "symbolic presence" of the dedicated writing teacher and the automatic feedback agent of word processing software. Theories of computer-assisted writing assessment are already in practice. Not as Herrington and Moran (2001) fear through the creeping power of the College Board and WriterPlacer Plus or the clever, yet potentially more dangerous, content-based assessment tools such Landauer's latent semantic analysis (2001). Rather theories of computer-assisted writing assessment are already in practice in the mundane software tools students everywhere already are beginning to use.