Green Squiggly Lines:

Writing Without Fear circa 1982: Word Processing

While these views of error correction and student revision helped place computers-and-writing studies in dialogue with mainstream composition research during the late 1980s, they did not address the more vexing, and problematic issue, of software developed as a grader, evaluator, respondent, or editor for student writing. In fact, stylistic programs such as Writer's Workbench and Grammatik were not focal points in Hawisher's overview of word processing studies (1986, p.7). In the late 1990s, features similar to those found in Writer's Workbench will be integrated into word processing packages, and this integration will spell a change for students composing electronically.

Lawrence Frase et al.'s "Computer Aids for Text Assessment and Writing Instruction" (1981), Kate Kiefer and Charles Smith's "Textual Analysis with Computers" (1983) and Patricia S. Gingrich's "The UNIX Writer's Workbench Software" (1983) addressed the tricky-and potentially anti-process movement-question of measurable improvement in the surface features of student texts. What if a software agent could make student texts almost error free? What if spelling and grammar checkers could increase the speed with which students were able to edit their essays? Did studies of these "surface-feature" writing tools suggest a return to a pre-process movement, a pre-Mina Shaughnessy, approach to error, response, and revision?

And perhaps the more interesting question is not whether Frase, Kiefer, Smith, and Gingrich's studies were "regressive" in some form or another but rather in what ways did their ideas about software-based responses to errors play into the development of features found in "commonplace" writing tools such as Microsoft Word. Bernard Susser's study (1998) of a word-processing heuristic and its use by Japanesse students learning English demonstrates the type of knowledge that can be created by returning to a mico-level examination of how software functions are shaping students' composing processes (p. 355-363).