taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (07/13/86)
This article is from hplabs!hpisla!hpltbd!marc (Marc I. Clarke) and was received on Sat Jul 12 12:10:12 1986 I greatly enjoyed the section on the physical mail in England, with the multiple deliveries per day. I would like to offer several comments on the topic of poor writing quality perceived as stemming from the use of electronic text processors. First, I'll take a note from the NRA, and misquote them a bit to note that, "Computers don't write poor text -- PEOPLE write poor text." Computers are deigned and built by people. Software (whether for word processors, spelling checkers, grammer checkers, or text formatting) is written by people. All of the above is then used by people. I have zero respect for the oft-repeated "The computer made an error," or the new "The computer maked me writed iliterate prose." Rubbish. Better to say, "The Devil made me do it." That, at least, I can't disprove. Secondly, working on a computer with its small screen and limited number of lines on a display can lead to tunnel vision, in the literary sense. Where I would have one or more pages with 60+ lines of text on my desk as I write a letter by hand, I have about 18 useful lines of text on the screen at once when I type a letter to a friend. It becomes very easy to over focus on the topic in front of my nose and loose the treads of my letter as a whole. I've even seen books (often Science Fiction) with this characteristic, and found a note on the flyleaf that this was the first book the author had written using an electronic text processor. My mother is a full-time author, and while she loves the text processor she now uses, she too noted the trend toward writing atomic paragraphs with discrete ideas rather than writing chapters which must be read in full to grasp the idea. She has noted that once she noted the trend, she used it to her advantage to focus her writing and hit home on a number of points rather than to smear the material across a chapter and leave it as an exercise to the reader to extract the diffuse idea. I have found working on a large, high-resolution screen with multiple windows of 45 lines each has made writing coherent documents much easier for me. I particularly like being able to type on a screen which is roughly 150 characters across a line rather than roughly 80. I find it much easier to concentrate on a single idea and cover all of its aspects without its rolling off the top of the screen into oblivion. Third, I would love to hear a review of the various grammer checkers available and how people like using them. I have only a sparse set of things which came as part of my U**x system (a spelling checker) and some tools I have siphoned off of the net (a punctuation diagram generator). I would love to hear about people'e experiences with the AT&T documenters toolbench and any other tools people have. While I am happy to learn that others have many of the same problems I do, I am even happier to learn of solutions to those problems and peoples' experiences with those solutions. Lets turn the focus of the notes group to look beyond identifying problems (a worthwhile endeavor in itself) to identifying potential solutions if they exist or specifying them if they don't. I can't help but remember a chum who groused about the defects of various electronic mailers and decided to write one which cured most of the identified ills associated with the existing set. Even now, he is madly exploring the solution space of what an electronic mailer should really do, now that he has passed beyond dealing with what the previous mailers did not do. This second phase is the one I would love to encourage other readers of this digest to explore in this rather eclectic forum. Yours truly, Marc I. Clarke