Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca> (02/06/90)
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 1006. Monday, 5 Feb 1990. (1) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 90 01:57:00 EST (10 lines) From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@OAC.UCLA.EDU> Subject: Re: 3.999 the quality of writing: IBM vs Mac (46) (2) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 90 10:00:00 EST (49 lines) From: EIEB360@UTXVM Subject: 3.999 the quality of writing: IB (1) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 3 Feb 90 01:57:00 EST From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@OAC.UCLA.EDU> Subject: Re: 3.999 the quality of writing: IBM vs Mac (46) But it was common knowledge from the earliest ads that the "Mac was made for the rest of us (dummies), including Ph.D's...I couldnt understand an IBM menu if I tried, though I dont use the icons of the mac either, but its alphabetical directories. As for the students...gee what a damning result. But somehow it does nt sound too objective a test. I think you get what you train people on. No? Kessler at UCLA (2) --------------------------------------------------------------58---- Date: Sat, 3 Feb 90 10:00:00 EST From: EIEB360@UTXVM Subject: 3.999 the quality of writing: IB I agree that the Halio article in *Academic Computing* is troubling. What troubles me, however, is not simply that there seems to be a qualitative difference between the writing done by students who use Macs and the writing done by students who use MS-DOS machines: what troubles me is the easy assumption that there is a *causal* relationship between the use of the Mac and poor or sloppy writing on the one hand, and use of the PC and competent (or at least better) writing on the other. That I just don't buy; sorry; at least not without a whole lot more evidence and much more rigorous argumentation; it would help, too, if the article itself were better written (and better edited by the folks at *Academic Computing*). It seems to me it's at least conceivable that students who weren't particularly comfortable with writing in the first place, and who thought of a required writing course is something to be survived rather than as an opportunity to manifest their talents, might well have been inclined to choose the Mac when given the choice between a machine consistently billed as having a "friendly" and "intuitive" interface and a more forbidding, character-based PC with its command-line interface, etc. I've been teaching writing in a computer-based classroom for four years now (an IBM-based classroom), and I've seen both obsessively neat, spell- and grammar-checked essays, and unbelievably sloppy, error-ridden essays. I've also gotten lots of essays produced on both Macs and IBMs by students in other classes, and I honestly can't say that the ones done on the Mac have been either better or worse than those done on the PC. I've gotten some wonderfully inventive work, particularly in the use of graphics, from students working on the Mac; but those graphically-innovative essays were also, with few exceptions, carefully executed and conceptually rich as well. I've seen terrible work, sure-- from people using Macs, from people using IBMs, from people using typewriters, from people using legal pads... And then there are long-winded, unedited outbursts from people like me who can't forbear composing on-line. Halio raises important points about what happens to writing when it's done in a graphic-based environment, and about the usefulness/ reliability of computer-assisted measurements. I believe quite firmly that the design of the interface has an important impact on the way the user/writer conceives of the writing project (for that matter, WordPerfect differs from MS Word in that respect), and I'm prepared to believe that there's a correlation between holistic evaluation of student work and the kind of score produced by, e.g., Writer's Workbench or less cumbersome tools like Grammatik (which also generates readability indices). But the logic of the essay is seriously flawed. John Slatin Department of English University of Texas at Austin