DONALD ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota


"Prospects for Writer's Workstations in the Coming Decade," in Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s, eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991), pp. 84-110.

After a decade of comfortable struggle, writers, composition teachers, and students have become familiar with word-processing software. Along the way, we have become aware of software that analyzes ordinary English prose. We have accepted some of these approaches, notably spell-checking programs, quite well. Others have caused more skepticism. This survey covers a wide range of computer programs that might possibly become relevant to the writer, ranging from ordinary tools such as a thesaurus to more complex programs that attempt syntactic or discourse analysis. Our profession needs to move toward showing students how to use as many of these tools as possible and teaching students to become "post editors," who evaluate recommendations that will inevitably be imperfect and imprecise. Emerging computer systems, i.e., the ones that will replace those on our desks, will present the writer with multiple windows into the writing process. This new hardware and software "architecture" should better model the experienced writer who sees a writing task as having multiple, parallel, and interacting dimensions. Assuming that composition specialists are able to influence the design of this writer's workstation, will we be more successful than we have been in the past in guiding our students to realize the full potential of the technology?


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