- Email: [email protected]
Computers across the curriculum: Using Writer's Workbench
3
This draft, too, was loaded onto the disk, printed, then brought to conference again. The text was far more successful both in communication of meaning and in organizaton of material, Satisfied, Michael moved on to his subsequent concerns. This refinement of text continued through half a dozen more drafts on the word processor and several more conferences with the teacher. Michael next shifted to sentence-level revisions. Every sentence needed to serve the purpose of elaborating his ideas, and each sentence was reread and often revised on the computer with this necessity in mind. In still later drafts, Michael was pleased with content and organization of his piece and became an editor. Punctuation, spelling, capitalization and other editorial concerns were now the focus of his efforts on the word processor. A composition handbook, dictionary and thesaurus helped him here, as well as other editing strategies: reading aloud, listening for the punctuation in his voice, sounding out words. The ninth draft of this writer's piece was a polished, smooth essay which he felt was complete. The thesis quoted above is shown in its revised form below: "Time" gives its interpretation of the news from a biased point of view based on the magazine's political persuasion. Certain techniques are used by journalists in order to propagandize. One method is composition, the manner in which an article is constructed and organized. A second method is repetition, the restating of an idea or concept over .and over. A third method is presenting an argument which is refuted by a counter-argument. Michael was very happy with his piece and wrote that he learned a great deal about how to revise both content and organization. The conference method of teaching helped him to learn how to write, and word processing helped him to make his textual changes easily and quickly without risking new mistakes. The time required to create and complete a piece was much shorter than traditional composing methods permit: only ten days were necessary for Michael's nine drafts. Continued work with writers confirms my experience with Michael: sound composition instruction is even more effective when students are given word processing as a composing tool.
*********************************************** Computers across the Curriculum: Using WRITER'S WORKBENCH for Supplementary Instruction Muriel Harris and Madelon Cheek Purdue University Writer's Workbench, a set of text-analyzing programs produced by Bell Labs, has attracted attention because of its potential for helping students edit and revise their writing.. Since all the programs inthe set are now commercially available, there is a greater likelihood that what was originally meant as editing aids 1 for technical writers will be a tool for student composing as well. At Colorado State University, where Kathleen Kiefer and Charles Smith adapted the Writer's Workbench for students to use when revising compositions, Kiefer and Smith concluded that use of this computerized text analysis program "speeds learning of editing skills by offering immediate, reliable, and consistent attention to surface features of writers' prose."2 At Purdue University, where three of the Writer's Workb~ch programs, STYLE, DICTION, and SPELL, are available for public use on the engineering computer network, we had the opportunity to use these programs in our Writing Lab for evaluating rather than editing. We were not able, as Kiefer and Smith were, to have students use Writer's Workbench to revise their writing. Instead, w7 used the;---programs as aids in analyzing and commenting on engineering students' weekly lab reports written for an engineering course. Our initial assessment is that, despite some limitations, Writer's Workbench may indeed be a useful analytic::Dtool ;:Vailableto teachers who are aware of both its merits and limitations. As a means of analyzing surface-level problems in a student's text, it assists the teacher with some of the tedious editing and proofreading tasks, thereby giving the teacher more time to consider larger rhetorical questions of organization, structure, clarity, and so on.
UNIX 1Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald, "The Writer's Workbench Software," BYTE (October, 1983),241-48. 2Kathleen Kiefer and Charles Smith, "Textual Analysis with Computers: Tests of Bell Laboratories' Computer Software," Research in the Teaching of En.,gJish, 17 (October, 1983), 201.
4
In a pilot project designed to determine if Writer's Workbench could assist engineering students as they wrote in their courses, we used a terminal in our Writing Lab linked to the engineering computer network across campus and read students' weekly reports written for the lab segment of an engineering course. After the students completed their reports using terminals in their lab, they simultaneously sent copies to their lab instructor and. to us, via the computerized mail system available on this network. To be useful, we had to read these reports quickly, comment, and return them before the students wrote their next reports. To do so, we used the Writer's Workbench output to complement our own analysis of t~students' writing skills, inserted our comments in each report, and sent them back to the students through the computer's mail system. For us, this-use of Writer's Workbench as a teacher's diagnostic tool wa;Par~f i uniqueopportunity "to offer on -going writing instruction in courses in other disciplines. Of the three Writer's Workbench programs we used, we found each to have its own merits and limitations. With SPELL, a useful program which prints out all words in the student's report that are misspelled or that do not appear inits 30,OOO-word dictionary, the major advantage is a time-saving one in that we don't have to read for most of the possible common misspellings. In our comments we can remind the students about any spelling problems that are evident as we Quickly scan the output of SPELL. Unfortunately, though, this spelling checker--like any other--cannot detect homonym confusions, those common but potentially distracting (or irritating) confusions of to/too, their/there, its/It's, and so on. These must still be noted by the writing instructor reading for such errors. The DICTION part of Writer's Workbench moves beyond simple editing suggestions by flagging possibly wordy or ineffective constructions and asking the writer to consider them. This program, containing a file of 450 words and phrases to avoid, reprints sentences from the student's report which contain these words or phrases and brackets the construction, as in the following student example: The difference between AC and CD coupling lies in [the fact] that with the DC coupling the circuits are coupled directly. While "the fact" is indeed unnecessary verbiage, writing instructors might be more inclined to have the student consider whether the whole phrase i'lies
in the fact that" might simply be replaced by "is that." Thus, while the suggestions for revision in the DICTION program do highlight potential problems, teachers using DICTION cannot rely entirely on the program's output. However, its usefulness can be enhanced by adding to its expandable list such word clutter as "is due to the fact that," a student favorite which is apparently not in the present DICTION listing. For a student's sentence which used this phrase, the program reacted as follows: The attentuation of the signal is [due to] the fact that capacitors attenuate low frequency signals. Similarly, it bypassed student sentences which began with "The reason for this is that" or "The reason for this occurrence is beeause." While DICTION is immediately useful to both the composition teacher and student writer, the output of the third program we used, STYLE, is not as readily accessible because the output requires some interpretation. It does, though, offer an extensive amount of information about the .text it has analyzed. It lists readability levels on three scales--the Kincaid, Colernan-Liau, and the Flesch --and gives sentence-level information such as the total number of sentences, total number of words, and average number of words per sentence, the number of non-function words, the number of . words in the longest sentence, and the percentage of sentence types. Its analysis of word usage includes the percentage of lito be" verbs, passive constructions, and different types of sentence openers. For us as writing teachers, some of the information was immediately useful, and some had to be studied and considered. If the output lists 31% of the verbs as "to be" verbs or 42% of the sentences types as simple sentences, we weren't always sure about our evaluation of these statistics. However, in the complete set of Writer's Workb~ch programs (which were not available for us to use), the PROSE program offers some interpretation of these statistics. For the students in the Colorado State project, an excellent manual was written for their use ("Manual for Writing with Computer Assistance," Dept. of English Colorado State University, January, 1983). Our evaluations, then, of Writer's Workbench remain generally favorable. For us as teachers of writing working under time constraints to offer some help to student writers, the output of these programs was definitely helpful as a reasonably efficient diagnostic
5
tool for some surface features of the writing. Though not a complete analysis, the output did call our attention to potential writing deficiencies such as overuse of the passive, overly long sentences, and a tendency toward wordiness, and it saved us from proofreading for most spelling errors. Moreover, it allowed us to add into an already overloaded teaching schedule some writing assistance that we could not have offered otherwise. There are other advantages as well. Deflating as it might be to a composition teacher's ego, we found that students tend to respect the computer output of Writer's Workbench--or at least regard it as less arbitrarytha~;-writing teacher's comments. A further advantage is that while the novelty might eventually wear off, our use of Writer's Workbench generated interest among engineering faculty and encouraged them to consider its potential as a writing tool. This can lead to a stronger interest in writing instruction within their classrooms, drawing them into the writing-across-the- curriculum movement via the computer. ~**********************************************
Computer-Assisted Grading of Essays and Reports Jack Jobst Michigan Tech University Someday computers may grade our students' essays and reports, but until then they can assist human graders in this onerous task. I wrote a program composed of three major sections: the first is a simple text editor for writing original comments; the second section consists of pre-written commentaries on common writing errors, principally in mechanics and organization; section three keeps track of bookkeeping. Questionnaire results show that students prefer this type of grading over traditional hand-written methods because it doesn't involve marks on their papers, and it produces more extensively detailed comments.
they number each line of text in the margin of every page. When grading, the teacher places each ' assignment alongside the computer keyboard and types in the appropriate line number next to his or her comment. If the student writer makes a common error, such as using a semicolon rather than a colon, or confusing "its" with "it's," the grader hits a key on the keybord which brings up from memory a commentary on that particular error. The commentaries range from one sentence to several paragraphs in length. After completing the line-by-line comments, but before writing a summary, the grader pushes another button and the _ bookkeeping section of the program totals the numbers of errors and prints the appropriate page numbers from the class handbook. When the teacher assigns a grade, the program writes this to a disk, along with the total number of errors and final commentary. This may be recalled at a later date to note improvement and understanding of earlier comments. After grading the assignment the instructor may include a short quiz for the student on particular errors which occurred in the paper. To produce the sense of a more personal response, the lengthier commentaries either include the student's name (placed at different locations within the paragraphs) or a specific identification of the student's error. For example, in the two-paragraph explanation on proper use of possessives, an example for singular possessive includes the student's name, as in "Mary's book." The commentary on "repetition" incorporates the repetitious word or phrase actually used by the student. The program accomplishes this by prompting the grader for the element after this particular commentary has been selected.
The program is similar to Bill Marling's GRADER and READER (see Vol. I, No. ·l of this newsletter) in that it contains grammar information, bookkeeping help, and is written for the IBM -PC, One major difference is that the program isn't designed to work with student materials written on disk.
When the grading is completed, the program takes the information appearing on the screen and transfers it to a printer. The teacher than staples the resulting printed commentary to the front of the assignment for return to the student. When correcting their work, students match the line-numbered, printed comments to the lines in their assignments, determine the correct punctuation or requested change, then correct their work. This method of teaching mechanics and paragraph organization promotes a higher degree of student involvement, offers detailed commentaries, and should be particularly effective since it involves the student's own writing.
Students submit their essays and reports to the. instructor in the traditional manner, except that
I have not yet produced a version available for distribution, but would if enough interest develops.
This draft, too, was loaded onto the disk, printed, then brought to conference again. The text was far more successful both in communication of meaning and in organizaton of material, Satisfied, Michael moved on to his subsequent concerns. This refinement of text continued through half a dozen more drafts on the word processor and several more conferences with the teacher. Michael next shifted to sentence-level revisions. Every sentence needed to serve the purpose of elaborating his ideas, and each sentence was reread and often revised on the computer with this necessity in mind. In still later drafts, Michael was pleased with content and organization of his piece and became an editor. Punctuation, spelling, capitalization and other editorial concerns were now the focus of his efforts on the word processor. A composition handbook, dictionary and thesaurus helped him here, as well as other editing strategies: reading aloud, listening for the punctuation in his voice, sounding out words. The ninth draft of this writer's piece was a polished, smooth essay which he felt was complete. The thesis quoted above is shown in its revised form below: "Time" gives its interpretation of the news from a biased point of view based on the magazine's political persuasion. Certain techniques are used by journalists in order to propagandize. One method is composition, the manner in which an article is constructed and organized. A second method is repetition, the restating of an idea or concept over .and over. A third method is presenting an argument which is refuted by a counter-argument. Michael was very happy with his piece and wrote that he learned a great deal about how to revise both content and organization. The conference method of teaching helped him to learn how to write, and word processing helped him to make his textual changes easily and quickly without risking new mistakes. The time required to create and complete a piece was much shorter than traditional composing methods permit: only ten days were necessary for Michael's nine drafts. Continued work with writers confirms my experience with Michael: sound composition instruction is even more effective when students are given word processing as a composing tool.
*********************************************** Computers across the Curriculum: Using WRITER'S WORKBENCH for Supplementary Instruction Muriel Harris and Madelon Cheek Purdue University Writer's Workbench, a set of text-analyzing programs produced by Bell Labs, has attracted attention because of its potential for helping students edit and revise their writing.. Since all the programs inthe set are now commercially available, there is a greater likelihood that what was originally meant as editing aids 1 for technical writers will be a tool for student composing as well. At Colorado State University, where Kathleen Kiefer and Charles Smith adapted the Writer's Workbench for students to use when revising compositions, Kiefer and Smith concluded that use of this computerized text analysis program "speeds learning of editing skills by offering immediate, reliable, and consistent attention to surface features of writers' prose."2 At Purdue University, where three of the Writer's Workb~ch programs, STYLE, DICTION, and SPELL, are available for public use on the engineering computer network, we had the opportunity to use these programs in our Writing Lab for evaluating rather than editing. We were not able, as Kiefer and Smith were, to have students use Writer's Workbench to revise their writing. Instead, w7 used the;---programs as aids in analyzing and commenting on engineering students' weekly lab reports written for an engineering course. Our initial assessment is that, despite some limitations, Writer's Workbench may indeed be a useful analytic::Dtool ;:Vailableto teachers who are aware of both its merits and limitations. As a means of analyzing surface-level problems in a student's text, it assists the teacher with some of the tedious editing and proofreading tasks, thereby giving the teacher more time to consider larger rhetorical questions of organization, structure, clarity, and so on.
UNIX 1Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald, "The Writer's Workbench Software," BYTE (October, 1983),241-48. 2Kathleen Kiefer and Charles Smith, "Textual Analysis with Computers: Tests of Bell Laboratories' Computer Software," Research in the Teaching of En.,gJish, 17 (October, 1983), 201.
4
In a pilot project designed to determine if Writer's Workbench could assist engineering students as they wrote in their courses, we used a terminal in our Writing Lab linked to the engineering computer network across campus and read students' weekly reports written for the lab segment of an engineering course. After the students completed their reports using terminals in their lab, they simultaneously sent copies to their lab instructor and. to us, via the computerized mail system available on this network. To be useful, we had to read these reports quickly, comment, and return them before the students wrote their next reports. To do so, we used the Writer's Workbench output to complement our own analysis of t~students' writing skills, inserted our comments in each report, and sent them back to the students through the computer's mail system. For us, this-use of Writer's Workbench as a teacher's diagnostic tool wa;Par~f i uniqueopportunity "to offer on -going writing instruction in courses in other disciplines. Of the three Writer's Workbench programs we used, we found each to have its own merits and limitations. With SPELL, a useful program which prints out all words in the student's report that are misspelled or that do not appear inits 30,OOO-word dictionary, the major advantage is a time-saving one in that we don't have to read for most of the possible common misspellings. In our comments we can remind the students about any spelling problems that are evident as we Quickly scan the output of SPELL. Unfortunately, though, this spelling checker--like any other--cannot detect homonym confusions, those common but potentially distracting (or irritating) confusions of to/too, their/there, its/It's, and so on. These must still be noted by the writing instructor reading for such errors. The DICTION part of Writer's Workbench moves beyond simple editing suggestions by flagging possibly wordy or ineffective constructions and asking the writer to consider them. This program, containing a file of 450 words and phrases to avoid, reprints sentences from the student's report which contain these words or phrases and brackets the construction, as in the following student example: The difference between AC and CD coupling lies in [the fact] that with the DC coupling the circuits are coupled directly. While "the fact" is indeed unnecessary verbiage, writing instructors might be more inclined to have the student consider whether the whole phrase i'lies
in the fact that" might simply be replaced by "is that." Thus, while the suggestions for revision in the DICTION program do highlight potential problems, teachers using DICTION cannot rely entirely on the program's output. However, its usefulness can be enhanced by adding to its expandable list such word clutter as "is due to the fact that," a student favorite which is apparently not in the present DICTION listing. For a student's sentence which used this phrase, the program reacted as follows: The attentuation of the signal is [due to] the fact that capacitors attenuate low frequency signals. Similarly, it bypassed student sentences which began with "The reason for this is that" or "The reason for this occurrence is beeause." While DICTION is immediately useful to both the composition teacher and student writer, the output of the third program we used, STYLE, is not as readily accessible because the output requires some interpretation. It does, though, offer an extensive amount of information about the .text it has analyzed. It lists readability levels on three scales--the Kincaid, Colernan-Liau, and the Flesch --and gives sentence-level information such as the total number of sentences, total number of words, and average number of words per sentence, the number of non-function words, the number of . words in the longest sentence, and the percentage of sentence types. Its analysis of word usage includes the percentage of lito be" verbs, passive constructions, and different types of sentence openers. For us as writing teachers, some of the information was immediately useful, and some had to be studied and considered. If the output lists 31% of the verbs as "to be" verbs or 42% of the sentences types as simple sentences, we weren't always sure about our evaluation of these statistics. However, in the complete set of Writer's Workb~ch programs (which were not available for us to use), the PROSE program offers some interpretation of these statistics. For the students in the Colorado State project, an excellent manual was written for their use ("Manual for Writing with Computer Assistance," Dept. of English Colorado State University, January, 1983). Our evaluations, then, of Writer's Workbench remain generally favorable. For us as teachers of writing working under time constraints to offer some help to student writers, the output of these programs was definitely helpful as a reasonably efficient diagnostic
5
tool for some surface features of the writing. Though not a complete analysis, the output did call our attention to potential writing deficiencies such as overuse of the passive, overly long sentences, and a tendency toward wordiness, and it saved us from proofreading for most spelling errors. Moreover, it allowed us to add into an already overloaded teaching schedule some writing assistance that we could not have offered otherwise. There are other advantages as well. Deflating as it might be to a composition teacher's ego, we found that students tend to respect the computer output of Writer's Workbench--or at least regard it as less arbitrarytha~;-writing teacher's comments. A further advantage is that while the novelty might eventually wear off, our use of Writer's Workbench generated interest among engineering faculty and encouraged them to consider its potential as a writing tool. This can lead to a stronger interest in writing instruction within their classrooms, drawing them into the writing-across-the- curriculum movement via the computer. ~**********************************************
Computer-Assisted Grading of Essays and Reports Jack Jobst Michigan Tech University Someday computers may grade our students' essays and reports, but until then they can assist human graders in this onerous task. I wrote a program composed of three major sections: the first is a simple text editor for writing original comments; the second section consists of pre-written commentaries on common writing errors, principally in mechanics and organization; section three keeps track of bookkeeping. Questionnaire results show that students prefer this type of grading over traditional hand-written methods because it doesn't involve marks on their papers, and it produces more extensively detailed comments.
they number each line of text in the margin of every page. When grading, the teacher places each ' assignment alongside the computer keyboard and types in the appropriate line number next to his or her comment. If the student writer makes a common error, such as using a semicolon rather than a colon, or confusing "its" with "it's," the grader hits a key on the keybord which brings up from memory a commentary on that particular error. The commentaries range from one sentence to several paragraphs in length. After completing the line-by-line comments, but before writing a summary, the grader pushes another button and the _ bookkeeping section of the program totals the numbers of errors and prints the appropriate page numbers from the class handbook. When the teacher assigns a grade, the program writes this to a disk, along with the total number of errors and final commentary. This may be recalled at a later date to note improvement and understanding of earlier comments. After grading the assignment the instructor may include a short quiz for the student on particular errors which occurred in the paper. To produce the sense of a more personal response, the lengthier commentaries either include the student's name (placed at different locations within the paragraphs) or a specific identification of the student's error. For example, in the two-paragraph explanation on proper use of possessives, an example for singular possessive includes the student's name, as in "Mary's book." The commentary on "repetition" incorporates the repetitious word or phrase actually used by the student. The program accomplishes this by prompting the grader for the element after this particular commentary has been selected.
The program is similar to Bill Marling's GRADER and READER (see Vol. I, No. ·l of this newsletter) in that it contains grammar information, bookkeeping help, and is written for the IBM -PC, One major difference is that the program isn't designed to work with student materials written on disk.
When the grading is completed, the program takes the information appearing on the screen and transfers it to a printer. The teacher than staples the resulting printed commentary to the front of the assignment for return to the student. When correcting their work, students match the line-numbered, printed comments to the lines in their assignments, determine the correct punctuation or requested change, then correct their work. This method of teaching mechanics and paragraph organization promotes a higher degree of student involvement, offers detailed commentaries, and should be particularly effective since it involves the student's own writing.
Students submit their essays and reports to the. instructor in the traditional manner, except that
I have not yet produced a version available for distribution, but would if enough interest develops.