Student Writers and Word Processing: A Preliminary Evaluation

Rather extravagant, and largely unsubstantiated, claims have recently been made about the potential of word processing to improve student writing. We are told that word processing not only reduces the number of errors in our students' writing but also encourages them to experiment, increases the amount of revising they do, enables them to perceive writing as a process, and gives them a sense of audience. 1 In fact, as a result of our enthusiasm for word processing, our discipline's initial skepticism about computers has been replaced by an acceptance of their instructional potential that is perhaps too uncritical. Few existing studies provide useful information about how word processing affects student writing or offer realistic evaluations of its effects on the process of composing. Rather than investigating a specific feature of writing, many of these studies attempt to determine the effects of computers on writing in general. Those that do focus on a specific feature of writing usually deal with revision, but few researchers define what they mean by the term revision, using it to encompass all rewriting operations and failing to distinguish among revising, editing, and proofreading. Because editing and proofreading affect only the surface features of a text, they should be distinguished from revision, which is more accurately defined as making semantic and rhetorical changes that affect the content and organization of a piece of discourse.2 In a small pilot study involving six student writers, I investigated the effect of word processing on revising. Using a case study approach, I attempted to discover whether the use of word processing increases the number of revisions-significant modifications in content and organization-that a student makes in his or her text. My subjects were six student writers, volunteers who were selected from two classes-an honors freshman English course and an advanced composition course. In selecting these six subjects, I considered two qualifications: ability to type and prior experience with a computer. However, the computer experi-