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Writing with a Personal Computerpersonal computers, in and out of business, is word processing, which the author feels might more accurately be thought of as wordworking. That is also the area in which personal computers can be the most helpful to a library or a professional user. It is likely that there are more programs available for wordworking than for any other personal computing task. The author discusses some of the problems occasional writers experience, how a personal computer can help overcome them, features that professional writers should look for in a word processor, and how word processing works. Four contemporary word processing systems are used as examples. This material is excerpted from Crawford's book Common Sense Personal Computing: A Handbook for Professionals (copyright 1986 by Walt Crawford), to be published by Pierian Press this year.

Librarians and other professionals preparing complex documents benefit from sophisticated wordworking systems. A small handful of wordworking systems provide unusually flexible print formatting and text handling. The author considers two such programs, The FinalWord II and WordPerfect 4.1. The two programs achieve somewhat similar ends through distinctly different means. WordPerfect has a wider variety of unusual text‐manipulation capabilities, while The FinalWord offers more varied formatting capabilities and much greater user control. The two programs are compared with each other; and their editing functions are compared with PC‐Write. Time trials show some of the strengths and weaknesses of each editor.

Editing assistance software programs are computer-based tools that check and make suggestions for the grammar, spelling and style of a piece of writing. These tools are becoming more popular as recommendations for students who struggle with written expression, such as English language learners (ELLs). The purpose of the present study is to compare the performance of four different programs with embedded editing assistance tools in their ability to identify errors in the writing of ELLs.

Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to determine whether there were differences in the number of errors (i.e. spelling, grammar, punctuation and errors that change the meaning of the text) identified by editing assistance programs (i.e. Grammarly, Ginger, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and human raters) for writing by ELLs.

The results of the present study indicate that the four programs did not differ in their identification of spelling errors. None of the editing assistance programs identified as many errors as the human raters; therefore, editing assistance cannot yet replace effective human editing for ELLs.

Limitations with the present study include manual verification of errors flagged by editing programs, multiple raters, a small sample size and a young sample of students.

The paper includes practical factors to consider when integrating editing assistance software into the classroom, including the development needs of students, the impact of students' first language and student training on the technology.

This paper provides school psychologists, teachers and other professionals working with students with specific, evidence-based recommendations for implementation of editing assistance AT.

In 1981, the Carnegie‐Mellon University Libraries began to expand their usage of CMU's central computing facilities. This paper describes the utilization of three software packages resident on the University's central computers: text editing, text formatting, and electronic mail. The advantages of utilizing central computing resources, the introduction and training in computing systems within the Libraries, and specific computing applications are described. The advantages of electronic mail for organizational communication are discussed, as well as the problems.

Lectures can be digitally recorded and replayed to provide multimedia revision material for students who attended the class and a substitute learning experience for students unable to attend. Deaf and hard of hearing people can find it difficult to follow speech through hearing alone or to take notes while they are lip‐reading or watching a sign‐language interpreter. Notetakers can only summarise what is being said while qualified sign language interpreters with a good understanding of the relevant higher education subject content are in very scarce supply. Synchronising the speech with text captions can ensure deaf students are not disadvantaged and assist all learners to search for relevant specific parts of the multimedia recording by means of the synchronised text. Real time stenography transcription is not normally available in UK higher education because of the shortage of stenographers wishing to work in universities. Captions are time consuming and expensive to create by hand and while Automatic Speech Recognition can be used to provide real time captioning directly from lecturers’ speech in classrooms it has proved difficult to obtain accuracy comparable to stenography. This paper describes the development of a system that enables editors to correct errors in the captions as they are created by Automatic Speech Recognition.

The recent report for the Commission of the European Communities on current multilingual activities in the field of scientific and technical information and the 1977 conference on the same theme both included substantial sections on operational and experimental machine translation systems, and in its Plan of action the Commission announced its intention to introduce an operational machine translation system into its departments and to support research projects on machine translation. This revival of interest in machine translation may well have surprised many who have tended in recent years to dismiss it as one of the ‘great failures’ of scientific research. What has changed? What grounds are there now for optimism about machine translation? Or is it still a ‘utopian dream’ ? The aim of this review is to give a general picture of present activities which may help readers to reach their own conclusions. After a sketch of the historical background and general aims (section I), it describes operational and experimental machine translation systems of recent years (section II), it continues with descriptions of interactive (man‐machine) systems and machine‐assisted translation (section III), (and it concludes with a general survey of present problems and future possibilities section IV).

This paper proposes a number of essential requirements intended to provide direction for translation work‐benches of the future. The points made arise from a consideration of the problems and frustrations encountered during several years' experience in the use of proprietary and in‐house translation tools. The paper will also suggest innovations which may considerably improve the productivity and flexibility of future translation workbenches.

The ‘Office of the Future’, ‘Office Technology’, ‘Word Processing’, ‘Electronic Mail’, ‘Electronic Communications’, ‘Convergence’, ‘Information Management’. These are all terms included in the current list of buzz words used to describe current activities in the office technology area. Open the pages of almost any journal or periodical today and you will probably find an article or some reference to one or more of the above subjects. Long, detailed and highly technical theses are appearing on new techniques to automate and revolutionize the office environment. Facts and figures are quoted ad nauseam on the high current cost of writing a letter, filing letters, memos, reports and documents, trying to communicate with someone by telephone or other telecommunication means and, most significant of all, the high cost of people undertaking these never‐ending tasks. The high level of investment in factories and plants and the ever‐increasing fight to improve productivity by automating the dull, routine jobs are usually quoted and compared with the extremely low investment in improving and automating the equally tedious routine jobs in the office environment; the investment in the factory is quoted as being ten times greater per employee than in the office. This, however, is changing rapidly and investment on a large scale is already taking place in many areas as present‐day inflation bites hard, forcing many companies and organizations to take a much closer look at their office operations.

Based on the premise that computers have now become cultural and cognitive artifacts with which and not from which learners interact on a daily basis, this chapter focuses on best practices in preparing and engaging digital natives to become tomorrow’s leaders of a global knowledge economy that is increasingly dependent on electronic modes of communications. Using a study based on online tools in a writing course taught at the University of Victoria (Canada), we take a qualitative interpretative stance to explain the opportunities and challenges of learning and teaching in such environments. We comment on such aspects as the need to properly address learner’s functional skills (or lack off), the various tools that can be used to engage and motivate learners, and the need to go beyond methods based on delivery in order to better focus on the development of multiliteracies, in particular critical literacy and functional literacy. Our argument, grounded in cognitive and sociocultural theories of learning, favors an interdisciplinary approach while focusing on disciplines that are typically housed in the humanities, in particular second language academic programs. Our discussions and conclusions move from these case studies to a more general reflection on the extent to which electronic environments are reshaping higher education.

Two commercial computer‐based legal retrieval systems are described — WESTLAW of West Publishing Co. and LEXIS of Mead Data Central. These systems enable searches by words or phrases in the full legal text of such as those relating to court opinions, US codes and various Federal tax matters. Also it is possible to check case citations. Examples are given of how the computer is able to meet the lawyer's needs and explanation of the various ways in which searches can be made. It is considered that familiarity with the relevant law speeds up searching due to the user's knowledge of the vocabulary of the judges. The limitation on the number of years covered should soon disappear as file sizes are increased and storage costs reduce. The article goes on to compare the coverage and performance of both systems. Examples are given of search statements for each. Comparative comment is given on data input, text editing, text enhancement including indexing, updating and hard copy support. It is concluded that the customer will find it difficult to choose between the systems. No refs.