Re: basic writers/software

[bobbie silk <bsilk@keller.clarke.edu>]

Me too, Dave.  And Marcel Proust has been described as spending days and
days searching for the "bon mot" or perfectly crafting a sentence. He
produced some pretty lengthy and influential novels that way.  Of course,
I can see a considerable difference between the self-motivated search for
the right word and the shrill insistence of a mechanical spell-check
underlining supposed misspellings in red.  

  --Bobbie
    bsilk@keller.clarke.edu

On Tue, 28 Jan 1997, Dave Healy wrote:

> Kevin Davis asks whether word processing reinforces behaviors characteristic of 
> basic writers.  The specific behavior that set him musing was "unsmooth" writing
> processes.  I don't know the study that mentions this as a characteristic of 
> basic writers, but based on my own behavior, by that criterion I'm a basic 
> writer.
> 
> Dave Healy
> 
>