Volume 1, Number 1

Moulthrop and Kaplan question explanatory narrative

In "Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition," Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop question the failure of Marcia Peoples Halio to include an explanatory narrative in her article "Student Writing: Can the Machine Maim the Message?":

<1> Even if we suppose that Halio could have demonstrated that students in the IBM sections wrote better essays than students in the Macintosh sections, she has failed to provide a plausible explanatory narrative, one that might serve to inform further research. Suppose then that some well constructed experiment were to find that writers of equal ability before using a particular computer system became writers of unequal ability after they had worked with different systems for some time. To what factors and influences might we attribute these effects and how might such hypotheses be tested? For example, a researcher might hypothesize that screen size affects writers' work. What elements of writing might be affected? Paragraph length, we might suppose, could be influenced by the amount of text a screen can display. Before testing that proposition, though, the investigator should probably consider whether screen size also interacts with software features, for example whether the wordprocessing program allows the user to scroll easily or restricts movement within the document to discrete screens (as in pageup and pagedown navigation). A combination of factors, rather than an isolated feature, is likely to affect a writer's work (see Carroll).

<2> To study the effects of screen size alone, the researcher should use an experimental design. The study would test two different screens (preferably using the same wordprocessing software to minimize confounding factors) on the same group of writers, measuring whatever aspect of writers' performance the study was designed to examine. In a study of this type Christine Haas and John R. Hayes compared the effects of large bitmapped displays, small IBM PC displays, and pen and paper on writers' difficulty working with text they had already produced. The study found that the large bitmapped display and pen and paper conditions were essentially equivalent whereas writers had more difficulty with the small CRT displays. The study does not make clear whether the bitmapped display alone (holding screen size constant) offers an advantage over the standard CRT, but it does suggest that screen resolution might be as important as screen size in assessing technological effects on writers working on line.

<3> Similarly, what theory would connect a command-driven system with mechanical and grammatical correctness, and how would such a theory be tested? The researcher might hypothesize that a command system demands syntactical accuracy and that there is a transfer effect. In other words, writers would learn that "computer readers" (operating systems or wordprocessing programs) are inflexible and might come to believe that human readers are similarly exacting. Writers would therefore be more attentive to precise syntax in English. The role of feedback--immediate machine response to error as opposed to delayed human reader response--might prove crucial here, and the experimental design would have to take into account those factors as well as the substantial differences between artificial command structures and natural languages. The experiment would have to test writers working with command-driven editors, not with programs whose interfaces employ menus or function keys.

<4> Perhaps, as Halio implied, easy manipulation of visual features--everything from fonts and typefaces to full illustrations--affects students' writing on the Macintosh or in other graphic computing environments. The controlling hypothesis might posit that, whether writing on a Macintosh or an IBM, students spend roughly the same amount of time preparing their assignments but that those working on a Macintosh devote less time to text production or revision because they spend more time with visual features. To establish this hypothesis, a descriptive approach would be appropriate. The study would track students' activities and measure the amounts of time writers give to producing words, formatting text, illustrating, and completing the whole task. Any report of this type would certainly have to indicate whether the students composed at the computer or merely typed in already drafted texts before they began to "play" with graphics. (259-260)

Return to the critiques of Halio. Move on to Moulthrop and Kaplan's Works Cited.

Move on to the conclusion, or return to Not Maimed but Malted.
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