Computers and the Writing Process 
Computers as Revolutionary Tools for Writing
Years ago, the mathematician George Polya recognized a problem with the
way in which mathematics is taught. Math textbooks typically present page
after page of rigorously organized materials, including a set of axioms
followed by proofs of theorems derived from the axioms. The problem with
such texts, Polya believed, is that they give students the wrong impression
about how mathematics is actually done. The actual business of doing mathematics,
Polya argued, is much messier. When attempting to solve a problem or construct
a proof, mathematicians try one approach and then another. A mathematician's
notebooks tend to be full of false starts, leads followed down what turn
out to be blind alleys, sudden flashes of intuition, lucky guesses, and
so on. Every good mathematician has a grab bag of tricks, or rules of thumb,
for approaching problems: break the problem into parts and solve each individually,
solve a simpler but related problem first, establish a goal and then take
small steps toward it, and so on. Polya wrote a brilliant book, called
How to Solve It, to present these heuristics, or rules of thumb,
for actually doing mathematics.
What Polya recognized about doing mathematics is trebly true of writing.
Rarely does a finished piece of writing spring full blown from a writer's
head as though it had been dictated by a muse. Instead, writers generally
go through multiple drafts, refining their work over a period of time.
The poet Dylan Thomas left behind over sixty rough drafts of the poem that
he was working on when he died. The novelist Thomas Wolfe brought to his
editor a huge crate containing the rough draft of Look Homeward, Angel,
many thousands of rough pages that had to be whittled down to create a
readable final draft. The short story writer Ray Bradbury once remarked
to an interviewer that the great thing about writing is that it's not like
baseball. There's no "three strikes and you're out" rule. You get as many
strikes as you like. You can keep revising until you get it just right.
Good writing is rewriting, and that's why computers
are such powerful tools for writers. They make it easy to try out ideas,
to refine and edit a piece through successive drafts. The rest of this
article will describe some of the ways in which you can use a word-processing
program in the various stages of the writing process to make your writing
better than it otherwise might be. This article focuses on preparing expository,
or informational, papers for classes, but many of the suggestions made
will be applicable, as well, to other types of writing.
Prewriting: Gathering and Organizing Ideas
Prewriting is the stage in the writing process in which you come up with
a topic, gather information or ideas, and organize your raw materials.
The following are some ways to use computers for prewriting:
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Use a multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM or an Internet browser and a search
engine to explore possible topics. Doing a search on a general topic can
help you to come up with a specific topic, one that is focused enough for
your paper.
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In a word-processing program, list a general topic that interests you.
Then, list more specific topics related to the general topic. In this way
you can narrow a topic to one that is manageable.
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Once you have a focused topic for your paper, you can begin to gather information
for it. Again, multimedia encyclopedias and the Internet are excellent
sources of material for use in a paper. An excellent way to work is to
prepare note cards, in a word-processing program, as you go. Simply open
a blank word-processing document and save it as "Notes for Paper on [subject
of paper]." For each source that you find, include the topic covered in
the source, a complete bibliography entry for the source, a unique source
number, and a note from the source. Make sure to place quotation marks
around any material in your notes that you pick up verbatim from a source.
Here is an example of a note card entry:
A sample note card
| 1 –Source number
Architecture as Imitation of Natural Forms –Subject
of note
Scully, Vincent. Architecture: The Natural and the
Manmade. New
York: St. Martins, 1991. –Bibliography
entry
“The architectural principle at work in these individual dwellings,
therefore, is that of the imitation of natural forms by human beings who
seek thereby to fit themselves safely into nature’s order.” P. 5.
–Note, with page number
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After you have gathered information for your paper from electronic and
printed sources, and after you have recorded your "note cards" in a notes
document, you can create an outline for your paper. Most word-processing
programs these days have outlining modes that can make creating a formal
outline quite easy. Most writers, however, do not create formal outlines.
Instead, they make use of informal outlines consisting of major headings
and subheadings, as follows:
Mesopotamian Cultures
--Sumeria
--Babylonia
--Assyria
Open a new word-processing document and label it "Outline with Notes."
In this document, create an informal outline for your paper. Then, open
your notes page alongside the informal outline and cut and paste appropriate
notes into the spaces in the informal outline to which they apply. Include
the source numbers from your note cards after each note.
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After you have created the "Outline with Notes" document, you are ready
to begin drafting. You may find that you need to do some additional research
and to create more "note cards" to fill in blanks in your outline.
Drafting Your Paper
To create a rough draft of your paper, simply open the "Outline with Notes"
document and save it as "Draft 1." Then, begin with any section of the
document. Read the outline heading and the corresponding notes and turn
these into paragraphs. Incorporate materials from your notes into your
paragraphs, either as paraphrases or as quotations. Make sure to add, after
any paraphrased or quoted material, the source number in parentheses, like
this: (1). Later, when you have completed your final draft, you will use
these source numbers to prepare the documentation for your paper. As you
finish paragraphs for your paper, you can delete the outline headings and
the source notes.
Revising Your Paper
After you have completed work on "Draft 1," you are ready to begin revising
the paper. Read the paper through entirely to check for logical organization,
accuracy, thoroughness of coverage, gracefulness, appropriateness to your
audience, and other content-related issues, but do not worry at this point
about matters of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or grammar. You
can take care of such matters later.
Use the copy, cut, and paste features of your word processor to try
out different arrangements of your ideas. If you make major changes, save
your successive drafts as "Draft 2," "Draft 3," and so on, so that if you
need to, you can go back to a previous version. This ability to save successive
drafts leaves you free to experiment as much as you like with the organization
of the material in the paper.
Preparing the Documentation
Open your "Notes for Paper on . . ." file and the final revised version
of your paper and resize them so that they are side by side on your screen.
Replace each source number in parentheses with a proper parenthetical documentation
note. A typical note will look like this:
The Mesopotamian ziggurat is an imitation mountain created according
to "The architectural principle . . . of the imitation of natural forms
by human beings who seek thereby to fit themselves safely into nature's
order" (Scully, 1991).
After entering a parenthetical documentation note, skip to the end of your
paper and, under the centered heading "Notes," add a complete bibliography
entry for the source. You can simply copy this note from your "Notes for
Paper on . . ." file and paste it into your final draft. Use the hanging
indent and sort features of your word-processing program to indent the
bibliography entries correctly and to sort them into alphabetical order.
Proofing Your Paper
Most word-processing programs today have powerful tools for proofreading,
including spell checkers, grammar checkers, thesauruses, and, often, formatting
wizards. Use these to check your spelling, grammar, usage, and mechanics.
Spell checkers work very well and should be run on any document that you
plan to send to others. Grammar checkers, on the other hand, tend to be
overzealous, marking items for correction that are not, in fact, incorrect.
That's because the language is much more complicated than the grammar checkers
are. Therefore, use caution in applying suggestions for corrections given
by grammar checkers. Most word processors contain excellent Find and Replace
features that can be used to change a recurring element in a document.
They also contain thesauruses that will let you find the right word to
replace one that is not vivid or precise. After checking your spelling
and grammar online, print a hard copy and check it again. Research has
shown that people catch more proofreading errors on hard copy than they
do when proofing on screen, so a hard copy check is always a good idea.
In any case, it is essential that you read your copy through carefully.
Spell checkers are no substitute for old-fashioned proofreading.
Formatting Your Paper for Publication
Word-processing programs contain powerful tools for formatting documents.
These tools will enable you to choose your fonts, specify margin sizes,
automatically format headings, create title pages, boldface and italicize,
create bulleted lists, and much, much more. Be cautious with formatting,
however. It is generally a bad idea, from a design perspective, to use
more than two fonts (one for text and one for headings) in a document,
and fonts should be standard serif or sans serif faces, not script or display
faces that tend to be unreadable for long documents. Follow standard conventions
for margin sizes, indention of long quotations, placement of headings,
and so on. Information on these conventions can be found in any good style
manual for papers and reports, such as the MLA Style Manual. If
you are preparing the paper for a class, make sure to follow the manuscript
and documentation formats preferred by your instructor.
Print the final version of your document on standard 8 1/2-x-11-inch,
unlined, white paper, and proof it one last time before giving it to others.
Save your files on a backup disk in case you need to revisit them in the
future.
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