Discusses creativity and the teacher's importance in providing a context that encourages creative thought. Contrasts the author's success in teaching technical writing to college juniors and seniors with her experiences in using the Macintosh personal computer to teach first year composition. Notes that computers alone cannot stimulate creativity.…

Discusses Julia Kristeva's notion of text--the tension between the semiotic and the symbolic--and how the tension can be made visible through typeface variation and other shaping techniques possible with word-processing software. Shares ways the author encourages students in first-year English classes to explore possibilities for incorporating…

Explores how computer-assisted instruction (the ACCESS program) affected teaching goals and student responses in a freshman composition course. Finds that the quantity of student writing increased dramatically. Suggests that word processing offers new ways to provoke students' thoughts, encourage collaboration, and create a lively and interactive…

Examines the cognitive needs of novice writers and the role of word processors in the instruction of those writers. Reviews writing software in the categories of idea organizers, text analyzers, process prompters, communication packages, and artificially intelligent writing environments. Suggests future research areas. (SG)

Presents a research agenda for examining learners' and teachers' conceptions of computers, language, and writing and their relations to one another. Claims that theories of computer usage are connected to notions of language and writing. Provides a theoretical foundation for proceeding with needed research. (HB)

Compares course completion rates for students enrolled in sections of a required first-year writing course taught in a microcomputer laboratory/classroom to the course completion rates for pen-and-paper sections of the same course. Finds higher course completion rates for students enrolled in the microcomputer sections. (RS)

Assesses the utility of the analyses within the "Writer's Workbench" (an advanced text editor) range. Compares professional prose with first-year college student essays, using readability, sentence variety, sentence structure, parts of speech, vocabulary, and usage. (MS)

Reports a protocol study of a freshman composition student to examine how significant a problem it actually is to learn to operate a computer, how influential students' expectations about computers are, whether the use of a computer promoted the importance of invention strategies, and whether computers encourage revision. (MS)