This paper addresses the question of how grammar checkers may help or hinder students by analyzing the performance of the Microsoft Word 97's Grammar Checker at flagging and explaining errors frequently made by college students. Thousands of sentences were fed into the program. Results indicate that it caught some of the errors reliably (e.g.…

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)

A study of the effects of a typing tutor plus a computer-based word processor versus paper and pencil on the writing of six elementary students with behavioral disorders found small improvements in capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and complete sentences attributable to either method, though story length increased for three of six students…