"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it" (as quoted in McGee and Ericsson pg. 453). This is certainly true of my experience with MSWORD for all practical purposes. In fact, most of the time I have spent working with the program has been spent wishing that it was more invisible so that I could more effectively ignore it! However, such an approach, trying to ignore the program myself because of all of its annoying prescriptions and inconsistencies while never addressing those same issues in class (except to warn the students not to settle for polishing via computer on a final draft) is not a particularly effective way of teaching writing.
While the program is incessantly annoying to me as an informed user who encounters the program primarily in its most annoyingly prescriptivist or glaringly inaccurate moments ("long-sentence," anyone?), I have for the most part ignored it as a minor inconvenience except when its autoformatting kicks in in strange - and strangely stubborn - ways (never an issue with essay writing, but a real pain in the butt for creating anything not in a straight, traditional prose format). As such, the most involvement I've given the darn thing when teaching writing is to warn students not to rely on it too heavily because it is often inaccurate. Even spell checker - which should be much easier and therefore more effective I would think - fails to offer accurate options with misspelled words far more often than it provides correct choices. While I have made my students aware of these failings, I have failed them myself by not considering the impact of this program on the writing process. The technology, while not invisible to me (I wish it were!) as a user, was invisible to me as a teacher. I had never considered its impact on writing or the teaching of writing beyond the situations/manners outlined above.
In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense to tell the students to turn the darned thing off, especially during drafting stages. (I'll have to get a student to show me how this is done so that I can inform the 1 - 2% of students who might actually rely on me to know something about computers.) I heartily agree with Mike Rose (and I believe Elbow argues the same point) that bringing in grammar too early in the process contributes to blocking our students. If the lines are popping up all over the place telling the students that they are messing up, that they're in error right from the get go, how can they ever get a draft out to reach the polishing stage that MSWORD is trying to assist them with? The appearance of red and green lines on the page as a student is in the initial phases of composition is, I believe, a pernicious thing. It contributes actively to the worst fears of our students by disciplining them in the area most of them are least confident, often before a full sentence - let alone a full paragraph - is completed (McGee/Ericsson 464).
To me, this attack on process is the primary evil of the program. The presentation of traditional rules of grammar/usage/style may even be a blessing, if it arrives at the appropriate time. I disagree to an extent with the unnamed research cited on the usefullness of direct grammar instruction as I believe that taught correctly the different aspects of grammar provide the students with writing tools for varied expression.
To make a culturally relevant argument, the presentation of the various grammars and their varying degrees of acceptance with various audiences is nice theoretically, but I don't think that a long discussion of such matters is important for the teaching of writing. The sociopolitical implications may be important to the students on a theoretical level eventually, but on a practical level the discussion of the social underpinnings will not break them into the academic conversation, prepare them as writers for college and academic discourse, nor prepare them to function in the language of privilege and power. If the traditional grammar underlies the existing power structure and I want to provide my students access to that structure through as many tools as possible, (and I DO) than it is more important to help them effectively use the language acceptable in that environment than it is to teach them the politics of it. That can come later.
All of this is to say that I have no inherent objection to a computerized assistant to my students' grammar and usage. In fact I would find it a useful tool under the following conditions:
1. Students should be instructed/encouraged to turn it off until they are ready to work on a polishing draft.
2. Students are sufficiently informed in the subject to understand what the computer is suggesting and why, and/or, even better, students have enough knowledge of the subject to make informed decisions about whether or not to accept the programs suggestions in a given instance.
3. The program was far more accurate a far greater percentage of the time than the current program is.
Until we get such a program, my intention, newly formed upon the reading of this article, is to have my students turn the darn thing off.
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"It contributes actively to the worst fears of our students by disciplining them in the area most of them are least confident, often before a full sentence - let alone a full paragraph - is completed," and you are so correct. It never occurred to me that I should turn it off while writing fiction stories, because my narrative prose is much different (as you also say) from my academic prose. I know how to "turn the darned thing off," but it never occurred to me to do so, I have become so stupidly dependent on it's ridiculous opinion of my writing!
ReplyDeleteI guess I hesitate to agree that students should be rigorously informed of what the computer is doing wrong, and the only reason I would argue is because I am planning to teach college, and the time with college students is about 2/5ths of what it is in high school, and I would also think that they should have a pretty good grasp of the usefulness and dis-usefulness of the grammar-checker and, even moreso, the spell checker. I think that our editing marks will serve to help them along in deciphering what is and isn't useful in the checker, because I fully believe that the more conscious students will learn no matter how we teach them, and the less conscious ones will struggle, also no matter what. I always encourage people to read things out loud before turning something in. That's probably the most that can be done. But, yes, turn it off until the writer is ready to edit.