Date: Sat, 01 Apr 1995 20:35:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Laurie Cubbison <ENGCUBBI-AT-ACS.EKU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Posture


technology-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu  1-APR-1995 writes:

>
>
>
>I also wrote all the way through college without revision, and still use 
>the skills I necessarily developed to do that. But you and I are 
>privileged, and grammar checkers are often employed by people who are in 
>remedial, etc. and who can emerge at the other end functionally 
>illiterate. Now at one point, I wouldn't think that bad, but for two 
>reasons it is - literacy is more necessary than ever given the current 
>political process; literacy is necessary for almost any sort of work at 
>this point, especially since manual labor, outside of agriculture, is on 
>the decrease here.
>
>Alan
>
>
>     --- from list technology-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

The trouble with grammar checkers and spell checkers for the remedial 
students I teach is that their grammar and vocabulary are so poor that 
they often don't recognize the wrong answers the checker may give them. 
Presented with a list of alternative words by Word Perfect or some other 
program, they can't recognize the word they want from the options, 
resulting in some of the most bizarre attempts at 
communication--sentences in which a word I took my student to mean to be 
'problems' was turned by his poor vocabulary skills and the spell 
checker into 'preambles' with him unable to recognize the difference 
between the two. Similar errors result from grammar checkers, which may 
be unable to recognize the period following 'Martin Luther King Jr.' as 
punctuation that does not end a sentence.

The trouble with spelling and grammar checkers is that they take a 
certain level of literacy to get any good out of them.

Laurie Cubbison



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