Computer-Based Writing: Navigating the Fluid Text

Abstract

Our ideas the role that revision plays in writing have changed considerably in recent years. Revision is no longer just editorial change; it is creative adaptation, part, as Nancy Sommers notes, of the process discovering meaning altogether.'I At the same time that such beliefs have broadened our theories, we have also been hearing how computer technology will affect our teaching praxis. Unfortunately, creativity and computer technology remain incompatible terms for many. Not a few people still assume that computerbased writing involves an inherent and damaging simplification writing activity. They believe that writers who adapt themselves to the demands a word processor do so at the cost individual creativity and freedom. The question to be raised is obvious. Can the computer be used, and used creatively, to support and augment our belief that writing and revision are interconnected creative activities? Looked at more closely, that question resolves itself into three concerns. First, are writing habits affected by using a word processor? Second, what do we discover about writing and especially about revision by observing both activities performed on a word processor? Finally, can anything learned by such observations be adapted to the teaching writing? My attempt to answer these questions required the cooperation writers who were willing to use word processors and text-editing programs,2 and I was lucky enough to find such people at Brown University. Two successful novelists, Robert Coover and Rosmarie Waldrop, were already interested in word-processing.3 In exchange for basic instruction on the Brown University Computing System, both writers agreed to make their manuscripts available as they composed and to discuss their writing habits and reactions. No attempt was made to measure the changes made by both writers as they composed their novels. Such objective data would have been small use given the size the sample. Both writers simply wrote, modifying their habits as much or as little as was needed.

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