The User-Friendly Fallacy

Abstract

Why is it, after more than seven years of imaginative and innovative work by Hugh Burns, Helen Schwartz, Valerie Arms, Cynthia Selfe, William Wresch, and Dawn and Raymond Rodrigues, computer-supported writing instruction in labs and classrooms across the country remains dominated by grammar drill, text analysis, and word processing? Whatever the merits of such computer support, if they continue to signify in the popular imagination all that a computer can do, then the computer in writing instruction is doomed to being labeled superficial, remedial, and reductive. It will be relegated to the catch-up curriculum, or paraded in showcase research labs which produce data and case studies but do little of what the computer should be best at, providing powerful, self-paced writing instruction across the educational spectrum and at every ability level. There is, however, a type of software pioneered by Hugh Burns at the University of Texas in 1979 which can provide the student writer a powerful stimulation to creativity and originality, and if properly developed and applied, may demonstrate even to the hard-core skeptic that microcomputers can do much more than simply cosmeticize text or drill students in the avoidance of comma splices. But this type of software has remained in a prolonged infancy, largely as a result of an attitude which I have termed the UserFriendly Fallacy. The User-Friendly Fallacy stipulates that for a computer to provide truly significant help to the student writer, it must (1) produce the illusion of actual person-to-person interaction, and (2) evaluate the content and quality of student input. Without these capabilities, according to critics like Robert Hertz, computer-assisted instruction's role seems limited to those facets of composition that are clearly delineated, such as sentence structure or the mechanics of grammar usage (62-64). The day will come, of course, when computers will be able to employ natural language ability in order to replicate human behavior and judge to some degree the meaning and quality of inputted text. That day will not be soon,