moodwatcher & other crutches. Was:someone/somebody, etc.

[Lynne Murphy]

Thomas Paikeday writes:

>I am shocked to hear that someone like Dr. Lynne Murphy would use the
>style checkers that come with word processors. Has anyone tried putting
>one of those Christmas messages from the Queen to a style test? Or a
>stream of consciousness from James Joyce? I think we should be free to
>write as we like. Remember "Style is the woman" (to be politically
>correct), etc.?

I don't set out to use the moodwatcher, as in putting the message
through the grammar checker on a word processor; I just leave
moodwatcher on, so that as I type things, chili peppers show up if
the "offensiveness" triggers are triggered.  I do this because I find
it terribly amusing to see how stupid the machine is.  Recently, I
was writing to a friend about the Ben Lee song "Cigarettes will Kill
You" and discovered that the words "kill you" together, even with
quote marks around them and an inanimate subject, merits the highest
number of chili peppers (three).  It's quite fun.

For more info on Eudora's moodwatcher and how silly it is, see:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/10/24/moodwatch/index.html

But, as for word processing grammar checkers, I do use them
sometimes, but I  customize them to look only for the things I care
about--i.e., the things I know I need to be careful about in my own
writing, like long series of phrases of the prepositional nature in
sentences that I write in  papers that I write for publishers of
academic publications.  And then there's my overuse of dummy
subjects.  It is therefore necessary for me to look for "there" and
"it is" in the editing stage, which is easy to do with a grammar
checker (or even a find-and-replace mechanism).  Once I work out
those kinds of problems on the computer, I print the document out and
give it a real editing.

Allison Smith's 1993 Illinois dissertation, _Revising process and
written product: a study of basic and skilled L1 English and ESL
Writers using computers_, shows that grammar checkers are useful to
skilled writers, and harmful to basic writers.  I was one of her
skilled L1 subjects--I hadn't used a grammar checker before, but
learning to use it for the study taught me how to use it to my
advantage.

>
>Another crutch for writers that I find quite useless is the thesaurus.
>No one is likely to have read the example that follows, so let me quote:
>"Often Joe may know that DIFFERENCES (in the sense of "disagreements")
>may be "settled," but wants to know what alternative words are
>available. A thesaurus gives "conclude, confirm, decide, determine,
>judge" as synonyms for SETTLE, but verbs that may be idiomatically used
>with DIFFERENCES are "compose, reconcile, resolve, set aside, thrash
>out."

There's lots of poor thesaurus use out there--especially by unskilled
writers trying to sound "academic".  I use mine constantly, but this
is in part because I write about synonymy, and always need new
examples.  I also use it for semantics exercises for my students
(give them a few pages of Roget's and have them determine the
semantic principles underlying its use of entries, paragraph breaks,
semicolons, and commas).  The thing I find the thesaurus most useful
for in writing is solving tip-of-the-tongue (or fingers) problems.
As in "I know there's a better word for this, and I think it starts
with a D--what is it?"  The problem for basic writers is that they
use the thesaurus to teach them words ("I don't want to use this word
again, better find another for the same thing") and don't understand
the differences among the words.

With three chili peppers,
Lynne
--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320