Tim McGee and Patricia Ericsson: David versus a Goliath That Wasn’t Asking for It

Wow, two for two this week. While I think that McGee and Ericsson should closely read Matsuda’s work, I still found this article to thought provoking. As it has been pointed out again and again, technology is the giant that rules most of our lives. Its application cannot be avoided by anyone who participates in any interaction with the modern world. Educators are no different. They are, in fact, likely to be forced into contact by multiple forms of new technology because their job is partially based on passing their skills, knowledge, and experience, through the means mostly easily received by their students, and students are technology junkies.
However, McGee and Ericsson are not concerned with all technology; they are focused only on the possible effects of grammar and style checkers in Microsoft’s Word program or MSGC for short. This is an intriguing thought. It is, as they write, almost an invisible participant in our world. It outnumbers teachers by a staggering number, and it exists as an integral tool of the modern classroom.

The first of the authors’ questions I enjoyed dealt with the ubiquitous nature of the program and its possible link to the atrophy of many students’ ability to self correct. I agree that “we need to dig around in software before using it” (465). We need to share with our students that the program can be turned off in the beginning stages of writing. By simply turning on the computer and obeying the ever present green and red lines, our students are unplugging their minds from a part of the writing process. They are using the grammar checker as a crutch instead of a last resort.

The second question that struck me as important was that of the quality of MSGC. As their research went on to show, with little doubt, MSGC is flawed. The program cannot distinguish between several complicated style rules. The example that the authors cite is passive versus active voice. I must admit, I was skeptical that the MSGC was so inadequate in this area, so I tried it myself, and “Bill was left by the side of the road” does receive a prompting to rewrite as “The side of the road left Bill” (459). While this is a definite problem, I believe that even a student with limited knowledge of English should be able to tell that this is an error.

In contrast to my earlier approval of the article, I found a few ideas that I didn’t care for. While I was attempting a little empirical research with the passive voice, I came across a line that did not sit well with my inner cynic. The authors state that MSGC cannot “take into account current thinking on the grammar itself, good rhetorical theory, or pedagogical considerations” (459). I think what the authors meant was the program did not take into account THEIR ideas of grammar and “good” rhetorical theory. This idea was only reinforced by McGee and Ericsson’s comparison to authors of current-traditional rhetoric textbooks and the authors of MSGC: “Baugh and Cable remarked that ‘most of these books were the work of men with no special qualification for the thing they attempted to do’” (456). There is no support given to these claims, nor do McGee and Ericsson go beyond writing that “almost all of [the writers] are computational linguists” (457). If there is more to support these claims, this article would have been the place to voice them. What the authors are attempting to do here is exactly what Matsuda cautioned against; they are creating a history that supports the idea of a negative theory upon which to counter the new, positive theory. In other words, their comparison implies that writers with a background in composition structure will go out their way to avoid or are too inexperienced to focus on rhetoric or process based composition. I am not usually one to find myself defending multibillion dollar corporations, but I think that here Microsoft either hasn’t designed a sophisticated program yet that can perform the function of critically analyzing rhetorical structure, or Microsoft has not found a way to do so cheaply.