Like all floods, it started with a single drop: early in 1983, Peter McWilliams’ The Word Processing Book (Prelude) appeared. This half humorous, half serious how-to book was followed by Wil­liam Zinsser’s narrative-heavy Writing with a Word Processor (Harper & Row), a breakaway bestseller. The floodgates were then open, and riding the crest was the heavily and favorably reviewed Writing in the Computer Age by Fluegelman and Hewes (Anchor), an “instant classic” (one reviewer said) because of the thoroughness and grace with which it covered its topic. Now the floodplain is filling with how-to’s, software-evaluation compendia, technical tomes—and the textbook tributary has not yet begun to swell. This review will direct attention to one seminal text and comment briefly upon the impact of wordprocessing, a phenomena with which many of us in the profession are learning to live very comfortably.

Helen Schwartz’s book¹ is fully as much a one could hope for in the first course-usable textbook of its type from a practicing teacher! researcher (who has published on CAT and designed her own courseware). When I say course-usable I have in mind my own courses, for instance, taught in part with microcomputers and wordprocessing software: Advanced Composition and Technical Communication. The book is tailor-made for the instructor and the student ready to take their tandem leap—if properly funded for such a leap, of course—into the computer age. Schwartz has taken the best recommendations of recent composition studies and applied them to real-life writing and wordprocessing in a sensible, process-oriented classroom text. I think I speak for at least the computer-using segment of our profession when I say Brava!

Most saliently, the book is a model of modem text design. While there is a lot jammed into its nearly 400 pages (including dozens of illustrations, many of on-screen texts and commands), everything is in its place and clearly labeled. This feature is especially commendable in a book which has to do, even tangentially, with computer technology. Beyond that, it is as inclusive as it needs to be without going into distracting or misplaced detail on any single aspect of either com­position or wordprocessing. For example, in the section entitled “De­fining the Writing Situation,” the student’s attention is directed to the necessity of audience-awareness in defining a situation, and the text provides several printout-style examples showing how it is achieved. Along the way the reader encounters helpful hints and activities that can be done either in pencil or at a keyboard, but at no time does the reader feel overloaded; besides, more on audience, if it is needed, appears in a later chapter. There is some repetition of information, but always with variation appropriate to context.

The book’s ten major sections range from the introductory “What Is Interactive Writing?” to “Organizing Ideas” (Section 5) to the final section, as necessary as the others in the new scheme of things, “Researching with Data Bases.” Each of these sections is subdivided into from two to seven subsections, with the subsections being further divided into short, orderly treatments of topics ranging from “Heuristics” to “Readable Phrasing.” Throughout, Schwartz unobtrusively incorporates her knowledge of the latest in theory and research, and she scatters names like Burke and Pike (and Kubler-Ross and Asimov) among references to such software items as THINKTANK and WANDAH. She knows, too, that the profession, like any computerizing agency, finds itself upon a Tower of Babel of hardware operating systems. Wisely, the book is not biased toward any system or wordprocessing software; in fact, the author leaves sufficient space at appropriate points in the text for a student to enter the commands specific to his or her equipment.

Although to utilize the book fully one needs access to a termi­nal-printer set-up of some sort, the main focus is where it ought to be in any book on how to write—on the writing itself. The overall orientation is, as I have implied, toward process-based composition instruction, yet the text is intended to be useful for a variety of purposes and methodologies. As Schwartz states in her preface,

Even though I have yet to use the text in a classroom, just from its layout I can see (and appreciate) its potential flexibility.

Most chapters end with suggested writing topics and a short bibliography of further readings. At all times one is aware of the shaping touch of Professor Schwartz, who can be facilely anecdotal but who is also extraordinarily well informed on a variety of topics, knows what high-tech writing is all about, and can convey her ideas in a systematic, readable manner. Two informative appendices, one constituting an entire “case for composition” on the 1981 Pulitzer Prize hoax, round out a book that is halfway between rhetoric and hand­book, and all the way into the computer age with its notion of “interactive writing.” Still, one wonders just how ready the market is for such a work, especially considering how few composition classes are currently taught with wordprocessing equipment.

There is an implicit lesson here. The computer revolution is not so much a revolution now as a way of life. Those of us who have been lucky enough to find the support, particularly the funding, to computerize our composition classes have been reporting the encouraging results in a variety of journals lately. The basic message seems to be that composing at a terminal somehow liberates students from writing and idea blocks. The human short-term memory is apparently not overtaxed because of the sheer speed with which one can get words up on the screen; nor is the task of thoughtful revision, a sine qua non of good writing at any level, seen as burdensome any longer. The movement toward computerized writing will not stop, and by working together to keep it headed in the right direction we can gain and keep control of how it affects our classes and our profession. The bottom-line beneficiaries will be the students we teach, who need both our expertise and our machines.

Or one could put it in the words of another Schwartz, Law­rence, who computerized his composition classes at Montclair State College and found that, yes, the students could write and learn better (or at least less painfully, more eagerly) at a microcomputer keyboard, all other variables being as nearly equal as possible. Writing in Educational Technology (June 1983), Lawrence Schwartz said that he expects “access to these powerful instruments to end the so-called ‘crisis’ in basic writing skills.” Those of us who have worked with these instruments under the right conditions and with sound teaching strategies also expect such dramatic results—over the long run. Breakthrough books like Helen Schwartz’s can only move the program along.