Some Effects of the Macintosh on Technical Writing Assignments  

This paper reports on a study examining writing on the Apple Macintosh and on paper by upper-level students who are novice writers but computer-literate. To gain a better understanding of writing behaviors using the Macintosh versus using pen and paper, we sought to answer two questions: 1) Do these writers revise differently, in terms of the number and types of revisions, when using the Macintosh? 2) Do they produce higher-quality texts on the Macintosh? In addition, we sought to determine whether this population would produce longer texts on the computer than they did with paper and pencil techniques, as previous studies showed with other populations.

Friedlander, Alexander and Mike Markel. Computers and Composition (1990). Articles>Software>Operating Systems>Macintosh