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Aucbvax.2339 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Sat Jul 18 02:21:53 1981 Editing >From ELLEN@MIT-MC Sat Jul 18 02:14:55 1981 As is often my occupation, I am indoctrinating a new user to EMACS. She (factual, please do not accuse me of sexism) asked after a couple of hours of EMACS-power, if it would be possible for "it" ("The Computer", i.e. a program) to warn her while she is typing a text, that she has used the same word repeatedly.

I pointed out to her that (a) many words in English repeat because they are common (parts of the verb to be for instance) (b) some words need to repeat, like "pathologist" because of the technical nature of the text, and thus to chose between "facts" and "data" in discourse might be hard, or to warn her that in the last two paragraphs the word "experimental" had repeated 6 times might not work. However, her problem is understandable in English terms: she is typing up notes for a doctor. He wants to write "well", which to him means not to repeat himself, which means not using the same word over and over again, unless it is a technical term (a distinction he may recognize but I am not sure). His hard- working secretary is trying to help him, and now that she knows how much EMACS can help her in just the typing up of his notes, she is asking for what she sees as the next step, a program to help her with editorial corrections... (i.e. "How many times have I used "practical"... should I get out the thesaurus?" -- next step of course is to provide the thesaurus, but let's concentrate on repetition of non-common but non-technical words in text).

Any thoughts on this?

And my comment, to everybody, "BUG-EMACS", and "Work Stations": See, secretaries are NOT a sub-species of homo-sapiens, they in fact often request the most sophisticated features from their editors, justifiers, work stations, etc. In fact, some of them are even willing to work on programming the features they want (they do know the specifications, after all!).

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