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Aucbvax.2416 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Thu Jul 23 02:13:34 1981 Collected responses on writer's aids >From WorkS-REQUEST@MIT-AI Thu Jul 23 01:45:01 1981 ------------------------------

Date: 21 July 1981 10:16-EDT From: TRB at MIT-MC

Date: Sunday, 19 Jul 1981 18:28-PDT From: mike at RAND-UNIX Subject: writer's workbench manual pages

Andy Tannenbaum of Bell Labs has a good point: the manual pages of UNIX are (or at least were) proprietary. I have heard some arguements about why the manuals may now be in the public domain and, while they are good arguements, I would rather not be a test case.

Unless you have the wherewithal to defend yourself in a lawsuit against the Bell System, I suggest that you don't go about defending yourself with arguments that the UNIX documentation is in the public domain. A good argument isn't all that is needed in a lawsuit.

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Date: 21 Jul 1981 1028-PDT From: Buchanan at SUMEX-AIM Subject: (Response to message)

In response to the message sent Tuesday, 14 July 1981 22:34-EDT from JWALKER at BBNA

Years ago Bob Smith (then at IMSSS, now at Rutgers) put together a SAIL program that produced a frequency count of words in a text file. I began hacking at it and made several modifications that did some syntactic nitpicking about style. For example, sentence too long (also produces statistics overall) too many conjunctions in a sentence (or prepositions or adverbs, etc.) too many qualifiers in a sentence ("probably the X is almost possibly Y", etc.) objectionable phrases ("the data is", etc.)

There are endless lists of things that people nitpick about, but I found more and more exceptions to the nitpicking that the program was doing. That is, there are perfectly fine sentences that violate such simple stylistic checks. What the program needs is an under- standing of the text -- and an understanding of what the author is trying to say. At that point, I abandoned my recreational hacking on it. If you're interested I can resurrect the code (all in SAIL).

Bruce Buchanan

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Date: 22 July 1981 16:49-EDT From: Ellen at MIT-MC Subject: An amusing aside on "word use" and "writer's assistants"

Date: 22 July 1981 14:25-EDT From: Carl W. Hoffman <CWH MIT-MC AT>

From today's AP digest. Thought you might be amused.

PLAIN TALK: Word Processor Says 'Don't Use That Word'

WASHINGTON - If Steve Piekarec tries to type "viable" on his word processor, it stops and flashes "Don't Use This Word!" because that's one of the several dozen that Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldrige doesn't want to see. Slug AM-Baldrige-Plain Talk; new.

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End of collected responses on writer's aids *******************************************

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