response to McGee and Eriksson

In this article, McGee and Ericsson revise the debate in composition between current-traditional rhetoric and those in the process movement. But whereas authors like Donald Stewart located the problems involved with the “doctrine of correctness” in uninformed teachers, the authors indentify a new direction from which the stultifying forces or conformity are coming—Microsoft Word. In their argument, the authors claim that Word is getting more “teaching opportunities” than English teachers. By virtue of its grammar and spell check options (always on in the default position), the Word program is insidiously inserting itself too early in the composing process and thereby short circuiting the uninhibited flow of thoughts on which good writing depends. Moreover, the grammar it teaches, based on algorithms and statistics, encourages a mechanistic view of language rather than an organic one.
Although I’m not impressed with the importance of this particular path in which technology is linked to an influence on language, it does serve to highlight the problematic nature of the relationship. Microsoft easily brings to mind the monopolistic tendency of corporations today: the wealth and global influence; its hegemonic influence that masks power as convenience; the way its products become so pervasive that the influence is unrecognized because it becomes so habitual.
Maybe if the authors linked the Word program to other ways technology is influencing language, their argument would be more convincing. As it stands though, it reminds me more of the facile way that the argument was shaped to define process against the education industry.