BOOK REVIEW
The New Writing Environment:
Writers at Work in a World of Technology

Sharples M. and der Geest Thea
Springer Verlag London Limited 1996
pp.260

The target journal of this review is Computers & Texts . It is the journal of the CTI (Centre for Textual Studies). It is edited by Michael Fraser and Sarah Porter. An on-line edition is available on:
http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/index.html

The Book review

>From the gathering of ideas through to the dissemination of the finished written product the activity of writing is changing. The computer is for many professional writers the medium which supports the whole writing process. The fact that these new writing environments are placed into workplaces with specific social and organisational characteristics is an aspect which at the present need to be considered. This aspect has been ignored by the cognitive oriented studies of writing, developed in the 1980s and, consequently, was never taken into account for the design of computer-based writing environments.
Existing writing environments are often ill-conceived and poorly used. The reason for this is their design, which is mainly based on commercial considerations and not on research of the user needs. Another reason is perhaps that software designers and writing researchers do not exchange between them their scientific findings and professional experiences in order to inform the design of writing environments. What is more, since writing systems became a significant and necessary part of most workplaces the notion of writing is defined by actors external to the writer. Such factors are, for example, information on the tasks performed by writers at work, the problems they encounter, and the kinds of documents they actually produce. This is the kind of knowledge that this book aspires to provide. This knowledge not only advances research on writing but also is useful for developing, using and evaluating writing systems.
The chapters are classified into four categories. The book begins with a useful introductory section in order to familiarise the reader with the existing research literature. In the following section, it is described how traditional workplace activities have considerably changed due to computers. New aspects for designing the new writing environments are developed in the third section. The book concludes with an estimation of future possibilities of writing systems.
The three chapters of the first section aim at expanding the notion of writing in the professional context. Der Geest strongly believes that the notion of writing is still expanding and that there are still a lot of things to explore about writing. So far the writing situation in which the text production has been taking place, was only seen as internal representation of the writing process. It is now important that factors external to the writers are taken into account. This first chapter is very useful for the reader because it challenges some of the established ideas in the cognitive psychological approach to writing and so enables the writer to understand the weaknesses in understanding writing.
Peter Medway describes one particular organisational context to highlight that the architect's practices, such as drawing sketches and plans and communicating with speech, influence the style of texts produced in an architect's office. Niels van der Maast, focus on the text as a product. In the case of writing policy papers for the government, the written output results from the well-structured negotiation between the parties involved. As it is not easy to discover the kinds of negotiation, a linguistic analysis may reveal "the multi vocal nature of the final text product".
The second section of chapters highlights how computer has changed the dynamics of the writing practice in the workplace. Changing a draft, reusing existing text, printing neat copies, retrieving information from on-line sources, collaborating with peers over long distance is becoming more and more simple in the new writing environments.
The first article by Pemberton, Gorman, Hartley and Power describes the development of an automating text generation tool for technical writers. Dagmar Knorr and Eva-Maria Jacobs discuss how the use of information technology is causing changes to information storing and retrieval by academic writers. In the last chapter of this section, Mike Sharples reports on the aspects of writing that can be supported by computers. The introduction of a new writing tool should be in harmony with the working practices of the writer. The findings of the research he carried out can serve as a checklist for designers evaluators and potential users of new technology for writing.

The third section is entitled "designing and developing the new writing environment". The three chapters in this section illustrate the possibilities for developing a new type of 'intelligent text processor' that can assist the writer with tedious but demanding tasks in writing. The tool described by Robert Dale and Shona Douglas carries out both the publishers's house style checking and grammar checking. Angela Glover and Graeme Hirst aim at developing a software that will "detect stylistic inconsistencies" across a document and suggest how these might be fixed. Agnes Kukuska-Hulme is working on indexing technical documents. Her study provides new principles for the design of software for indexing, matched to the needs of readers.// The final section talks about the future of writing environments. In this new era word processors are used as intelligent assistants in writing rather than over-complex typewriters, which is what commercial software has accomplished by releasing new versions of the same software package. The authors of this section describe interactive books, electronic libraries, on-line conferences and citizens' networks as the opportunities offered by multimedia and the Internet. They also highlight the problems of electronic text. Randall Woodland makes an interesting discussion on how the user is responsible for improving or destroying a text when she or he exploits the facilities of interactive text.

In conclusion, the computer has not just affected the process of writing, but is transforming the dynamics of the workplace. This is why it may be interesting for researchers as well as designers of computer-based writing environments to read this book.

Reviewd by Chryssafidou Evangelia