For the vast majority of the 20th century the three essential pieces of office equipment were the telephone, the typewriter, and the filing cabinet. The last decade of the 20th century saw this list change to the telephone, the computer, and the laser printer. Typewriters have now all but vanished from most offices, replaced by computers running word processors and inexpensive high-quality laser printers.
A word processor, such as Microsoft Word, is a computer program that can be used for typing and editing documents. In addition to supporting basic text entry, most word processors include spell checking and grammar checking tools, numerous formatting options, fonts, and page layout features, plus the ability to include images and create simple drawings and graphics.
Word processors were able to so quickly replace typewriters because of their many advantages. Typewriters were designed for one purpose, typing documents. Word processors on the other hand, are usually just programs running on general-purpose personal computers. This arrangement is much more flexible since the computer can be used for many things other than typing, like accessing a database or performing spreadsheet calculations.
Word processors also make the process of correcting typographical errors much easier than with a typewriter. On a typewriter, once a key had been struck, the character was actually printed on paper. While it was reasonably easy to correct simple mistakes on a good quality typewriter, even those often left some traces of the original error. More substantial corrections, such as inserting a missing word, sentence, or paragraph, were impractical, even on the best typewriters.
In addition to the increased flexibility and improved ability to correct mistakes, word processors allow documents to be automatically formatted in various styles, such as a memo, letter, or report. Word processors can also automatically generate page numbers, place footnotes at the bottom of a page and number them, create indices, tables of content, and lists of figures; plus a host of similar operations that make creating large documents, such as a book, much easier to do.
Another important feature of word processors are their ability to perform spell checking. Spell checking is possible because a dictionary is included with the word processing program. When a document is spell checked the computer compares every word in the document against the entries in its dictionary. Words that appear in the document but not in the dictionary are flagged as possibly incorrect. For each of these possibly misspelled words, the word processor can present a list of one or more suggested corrections. This list consists of dictionary words that are “similar” to the unmatched word that appears in the document.
For example, when I type “incomptable” my word processor marks it as incorrect, using a red underline, and offers two suggestions: “incomputable” and “incompatible”. Most of the time the word you meant to type is listed among the suggestions. But this is not always the case.
Occasionally, word processors will mark a correct, but uncommon, word as “incorrect”. For example when I type the word “tribble” my word processor marks it as misspelled and offers the following suggestions: (1) treble, (2) dribble, (3) gribble, (4) terrible, and (5) trebled. As any fan of the original Star Trek series can tell you, there is nothing wrong with the word “tribble”. Tribbles are cute furry little creatures that breed prodigiously. However, since “tribble” is not a very common word, it is not included in the standard dictionary that comes with my word processor. If I intended to use this word frequently, I could add it to my word processor’s dictionary so that it could recognize the word.
Towards the end of the 1990’s popular word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, began augmenting their traditional spell checking tools with an “autocorrect” feature. Autocorrect monitors the user’s keystrokes and automatically corrects a large number of common typographical errors. For example, Microsoft Word automatically changes the characters “teh” to the word “the” immediately after the spacebar is hit following the “h”.
Just as word processors may sometimes mark a correct word as “incorrect”, they may also occasionally fail to mark a word that is incorrect. The most common reason for this is that the word is properly spelled but improperly used. For example, if I type the sentence:
“You must finish you dinner.”
when I meant to type:
“You must finish your dinner.”
my word processor does not complain. It fails to realize that the second “you” should in fact be “your”. The sentence “Hay there.” passes muster as well, even though most people immediately realize that “Hey there.” is what was meant.
My word processor does somewhat better on the following sentence:
“There leaving there keys over their.”
which should be:
“They’re leaving their keys over there.”
The program points out a potential problem with the first “there” (by underlining it in green). If I take the program’s suggestion of “They’re”, it then points out a problem with the second “there”. If I also take the program’s suggestion of “their” for that word, it then points out a problem with the final word in the sentence and offers “there” as an alternative.
These kinds of errors (the ones that show up as green underlines in Microsoft Word) are generated by the word processor’s grammar check feature. Grammar checkers can sometimes catch improper word usage errors, but their advice is usually less reliable than the advice offered by spell checkers.
Although grammar checkers are useful and their capabilities are improving,[3] they are unlikely to become as reliable as spell checkers anytime soon. The reason has to do with the fact that word processors have no understanding of the meaning of the words being typed. Instead, grammar checkers use a collection of simple rules, like the kind you studied in high school, together with information on the parts of speech to which individual words can belong. Such systems can catch some simple errors, like subject verb number agreement, but they miss many other errors, and occasionally mark grammatically correct sentences as incorrect.
Footnotes
[3] For example, the grammar checker used by Word ’95 could not handle the “They’re leaving their keys over there.” example properly, while the grammar checker included with Word 2000 can.