They must be
word-processed or typed (for easy readability) and written in English by a student or potential student residing in North America.
Snail-mail, e-mail, faxes, contracts, term papers, homework, notes cut and pasted from Web pages, health information downloaded--an entire universe of information word-processed and made available online and in hard copy.
Reading and writing are different with word-processed text (you can't scroll when you read a book, and you don't have hyperlinks when you write with a pen or typewriter), and we are learning to think in electronic language.
The authors compared ESL learners' electronic mail and
word-processed writing and found no obvious differences between the two types of writing.
If you can create a
word-processed document and can think of the various background information, search strategies, and related data that users might wish to access, you can create a hypertext document.
Traditionally, Bowne would sign off on the final, hard-copy document, which was often typeset or
word-processed for readability.
Daiute (1986), in a study of nonhandicapped junior high students with extensive word-processing experience, found that the final drafts of
word-processed compositions were somewhat longer than handwritten compositions and contained fewer mechanical errors but were not significantly different in overall quality.
Results indicate no obvious differences between students' electronic mail and word-processed writing.
Nevertheless, a number of studies investigating asynchronous e-mail writing and word-processed writing have found that comparable writing, when done in both media, differs (Lepeintre, 1995; Murray, 1995, 1996; Yates & Orlikowski, 1993).
Lepeintre (1995), in a study with university students learning English as a second language, investigated the salience and deployment of textual features which Ochs (1979) associates with planned and unplanned speech.[2] She found that phrase structures were more common in the students' e-mail messages than in their in-class essays and suggests, similarly to Tella (1992), an investigation of cohesive lexical items and syntactic features as potential differentiators between students' e-mail and word-processed writing.
355) combined may be responsible for differences in cohesion and other syntactic features in e-mail and word-processed writing.