Dr. Hugh Burns

It was a real pleasure to have Dr. Burns in class last week. His low-key approach and thorough coverage of the history of rhetoric were very helpful to my understanding. Maybe I can catch up to all you brilliant and well-educated scholars . . .

I was especially interested in Dr. Burns’ rhetorical theories as they apply to computers and composition, and so I went looking for what some other people have said about the work Dr. Burns has been doing for so many years.

In his 1987 essay The User-Friendly Fallacy, Fred Kemp makes a compelling case for the type of research and programs that Hugh Burns was working on. Kemp addresses the User-Friendly Fallacy (the notion that computers must seem to behave like humans in order to have maximum efficiency in the teaching of writing) and exposes its limitations in helping student writers. He focuses on the pre-writing process, and holds up Dr. Burns’ TOPOI program as a model for helping students explore and define their topic and their argument, and thus improving their writing.

Kemp says, “. . . programming effort should concentrate on the nature of the thought prompts, the sequence and structuring of the prompts, and the response review mechanism. The writing instructor must direct the programmer, and instructional effectiveness must direct the technology . . . but people continue to expect that sophisticated instructional programs should, in some way, be more human, more like computerized teaching assistants complete with lively patter and foolproof electronic grading. As long as instructional software is judged in terms of the power of the technology - that is, on the basis of how human it makes the machine or how clever the program mechanism is - open-response software will continue to seem modest and unexceptional, especially in light of the powerful technical achievements of text analyzers and word processing.” (College Composition and Communication, Vol. 38, No. 1, February 1987. 32-39.)

I recall Dr. Burns talking about how the heuristic approach to writing software asks open-ended questions that are only designed to help the writer dig into the topic more thoroughly, and perhaps offer the writer opportunities for a creative look at existing information.

I see this as a way to teach writers how to think better, which is certain to lead to better writing. Dr. Burns says, and I agree, that writing software needs to be a lot more than a spelling and grammar checker. The above-mentioned article also shares the results of a small study conducted by the author. One of the findings was that students who participated the open-ended questioning process of pre-writing had, to some degree, internalized the process after a number of times. Then their writing improved permanently. I think that is a profound result, and worthy of further exploration.