NBC Today Show — Thursday, May 21, 1981: WRITER'S WORKBENCH

This morning, science correspondent Bob [Robert] Bazell has three guests, two scientists and then an expert on good grammar. It can improve your writing. Now, I want you to match up your mental image of what I've just said with what Bob is about to show you, both the scientists and the expert. Robert?

Good morning. One of the most important people at a newspaper, magazine, or a book publishing company is the copy editor, the person who checks grammar, punctuation, and writing style. This computer is designed to replace, or at least to help a copy editor, to rescue poorly written prose. With me are the two scientists who wrote the program for this computer, Dr. Nina MacDonald, Dr. Lorinda Cherry, both of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. We were just talking, Dr. MacDonald, you said that this will not replace the copy editor. Isn't that true?

No, we think that it's an aid to copy editing, but we don't see at the current time that it would replace it. There's always going to be, at least in the near future, a person doing the final editing, making certain that all the changes that should be made have been made.

Dr. Cherry, how long did it take the two of you to write this program, to get this thing to be able to do what it can do?

Well, all the programs have probably been worked on for perhaps two years.

We have a piece of writing which I will take responsibility for. I'm the person who wrote this. We're going to talk about the Today Show. Why don't you put that up on the computer, Dr. MacDonald, and we'll... And I'll read it to you. Now, this is, uh, Here on Today, we try to hopefully bring you the best in programming. perfection is the goal which everyone here is doing his best to achieve and furthermore we also want to alway be certain that the audience are satisfied. The manpower that runs this operation which is broadcast every morning truly always tries its its best, sort of. Now, that may be the sort of thing you've heard on the Today Show before, but why don't you have the computer check out that sentence and tell me what's wrong with it, if anything. We're running the program right now.

It's checking... here we go. Tell me what's happening when it happens.

This is the proofreading program. Right now it's checking the spelling. Here we go.

Now, it's listing words acheive, brodcast, operetion, perfecion. What does that tell you?

It's telling you that those words are incorrectly... Those words are not in its dictionary.

Oh, so you can't find them in the dictionary, so it tells you...

And it can't derive them from other words in its dictionary. So it's suggesting to you that you ought to consider making certain that they're correctly spelled. For instance, your name might come up if it were in that article, and it would be correctly spelled, but nevertheless not in the dictionary.

What else does it tell us?

It goes on and looks for punctuation errors. The first thing it does is count things like parentheses and quotes and expects those to be balanced. The next thing you see where it says old and new, you see a punctuation error that it's corrected. The old version, we didn't have the sentence that begins with perfection capitalized. In the second line, it corrects it.

Just like your grammar school English teacher, right?

Right.

All right, keep going. Let's see what else it does because there were a lot of other mistakes in there.

Okay, there was a it's that was printed twice in a row. It found that.

And then DICTION? What does that mean, diction?

DICTION looks for wordy or often misused phrases, and here it's found, hopefully, which is often misused.

That's a common mistake, I guess, you found in the people, in the writing that you've analyzed in the past?

Yes. It's found a possibly misused which that should probably be replaced with the word that.

And the thing that says beginning line 5, now that's kind of fascinating. That's a unique part of your program, isn't it? What does that tell you?

I want you to do that.

In the text file that's stored in the computer, the text, as we saw it, was stored in lines. And it's just telling you what line when you want to go back and make the changes. There's another program that we're not seeing here, which you can use to tell you what to substitute for these various words. For instance, here, manpower is one of our current sexist terms. We have another larger program called sexist, which will find all kinds of sexist words in the document and give you substitution. So, for instance, for manpower, it would suggest that you use staffing or personnel.

As when two women scientists write a program, it looks for sexist phrases. Thank you very much for being with us. Tom?

Thank you, Robert. We're still doing our best over here, sort of. And we'll be back with […] in just a few moments. This is Today on NBC.