%M J.VISLAN.84.17.4.380
%T Graphical Abstractions of Technical Documents
%A Perlman, Gary
%A Erickson, Thomas D.
%J Visible Language
%D 1983
%V 17
%N 4
%P 380-389
%K documentation user interfaces
%Y 1. Good Technical Writing
2. Traditional Aids: Summary/Predictive Statistics
3. A More General Approach: Abstractions
4. Two Graphical Abstraction Programs
    4.1 HEADINGS: Extract Section Headings
    4.2 PUNC: Punctuation Graphs of Sentences
    4.3 ABSTRACT: Combining the Two Programs
5. Comparison of Graphical and Numerical Techniques
    5.1 Graphical Representations of Readabilty
    5.2 Deficiencies of Numerical Techniques
        5.2.1 Sentential Analysis: Parenthetical Remarks
        5.2.1 Sentential Analysis: Lists
        5.2.3 Document Analysis: Headings and Paragraphs
6. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
%X Good technical writing demands clear and concise communication that allows
readers to skim documents for efficient access to information.  To aid
technical writers, many computer programs have been written to analyze writing
style in the hopes of improving writing standards.  The programs have tended to
be of a numerical statistical nature, summarizing a document or predicting its
``goodness.'' We feel that such programs hide more information is advisable to
help writers understand where and why their documents may have difficulties. 
After introducing the general concept of an abstraction of a document, we
describe the other side of the textual analysis coin: graphical displays of
text that enhance structural components of a document.  We describe two
programs for graphical textual analysis: one generates displays of the logical
structure of sections of a document; the other generates graphs of the
complexity of individual sentences.  While these programs are not the final
statement of abstract text analysis, they point to a new direction in which we
think writing aids should be going.

%M J.CACM.26.4.295
%T Composing letters with a simulated listening typewriter 
%A Gould, John D.
%A Conti, John
%A Hovanyecz, Todd
%J Communications of the ACM
%D 1983
%V 26
%N 4
%P 295-308   
%W http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2163.358100
%X With a listening typewriter, what an author says would be automatically
recognized and displayed in front of him or her. However, speech recognition is
not yet advanced enough to provide people with a reliable listening typewriter.
An aim of our experiments was to determine if an imperfect listening typewriter
would be useful for composing letters. Participants dictated letters, either in
isolated words or in consecutive word speech. They did this with simulations of
listening typewriters that recognized either a limited vocabulary (1000 or 5000
words)or an unlimited vocabulary. Results suggest that some versions, even upon
first using them, could be at least as good as traditional methods of
handwriting and dictating. Isolated word speech with large vocabularies may
provide the basis for a useful listening typewriter.

%T Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages
%A Shneiderman, Ben
%J IEEE Computer
%D 1983
%V 16
%N 8
%P 57-69
%W http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.1983.1654471