Path: utzoo!censor!geac!lethe!yunexus!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tekgen!brucec
From: brucec@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Bruce Cheney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Us Mac Yoosers R Stoopid
Keywords: Mac Bashing
Message-ID: <7285@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM>
Date: 5 Feb 91 17:36:39 GMT
Article-I.D.: tekgen.7285
Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or.
Lines: 93


The following appeared in the paper this Sunday. These guys must
be DOS-heads, because of their tone and reference to Mac software
that I certainly haven't heard of and can't find in any magazine.
A typo? Did they mean Word, or MacWrite, or WriteNow? Has any one
seen this study? Are copies available from IBM or Compaq?

The Register-Guard
Eugene Oregon
Sunday, February 3, 1991

Study Shows MS-DOS users do better in college
By T.R. Reid and Brit Hume

Now that the Macintosh and MS-DOS PCs are looking more and more alike, 
there's less fire in the famous running controversy over which system 
is better.  The endless arguments between IBM devotees and MacFanatics 
that provided so much entertainment during the 1980s is fading away.
But a recent salvo in that familiar war has sparked major new controversy 
between the Mac and MS-DOS camps.
The unlikely spark came from an article in a scholarly publication 
called Academic Computing.  In the pages of that august journal, Dr. Marcia 
Peoples Halio, an English professor at the University of Delaware, 
reported on a five-year study in which she compared the written quality 
of student papers produced on Macintosh and MS-DOS machines.
You can see what's coming, can't you?  Can't you just guess why this dry 
academic survey swept through the PC community like a tidal wave?
Here's why: Dr. Halio concluded that students writing their papers 
on IBM and similar MS-DOS computers made fewer spelling errors and earned 
higher grades, on the average, than students who used the Macintosh.
Dr. Halio, who helps run the college's writing program, had a perfect 
laboratory for such a study. Since 1985, the university has given a 
standard freshman writing course in which students can use either a Macintosh 
or a DOS machine.  Generally, the Mac users write with WordWrite and 
the DOS people use WordPerfect.
The professor started noticing and interesting pattern. Then she worked 
through a big pile of back papers to draw her conclusions.
The Halio study says that DOS users in the freshman writing class turned in 
papers with an average "readability scale" of grade 12.1 - that is, they 
wrote college-level papers.  Applying the same measure - the "Kincaid 
Scale" - to Mac-written papers, the average grade level was a little below 
eighth grade.
The report also says that DOS users were more apt to write about "serious" 
issues, such as war, pollution, teen pregnancy, than the Mac cohort, who 
wrote about such weighty topics as fast food.
If that doesn't get your blood running, Mac users, how about this.  Students 
who wrote on IBMs and clones made about four spelling errors per paper, 
while the Mac user rang up and average of not 4, not 8,  not 12, but 15 
spelling errors on each assignment.
The professor, serious scholar that she is, didn't rush to any conclusions 
about these findings, but we'll dive right into the analysis.
One possible explanation could be that the Macintosh is a less efficient 
word-processing tool than the IBM-PC.  If so, that might mean that Mac users 
have to concentrate so much on the machine that they can't give sufficient 
time to the message.
But that conclusion is ridiculous on its face.  The Macintosh is a wonderful 
computer for word processing.  Heck, almost any Mac word-processing software
is easier to use the uninviting WordPerfect, the most commonly used DOS 
word-processing program.
No, if there's any validity to the Delaware findings, the explanation 
probably lies not with the computers but with the people using them.  What 
the professors have found may be just one more manifestation of a truth 
universally acknowledged among PC buffs: Mac people are different from 
DOS people.
Mac users, by and large, are free spirits - artistic types, rebels, the 
kind of folks who don't want to be bound by stodgy old rules or 
plain-Jane mechanisms.
It's hardly surprising that such people would eschew spelling rules or take 
some liberties with conventional grammar.  Heck, they already broke with 
conventional, button-down ways of doing things when they opted for the 
friendly little "computer for the rest of us."
IBM people, in contrast, are no-nonsense types. They're the three-piece-suit 
crowd, willing and indeed eager to conform to the established ways of the 
world.  Of course they spell words right in their essays. Doing things 
right is important: That's why they bought the "right" kind of computer 
in the first place.
To which the only appropriate response is, "Viva la difference!"  It's 
differences like these that make the world go round. How dull things would 
be if we had only one type of personal computer for a country made 
of many different types of people.
But that brings us back to our opening observation. With Mac producing 
IBM-like modular color PCs and IBM moving rapidly toward a Mac-like 
user-friendly interface, we may be losing the satisfying differences 
among PC families.
And that raises the key question.  When every DOS-PC runs just like a 
Macintosh, and every Mac looks like an IBM-PC, what will happen to those 
freshman papers?  Will the Macintosh users bring their grades up, or will 
the DOS types sink to the error-prone level of their Mac-owning classmates.

*** end of article ****

bruce:
{ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4,allegra,uw-beaver}!tektronix!tekgen!brucec