Textual Processing, a Computerized Aid for the Writer, Editor, and Reader

Modern data processing equipment is explored for its usefulness in indexing, editing, and revising written documents. Incidental attention is given to a number of other textual-processing functions. Particular emphasis is given to possible uses of the computer to evaluate readability and to detect misspellings and a variety of other disallowed wordage. An experiment is reported in which 2000 abstracts from the technical literature were scanned for roundabout prepositional phrases. Counts of frequency of usage are reported, and four phrases were found to occur with particular frequency.