McAllister, Carole, and Richard Louth. “The Effect of Word Processing on the Quality of Basic Writers’ Revisions.” Jstor. Southeastern Louisiana University, Dec. 1988. Web. 22 Nov. 2014.

This article is based on a study across three college professor’s classes of a combined 102 students. The authors, Carole McAllister and Richard Louth, created and executed the study of the students and analyzed the results. The purpose of the study was to test out the hypothesis that a word processor improves a student’s ability to revise his/her paper. In the end the author claimed that the word processor improved a student’s ability to revise his/her work. The author’s intended audience is other researcher’s interested in word processor’s as well as student’s and teacher’s. The article is quite factual and includes many numbers and deviations that support the findings so there is no slant in the article.

The article has a lot of concrete evidence for its findings and supports its claim very well. At the end of the article, the authors qualify their findings in that the word processor might just create a change in mindset of the students rather than actually help with the writing. I viewed this as a strength of the article to know when to step back and explain to the reader the possible faults with your work. The weakness of the article was, as the author’s claimed, that they did not investigate why the word processor led to an increase in effectiveness for student’s revisions. The research in this article greatly helps our thesis because it shows the benefits of a word processor. Therefore, the article is extremely relevant to our paper and I can see us using the statistics and claims from this article in our final paper.