The role of colleagues and text-editing programs in improving text

This paper describes the suggestions for improvement made by nine colleagues about an article written by the author. These suggestions are placed in categories and examples of each are provided. The suggestions are then compared with those provided by a set of computer-based text-editing programs. The results suggest that both the contributions of humans and computers are limited in certain respects. Text-editing programs can deal well with textual issues (perhaps better than humans) but humans have prior knowledge and expertise about content which programs currently lack. An optimal approach would be to combine computer-based and human aids to writing and to explore further how computer-based programs can be made to match human skills.