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Nancy Grace is a professor of English and chair of the department at The College of Wooster, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1987. She is also director of the Program in Writing.

Grace received her bachelor’s degree from Otterbein College and her master’s and doctorate from The Ohio State University.

The author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature and The Tutor Handbook, Grace is currently researching women writers of The Beat Generation. She also specializes in composition and rhetoric, as well as 19th and 20th century American Literature, 20th century British Literature, and English as a second language.

Grace is a member of the Modern Language Association, The Association for Integrative Studies, The Hemingway Society, the Midwest Modern Language Association, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Past Q&A's

Technology’s Impact on the English Language
How has technology affected our use of the English language? How will it influence the way we read and write in the future? Nancy Grace, professor of English and director of writing at The College of Wooster, has seen how technology, specifically the Internet, has affected language, writing, and formal and informal communications firsthand, and she assesses the implications.

In what ways has the Internet affected the essays and papers that students’ produce for your courses?

Computer technology in general has made it much easier for student writers to draft and revise their work. It’s much simpler and speedier to type one’s ideas onto the screen, reread them, and then edit them. And since effective drafting, revision, and editing are crucial for the production of effective writing, having these capabilities allows instructors to require more drafting and revision. E-mail has also changed the way I, as an instructor, respond to my students’ writing. Rarely do I use pen or pencil – I’ll ask the writer to send me the draft via e-mail or as a document attachment, and then I will type my comments into the text itself, using brackets, underlining, and boldface type for different kinds of comments. In particular, I’ve found that the writers with the least self-confidence will send me e-mail questions. This technology has greatly increased the dialogue between my students and myself about their writing.

How do you incorporate the Internet in the courses that you teach?

I routinely have students use the Internet to access scholarly journal articles, hard-too-find or out-of-print texts, interviews, and many other kinds of information to give their writing more depth and texture. Many of my colleagues in other disciplines use the Internet to enable their students to access the most up-to-date information on topics relevant to the classroom. So much material that wasn’t previously available now is, so we can engage in discussions about how ideas are formed, and we can trace the evolution of ideas through their presentation on the Internet. These processes provide students with great experience in honing their critical thinking skills. Of course, students need experienced guides to do this, so the instructor is crucial in terms of helping students understand what to do with these texts and processes.

Has easy access to on-line information compromised the research process?

Easy access to information actually enhances the research process. I’d much rather be able to get as much information as possible rather than rely on fewer sources. And I don’t mind the fact that this plethora of information contains a lot of garbage as well. I love the mix because it represents the great democratic impulse of literacy: one doesn’t have to have a doctorate to comment intelligently and provocatively on a topic, and sometimes, those whom we expect to produce the most learned material, toss garbage at us. But a young thinker has to learn how to distinguish the garbage from the diamonds; it doesn’t come naturally. It’s not easy for an undergraduate to distinguish, say, between a scholarly article on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and a graduate student’s seminar paper on the same topic.

On the other hand, the accessibility of so much information has made it much easier for lazy or unethical writers to plagiarize. They can download papers in an instant, and they can access paper-writing services online. But the same technology has made it simple for us to identify plagiarized texts. We now have online subscription services that will identify the plagiarized document. College instructors are also finding that they have to be more creative about their assignments to avoid the easily plagiarized paper.

Will technology change the way we read books or do you think that there will always be a place for printed versions of literary materials?

I can’t say that there will "always" be what we now call printed texts, but they’ll be with us for a long time to come. We write and read printed texts differently than we do online texts, and thus far the human brain still prefers the processes associated with the printed text. We need to feel the paper, moving back and forth within a sequence of words using both sight and touch.

In what ways has the Internet technology affected newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals?

Many periodicals now publish both print and electronic versions. The electronic editions can be stored with extreme efficiency, which means that readers can access past issues without having to search through piles of old, crumbling copies or straining one’s eyesight trying to read blurring microfilm. Online editions of newspapers and other periodicals, though, are also designed differently from their print sibling. Editors and writers have had to adjust their layouts to communicate even more efficiently than ever before.

How has the informality of e-mail affected the grammar usage and spelling skills of students?

We don’t have sufficient research yet to answer this question with any certainty. We may receive e-mails with spelling and punctuation errors, but those do not necessarily provide evidence of the writer's lack of competence. It may well be that the writer, assuming the informal context for the e-mail, tolerates errors that he or she wouldn’t ordinarily tolerate in the construction of other texts. I’ve not observed in my students’ writing any patterns of errors that were not there 20 years ago in the pre e-mail era. I have noticed, however, that e-mail encourages writing by people, both young and old, not otherwise inclined to do so. In that respect, the technology is generating literacy, which is crucial for the long-term health of a democratic society.

Overall, has the Internet had a positive or negative effect on the reading, writing, and research skills of students?

It has certainly changed these processes to some extent. For some students, these changes have improved the quality of their work; for others, it hasn’t. What I find more interesting to think about, however, is the way we’ve responded to these changes. We have the ability to use technology to our advantage; it doesn’t have to control us.

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