This fascinating book explores machines as authors of fiction, past, present, and future. For centuries, writers have dreamed of mechanical storytellers. We can now build these devices. What will be the impact on society of AI programs that generate original stories to entertain and persuade? What can we learn about human creativity from probing how they work? In Story Machines, two pioneers of creative artificial intelligence explore the design and impact of AI story generators. The book covers three themes: language generators that compose coherent text, storyworlds with believable characters, and AI models of human storytellers. Providing examples of story machines through the ages, it covers the history, recent developments, and future implications of automated story generation. Anyone with an interest in story writing will gain a new perspective on what it means to be a creative writer, what parts of creativity can be mechanized, and what is essentially human. Story Machines is for those who have ever wondered what makes a good story, why stories are important to us, and what the future holds for storytelling.

Annotation. Presents both the philosophical and theoretical background for research in computer-assisted composition and a review and synthesis of the efficacy research in this area. The focus is on effective writing instruction for elementary, secondary, and special needs students. A paper edition is available (0336-X, $14.95). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone.

How We Write is an accessible guide to the entire writing process, from forming ideas to formatting text. Combining new explanations of creativity with insights into writing as design, it offers a full account of the mental, physical and social aspects of writing. How We Write explores: how children learn to write the importance of reflective thinking processes of planning, composing and revising visual design of text cultural influences on writing global hypertext and the future of collaborative and on-line writing. By referring to a wealth of examples from writers such as Umberto Eco, Terry Pratchett and Ian Fleming, How We Write ultimately teaches us how to control and extend our own writing abilities. How We Write will be of value to students and teachers of language and psychology, professional and aspiring writers, and anyone interested in this familiar yet complex activity.

Exploring the relationship between the writer and what he/she happens to be writing, this text by one of the foremost scholars in the field of literacy and cognition is a unique and original examination of writing--as a craft and as a cognitive activity. The book is concerned with the physical activity of writing, the way the nervous system recruits the muscles to move the pen or manipulate the typewriter. It considers the necessary disciplines of writing, such as knowledge of the conventions of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In particular, there is a concern with how the skills underlying all these aspects of writing are learned and orchestrated. This second edition includes many new insights from the author's significant experience and from recent research, providing a framework for thinking about the act of writing in both theoretical and practical ways. A completely new chapter on computers and writing is included, as well as more about the role of reading in learning to write, about learning to write at all ages, and about such controversial issues as whether and how genre theory should be taught. Written in nontechnical language, this text will continue to be accessible and stimulating to a wide range of readers concerned with writing, literacy, thinking, and education. Furthermore, it has an educational orientation, therefore proving relevant and useful to anyone who teaches about writing or endeavors to teach writing.

Someday computers will be artists. They'll be able to write amusing and original stories, invent and play games of unsurpassed complexity and inventiveness, tell jokes and suffer writer's block. But these things will require computers that can both achieve artistic goals and be creative. Both capabilities are far from accomplished. This book presents a theory of creativity that addresses some of the many hard problems which must be solved to build a creative computer. It also presents an exploration of the kinds of goals and plans needed to write simple short stories. These theories have been implemented in a computer program called MINSTREL which tells stories about King Arthur and his knights. While far from being the silicon author of the future, MINSTREL does illuminate many of the interesting and difficult issues involved in constructing a creative computer. The results presented here should be of interest to at least three different groups of people. Artificial intelligence researchers should find this work an interesting application of symbolic AI to the problems of story-telling and creativity. Psychologists interested in creativity and imagination should benefit from the attempt to build a detailed, explicit model of the creative process. Finally, authors and others interested in how people write should find MINSTREL's model of the author-level writing process thought-provoking.

Patrik O'Brian Holt Heriot-Watt University After speech, writing is the most common form of human communication and represents the cornerstone of our ability to preserve and record information. Writing, by its very definition, requires artifacts in the form of tools to write with and a medium to write on. Through history these artifacts have ranged from sticks and clay tablets, feather and leather, crude pens and paper, sophisticated pens and paper, typewriters and paper; and electronic devices with or without paper. The development of writing tools has straightforward objectives, to make writing easier and more effective and assist in distributing written communication fast and efficiently. Both the crudest and most sophisticated forms of writing tools act as mediators of human written communication for the purpose of producing, distributing and conserving written language. In the modern world the computer is arguably the most sophisticated form of mediation, the implications of which are not yet fully understood. The use of computers (a writing artifact which mediates communication) for the production and editing of text is almost as old as computers themselves. Early computers involved the use of crude text editors and a writer had to insert commands resembling a programming language to format and print a document. For example to underline a word the writer had to do the following, This is an example of how to .ul underline a single word. in order to produce: This is an example of how to underline a single word.

Highlighting and illustrating several important and interesting theoretical trends that have emerged in the continuing development of instructional technology, this book's organizational framework is based on the notion of two opposing camps. One evolves out of the intelligent tutoring movement, which employs artificial-intelligence technologies in the service of student modeling and precision diagnosis, and the other emerges from a constructivist/developmental perspective that promotes exploration and social interaction, but tends to reject the methods and goals of the student modelers. While the notion of opposing camps tends to create an artificial rift between groups of researchers, it represents a conceptual distinction that is inherently more interesting and informative than the relatively meaningless divide often drawn between "intelligent" and "unintelligent" instructional systems. An evident trend is that researchers in both "camps" view their computer learning environments as "cognitive tools" that can enhance learning, performance, and understanding. Cognitive tools are objects provided by the instructional environment that allow students to incorporate new auxiliary methods or symbols into their social problem solving which otherwise would be unavailable. A final section of the book represents researchers who are assimilating and accommodating the wisdom and creativity of their neighbors from both camps, perhaps forming the look of technology for the future. When the idea of model tracing in a computer-based environment is combined with appreciation for creative mind-extension cognitive tools and for how a community of learners can facilitate learning, a camp is created where AI technologists and social constructivist learning theorists can feel equally at home.