To determine how much electronic writing-analysis programs can offer college students and how valuable computerized text actually is, nine college student essays and nine professional essays were analyzed using text editors. The student essays (three each rated "superior,""average," and "failed") and the professional essays (three each by William Jennings Bryan, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln) were subjected to electronic text analysis using Writer's Workbench and MacProof. Writer's Workbench, the oldest and most highly-developed text analysis program currently available to students, is capable of analyzing writing for 30 different traits. The MacProof program, version 2.0, runs on the MacIntosh personal computer and was used because of its wide availability and similarity to Writer's Workbench. Data on all student and professional essays pertained to a number of criteria, including spelling, sentence length/structure, number of "to be" verbs, and number of words. The Writers Workbench reports were superior to the MacProof reports for all 18 papers on all writing qualities studied except for spelling and "be" forms. In contrast, MacProof's writing analysis reports were limited in scope and usefulness. Data on readability, sentence length, and frequency of use of "to be" verbs proved helpful, but, overall, the text analysis reports were misleading and overly simplified. The text analysis programs simply did not address the many key elements of student writing evaluated by even the most inexperienced of writing teachers. (AEW)