What excellent fun Word Skill is! An old and simple idea has been transformed into an addictive and amusing word game by Chalksoft, a company with a reputation for good educational software.

In some ways this program is a less serious version of Developing Tray (reviewed May 83), and in fact, would make a good introduction to it. Short phrases and sentences are presented on the screen with all letters replaced by dashes - except for capitals which are shown by stars. You must fill in all the spaces to reveal the sentence before your time limit is up. The quicker you do it, the more points you score. There are facilities for entering your own text and playing with a friend.

A most peculiar element is included - the computer will, if instructed, randomly combine words into syntactically correct sentences which usually make no sense. It's great fun as well as good practice in spelling unexpected words.

The list of phrases (sensible ones) includes sayings, proverbs, quotations, misquotations and even foreign languages! The user can alter the speed level and the volume - the machine plays a selection of tunes when you are successful.

Teachers may be interested that the same set of phrases can be repeated to different members of a class with a running set of the 30 most recent scores available for inspection. Pressing Break will not lose the program or the scores but will return the user to the main option menu.

All in all, an excellent piece of software with much potential for home and classroom applications.