This is my G post in the A – Z challenge, which should have been posted yesterday, but I was so busy, I forgot, even thought I’d written it the day before.
Computer software, such as Microsoft Word, has made the task of writing much easier. You can cut and paste, find and replace words, use highlights and perform other tasks. The spell checker and grammar checker are two tools that a lot of writers depend on.
However, like the spell checker, the grammar checker can mislead you, if you’re not careful, into thinking your work is perfect when it is not. The web is full of sites offering free grammar checking software, so I decided to play around with a few of them to see how helpful they are. I tried the sentence below to see what the results would be.
The children ran to there mother to complain that the boy had loss his money.
Spellchecker.net – a spell checking and grammar checking site – highlighted the errors like this: The children ran to there mother to complain that the boy had loss his money.
Wonderful, I thought. I’m on to something, but then the solutions were as follows: to mother there and there to mother. The explanation? Split infinitive.
For the same sentence, Language Tool Style and Grammar Checker came up with “No rule matches found in text.” I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean. Are there errors or not?
Microsoft Word did slightly better. It bluelined there, but left loss.
I hopped over to Grammar Slammer. This is an English grammar tool supported by Windows. It gives you a 21-day free trial and costs $49.00. The site does not say if that fee is annually or if it’s a onetime fee.
There’s also Grammarly which gives you a 7-day free trial and charges $29.95 monthly. For a small fraction of that cost you can purchase Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White from Amazon.com, or get it on your Kindle for even less. This book has been around for a long time and is one of the best resources a writer can turn to for help with grammar. I tried the same sentence with Grammarly, but didn’t get any results.
Relying on grammar and spell checkers can be, well, unreliable if you’re trying to put your best work out to the public. If it doesn’t matter to you whether you write your when you mean you’re, then go ahead. But if you take pride in your work, you would be better off enrolling in a grammar course or investing a small amount of money in a good grammar book.
April 9th, 2012 at 5:22 am
I don’t have much faith in grammer checkers. Sometimes, it pays to be human. This in one case. We constructed the language and only our brain has the conplexity to work out how the language needs to be used. So goodbye to one human to another and on with the A – Z challenge hop.
April 9th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
Especially the English language which is already so complex. Thanks for dropping by, Francene.
April 13th, 2012 at 2:45 pm
I really want to try this one. Hope this will truly helps my blog. love the sharing admin. hope to see more free software.
April 14th, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Try it. I’m sure you’ll be pleased.