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| This has just popped up on my screen |
- The typo in the header is not corrected.
- More significantly, the errors corrected aren't errors of grammar - which seems to me (in a product with a name that refers explicitly to grammar) to be a fairly gross oversight.
About 18 months ago there was a discussion about the unpopularity of the passive in the UsingEnglish forums, to which I made this contribution:
A fellow moderator added:One reason for its unpopularity may be that whenever you use it in WinWord the Grammar checker whips out its green pen and says 'Passive voice. Suggest rewriting.' - perhaps they mean 'A rewrite is suggested'.
(This may have been fixed in the latest flavour of WinWord, but I doubt it.)
I always suspected that grammar checkers went for that as an easy rule to turn into a computer routine, taking something from Gower's Plain Words and twisting it into a rule that has become semi-accepted.And I added this afterthought:
Yes - I don't think WinWord started it - which would be an excessively paranoid belief!Generally users of grammar checkers find them a useful tool, but one that needs close attention and post-editing. In my life as a technical writer I sometimes edited other people's work and found errors that had been suggested by Word and that they had unthinkingly accepted. Only last week I saw the phrase 'the choir needs more higher voices [a greater number of people with higher voices]....' - and Firefox's grammar checker marked the 'mistake'.They just encoded a 'rule' as you said, without bothering to consider its limitations. But Word's grammar checker is a pretty ubiquitous disseminator of that limited understanding.
Grammar checkers are improving. One that is quite useful (but not of course infallible) was announced last month in the UsingEnglish forums:
I have put together an online grammar checker, "GrammarTool". During graduate school my friends would often have me read their drafts as I was one of the few native English speakers around. Eventually I had the idea of writing software to do some automatic basic checks.If the poster's web-site is up to it, I'll post a link in an update on this page.
Eventually this personal project morphed into a website. The good news: the website is free (and I'll keep it that way unless traffic really picks up and I need to pay for faster hardware), it doesn't have ads; the interface is relatively simple. I am eager to introduce features -- my own skill and time allowing.
The bad news -- like any automatic grammar checker -- my tool is still far worse than having a real live person read your writing
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Update 2013.02.24:17.00: Here it is: GrammarTool. What I like about it is that the user's in charge and there isn't a complicated user-interface. There is a Feedback button, which you can use both for feedback and for suggested new features.
Update 2013.02.25:17.00: By chance I just noticed that the moderator I mentioned earlier on ('Tdol') has in fact written a blog post that deals specifically with Grammarly – which was the starting point for this post. It was written more than a year [A further update!] ago, though I imagine the principles are still the same.
Update: 2013.10.02.15:55
Header updated:
Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.0: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU, and IA-IU, and – new for V4.0 – OA-OU. If you buy it, contact @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.
Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**, and 4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)
** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.
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