Grammar-Checking Software Is Soft on Grammar Errors
Posted: April 09, 2013
© spaxiax - Fotolia.com[/caption]If you've seen ads for grammar correcting software, take a second to really look to see if they're worth your time.
© spaxiax - Fotolia.com[/caption]If you've seen ads for grammar correcting software, take a second to really look to see if they're worth your time.
You want to improve your grammar, but you’re disinclined to invest time and energy to laboriously study print or online resources about sentence construction. You’ve seen ads on the Internet about grammar checkers, and you decide to check them out. How useful is grammar-checking software?
After visiting five grammar-checker websites and using (the free versions of) their products, my conclusion is that software is no substitute for wetware (otherwise known as your brain). Here are my brief reports about the software I sampled.
Grammarbase.com
Grammarbase.com fallaciously flagged “ought to be” and “may be” as examples of passive voice — a common misunderstanding of the topic. (Passive voice is a backward-facing construction such as “This sentence was written by me”; “I wrote this sentence” is the active alternative. Verb form is not the primary issue.) Worse, there were several real grammatical and syntactical errors in the site’s introductory text (which I used as a test sample for this and the other sites); the grammar-checking tool found none of them.
Read entire article Grammar-Checking Software Is Soft on Grammar Errors on Daily Writing Tips