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GRAMMAR
CHECKERS DON'T WORK
Although your PC's thesaurus and spell checker can provide you with a wide vocabulary and help enormously with spelling, its grammar checker does not provide anywhere near the same level of service - not even close. In fact, it can be more of a hindrance than a help.
PROOF
The short article below contains more than 20 errors, but
the latest grammar checker will only spot three of them. For two of the
three, the grammar checker suggests correct versions. However, for the third error, it does not
suggest anything at all. More worryingly, it completely misses 17 errors!
Run the article below through your grammar checker and see how it copes. (You may have to
copy and paste it into your word
processor.)
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In April 2001, Caversham Buses, a small London based travel
company announced pretax profits of more than one and a half million pounds and
expanded it's fleet to more than 100 Luxury Buses. The Company which was
launched with a council 10 thousand pound loan with 4 years interest free credit is "unrecognisable",
according to its founder. An official, who works for the company, told our
reporter that he could of paid the loan back 2 weeks' after setting the
travel firm up. The newly-created millionaire attribute's his success to two things; Focus and hard Work.
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WHY ARE
THEY SO BAD?
Grammar checkers do not understand what is written, and this is the main reason
why they do not work very well.
For example:
 I have one dog. My dogs' kennel is green.
Even in this extremely simple prose, the grammar checker is unable to determine that
the kennel belongs to one dog. Therefore, your PC
is unable to spot that the text should be written as
dog's kennel and not dogs'
kennel.
The church is
near the tube station.
In this example, the church refers to a pub called "The Church".
Therefore, "church" should start with a capital letter. With no context,
however, there is nothing wrong grammatically with the sentence, and a grammar
checker would ignore it.
He has selected the model which Tony developed on Monday.
The latest grammar checkers would recommend the use of "that" instead of "which" in
this example. (Both are correct.) However, grammar checkers would also
wrongly suggest ", which" (with a comma) as an option. This
subject is covered in more detail here.
In summary:
"which" = "that"
", which" does not equal "that"
Therefore, if the grammar checker can force you to use "that", then it wins and
offers a correct version. On the other hand, it cramps your style by
preventing you from using "which" (without a comma) or, even worse, offers you
", which" (with a comma) regardless of whether it is correct or not.
Sandra was seen by the bridge.
In this example, your PC is likely
to suggest the version "The bridge saw Sandra". This is because it
does not realise that the word "by" is being used to mean
"near".
These simple examples
illustrate some of the flaws in grammar checkers. This is a huge problem. As
a result:
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Grammar checkers will miss around
65% of your
grammatical errors.
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