Grammar-Checking Software Is Soft on Grammar Errors

Image The Fremd High School English Ning

 

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.

GrammarCheck.net
When I copied and pasted the sample text into GrammarCheck.net’s tool, it showed the same poor results as Grammarbase.com’s. However, when I clicked on the site’s Advanced Report button, it took me to . . .

Grammarly
Grammarly found nearly fifty errors (or, more accurately, instances of concern), mostly involving what the site terms “writing style,” in the introductory text taken from Grammarbase.com. (The free version did not specifically identify the errors.) When I then plugged in the raw, error-laden version of a copyediting test, it found fewer mistakes than revealed in the Grammarbase.com text but gave the test text a lower score.

PaperRater
PaperRater found no errors in Grammarbase.com’s text and only two in the text for the copyediting test — both concerning misuse of hyphens.

Spellcheckplus.com

Spellcheckplus.com was stymied by the phrase “not only should the structure of your writing be solid,” reminding me about noun-verb agreement (irrelevant in this case) and by the phrase “your basic default word processor grammar checker,” alerting me that if by using your I meant “you are,” it should read you’re (again, irrelevant).

However, it advised changing you’ll to “you will” and noted that a letter space should both precede and follow an ellipsis and that the first two words in “run on sentences” should be hyphenated — all valid but superficial corrections.

My tests were not rigorous, and I did not purchase any of this software — I merely took a test drive of each company’s freeware trial. However, the only difference I can see between the free and paid versions of these software products is that the paid versions not only flag your errors but also analyze them. The problem is that, whether in simple or advanced mode, these tools missed just about every error that matters in a grammatical review.

These tests confirmed my suspicion that grammar-checking software can at best note only the most elementary errors (and sometimes marks valid constructions as mistakes). Grammar is much too complicated and nuanced to trust to technology. If you want to write well, learn to write well. If you want to have your writing reviewed and evaluated, access the brain of another human being. But don’t even think of relying on software.

How to Revise Bullet Lists for Grammatical Consistency

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Bullet lists — distinguished from numbered lists in that they do not imply a priority or chronology in the order in which the list items appear — are useful for when a list becomes too unwieldy to be formatted in line (within a sentence), but just as in a sentence’s in-line list, the bullet list’s grammatical structure should be coherent.

Here are three bullet lists I obtained from a job listing (a format that frequently exhibits grammatical infelicities and thus amuses job-seeking wordsmiths attuned to irony), each followed by a syntactically sound revision:

1. Original
“This position is responsible for:
• Writing and/or editing in all media
• Assures quality for engaging audience
• Coordinates flow of information to achieve news cycle deadlines
• Creative Designer
• Contributes to high-performing teamwork
• Continuously seeks and applies learning to enhance skills and performances”

1. Revision
“This position is responsible for
• writing and/or editing in all media.
• assuring quality for engaging the audience.
• coordinating flow of information to achieve news-cycle deadlines.
• creatively designing presentation of content.
• contributing to high-performing teamwork.
• continuously seeking and applying learning to enhance skills and performances.”

Note that the colon in the introductory phrase has been omitted because each bullet-list item independently completes that phrase, and the resulting statements should therefore not be interrupted; to support that structure, each item now also begins with a word in lowercase form and ends with a period. Most important, however, the verb(s) in each item now take an identical inflectional ending (-ing).

The list could also, by revision of the introductory phrase, allow a simple verb form (-s), requiring alteration only of the verb form of the first item and an extension of “Creative Designer” into a complete thought:

“The content manager
• writes and/or edits in all media.”
(etc.)

2. Original
“Job Requirements:
• Applicants should have at least three years of daily newspaper copy editing and design experience.
• Exceptional Writing Proficiency
• Strong Proofreading and editing skills
• Experience in page design and layout on pagination systems like Quark or InDesign.
• Must understand that journalists are held to a higher standard and must follow strict ethical rules, such as not accepting gifts from sources; not putting political bumper stickers on their cars; etc. — all outlined in The New York Times Co.’s ethical policies.
• Knowledge of best practices in page design, typography, use of space and photography.

2. Revision
“Applicants must have
• at least three years of daily newspaper copyediting and design experience.
• exceptional writing proficiency.
• strong proofreading and editing skills.
• experience in page design and layout on pagination systems like Quark or InDesign.
• knowledge of best practices in page design, typography, use of space, and photography.

Applicants must also understand that journalists are held to a higher standard and must follow strict ethical rules such as not accepting gifts from sources and not putting political bumper stickers on their cars — all outlined in The New York Times Co.’s ethical policies.”

The original introductory phrase is correctly punctuated because it is a fragment that sets up but is not syntactically continuous with each of the items that follow it. However, the items are inconsistent as to whether they are phrases or complete sentences and in terminal punctuation. In my revision, I created a new introductory phrase that can apply to all bullet list items (except the one about ethical rules, which I broke out as a separate paragraph because of its length and nonparallel structure — and note the revision of its own in-line list), and I lowercased several words that were gratuitously capitalized. This scheme now matches that of the first bullet list.

3. Original
We are looking for candidates that have the following qualities:
• Quality Orientation
• Strong Work Standards
• Exceptional Communication Skills
• Ability to manage work
• Contributing to team success
• Proven decision making skills
• Building strategic working relationships
• Active Learning

3. Revision
“We are looking for candidates that have the following qualities:
• quality orientation
• strong work standards
• exceptional communication skills
• ability to manage work
• desire to contribute to team success
• proven decision-making skills
• aptitude for building strategic working relationships
• active learning”

This list was easier to fix: The introductory phrase, a complete thought, is correctly punctuated, and the items were mostly consistent in their phrase form. (Inconsistency in grammatical form between one list and another in a piece of content is acceptable, but lists should be internally consistent.) I simply removed unnecessary capitalization and rephrased two of the items to describe qualities rather than actions.