Grammar-Checking Software Is Soft on Grammar Errors

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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.

Five Online Dictionaries

Regular Daily Writing Tips readers know that I often extol Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the dictionary of record for the American publishing industry. Despite its apparent casual acceptance of nonstandard spellings, it’s an authoritative resource — as is its Internet version, Merriam-Webster Online. But plenty of alternatives exist; here are five interesting and helpful variations on the lexicographical theme.

1. The Alpha Dictionary
This portal features links to hundreds of foreign-language dictionaries and glossaries, as well as numerous specialty dictionaries and glossaries covering specific subjects like chocolate, jewelry, and weather, and more resources like thesauruses and collections of quotations.

2. The Free Dictionary
Enter a word at The Free Dictionary, and you’ll get not only definitions from various dictionaries but also citations of the word in quotations, a translation tool to find the word’s foreign-language equivalents, and lists of related terms. The site also has starts-with and ends-with search functions and an option to call up a list of terms in which a particular word appears in the definition. In addition, you can look up acronyms and idioms and search encyclopedias, foreign-language dictionaries, and specialized dictionaries.

3. OneLook.com
This dictionary offers more than just definitions of words you type in; it also enables a variety of tip-of-the-tongue searches: To return words and phrases beginning or ending in a certain word, type in that word followed by or preceding an asterisk, or type the first couple of letters of a word followed by a colon and any complete word to produce a list of words and phrases starting with those letters that pertain to that word. (For example, at:air brings up not only atmosphere but also “attic fan” and atomization.) Or, precede an acronym or initialism with expand: to find phrases these abbreviations stand for, and more.

4. Wordnik
Wordnik collects definitions from numerous other dictionary websites, as well as displaying online citations of the word to provide context.

5. YourDictionary
This plain-English resource provides easy-to-understand definitions. For example, the meaning of atmosphere, rendered at Merriam-Webster Online as “the gaseous envelope of a celestial body (as a planet), the whole mass of air surrounding the earth, the air of a locality, a surrounding influence or environment, the overall aesthetic effect of a work of art, an intriguing or singular tone, effect, or appeal” here is explained as follows: “the area of air and gas enveloping objects in space, like stars and planets, or the air around any location,” or “an overall feeling and/or effect of a place, specially if it is an environment of pleasure or interest.” This site also provides links to other dictionaries as well as other resources.