It's i before e, except in that word, oh, and that one too. Nevermind.

July 22, 2010 2:40 PM

Grammar checker?

My dyslexic husband is looking for a grammar checker. He has access to the one in MS Word, which is kind of suck-y. We are looking for an alternative to the one in MS Word. He is a good writer, but his grammar and spelling are not so good. I have been his grammar checker and, in addition to being annoying, my grammar and spelling abilities are not that great either. I am also starting to feel like a school marm.

He is writing noir genre novels. Is there one for fiction? The checker can be Windows, OS, or online.

posted by fifilaru to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You might try LanguageTool or Grammar Slammer, but to be honest I doubt they will be much better than Word. The reality is that grammar is much harder than spelling for a machine to check, because grammar involves intent, which means that a proper grammar checker would need a sentient AI capable of simulating a reasonably intelligent human that speaks English, which is obviously impossible. The best we can do right now is make something that uses a list of rules and heuristics to try to spot common mistakes, but it's far from foolproof because such a program has no actual understanding of language which means it will be riddled with false positives and false negatives.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:08 PM on July 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

(Or in other words, if we had the ability to make a decent grammar checker we'd also have the ability to write a program that could translate one language to another without the result being only a few steps removed from sounding like incoherent gibberish.)
posted by Rhomboid at 3:12 PM on July 22, 2010

Microsoft has an entire team of language researchers working on stuff like grammar check. It isn't great, but as Rhomboid said it's sadly close to the state of the art.

I tried "These are an excellent examples. Except for sentence fragment." in Word - it correctly suggested removing 'an' and correctly called out the sentence fragment. LanguageTool thinks it should be "This are an excellent examples" or "These ares an excellent examples" (?!?) and doesn't even notice the sentence fragment.

You can probably hire an English major for next to nothing to do some copy editing.
posted by 0xFCAF at 4:02 PM on July 22, 2010

I don't know what it would be, but there are probably tons of forums online where grammar nerds congregate who would do this for free. (Of course, there is always the chance you'll get feedback like "your missing a comma in the second sentence.")

Obviously this is something that wouldn't work if your husband wants to keep his writing completely private, but it may be worth joining some grammar forums and asking around.
posted by phunniemee at 4:54 PM on July 22, 2010

You could get a grammatically-inclined college student to do it for cheap. If your husband is going to be published, a student would probably appreciate experience.
posted by elpea at 6:07 PM on July 22, 2010

I know of WhiteSmoke and StyleWriter. I have used them both, but I'm not sure how much better they would be from the MS Office grammar checker.
posted by Sufi at 6:55 PM on July 22, 2010

I used Paper Rater recently for a class. It's free and checks for grammar, spelling, and plagiarism. It's not bad, for the price.
posted by fuse theorem at 9:19 PM on July 22, 2010