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SCMP Reporter

USING a grammar checker in conjunction with a word processor is all well and good if you have plenty of time to spend trying to learn your grammar.

  Of course you have to know the basics about grammar to begin with.

  As far as I am concerned, a grammar checker is a complete waste of time for someone even relatively well versed with the intricacies of the English language, and a confusing exercise in testing one's patience if one isn't.

  In a bid to prove this point, I took it up on myself to install a grammar checker called Correct Grammar version 4.0 for Windows on my PC, if for nothing else to see how I could cope with extreme irritation.

  As it turned out, many of my fears about grammar checkers - built up after several encounters with such applications - proved to be well founded.

  But in fairness to Writing Tools Inc, the subsidiary of WordStar that makes Correct Grammar, the program had several features that made it better than other applications.

  One of the problems with grammar checkers is they work pretty much on the same principles as spell checkers, which go back to a pre-programmed dictionary to verify each word in the document being checked.

  This is alright for spell checkers, which only have to run checks on individual words. But things aren't quite the same when groups of words in the form of sentences and paragraphs have to be checked against a set of pre-programmed examples and rules.

  One of the favourite bits of advice grammar checkers like to dish out - and Correct Grammar is no exception - deals with homophones, or words that sound alike but have different meanings.

   More often than not the said advice turns out to be wrong because the programs apparently often take words and phrases out of context.

  For example, when I checked a story that dealt with Microsoft Windows, Correct Grammar kept insisting that the word ''click'' in relation to a computer mouse be changed to ''clique''.

  It also advised that the word ''right'' used to mean ''correct'' be double checked to ensure I didn't in fact want to use ''rite''. No further reasons were given.

  When most grammar checkers do give reasons for questioning the accuracy of a particular passage, these are often so technical that a user would have to have a degree in English grammar to understand them.

  Correct Grammar, though, does provide some useful pointers to writers - or potential writers, and not all of it is hard to follow.

  Correct Grammar, like several other grammar checkers that come loaded on to the latest word processors such as Ami Pro for Windows, check passages against several writing styles.

  Business, casual, formal and legal are some of these and their rules and pointers differ accordingly.

  It often comments on the length of sentences, their degree of clarity, and it sometimes even makes suggestions on how a word or two may be changed here and there to improve matters.

  For example, it quite rightly kept pointing out that the last sentence was too long by most standards.

   Thankfully, it didn't say too much about any possible lack of clarity, although it did add that long sentences and complex words rarely impressed readers but often confused them.

  It spotted the use of jargon and warned against using it in all but the most technical writing, which is as good a pointer as any English teacher could give a student.

  The program is also useful if you want a quick analysis of your writing. After checking a document, it displays statistics that include number of words per sentence, number of sentences per paragraph and the number of words that contain more than three syllables.

  It even checks your spelling as you go through a document - something many other grammar checkers don't do - and at the end points out the number of misspelled words in a document.

  Among other pointers: the Flesch Reading Ease Score; Flesch-Kincaid grade level; and, whether you want to know or not, the percentage of US adults who would understand your writing.

  Grammar Checker confidentially informed me that 89 per cent of US adults would understand the first paragraph of this review. As if, being in Hongkong, I cared.

  At the end of the day, having taken the time to give grammar checkers a chance, I'm convinced Correct Grammar is one of the better ones, and a versatile program at that. It can, after all, work with most Windows word processors available.

  However, I am still convinced that grammar checkers in general are a waste of time and computer hard disk space. If you don't know much about grammar to begin with, most of the advice such a program gives you would be meaningless. Considering the fact that it can get things wrong quite often, you stand a good chance of being misled anyway. Your best bet would be to try taking English lessons.

  If you do know your grammar, you may well consider it an insult to let a computer program tell you what is right or not.

  After much thought, there is only one useful application I can think of for such a program and that is as an exercise correction tool for an English grammar teacher - provided students submit their essays on disk.

  Imagine the ease with which a teacher could check passages for spelling or grammatical errors. Especially since a program like Correct Grammar would even provide the scores.

  But since this is about as far from reality in Hongkong as Pluto is from the sun, grammar checkers can gather dust on store shelves for the rest of the century, for all I care.

Next week: A review of the American Heritage Dictionary for Windows, published by Writing Tools Group Inc, the same company that makes Correct Grammar.



Testing war of patience