Re: Grammar and Style Checkers

[Eva Thury <thury -at- DUNX1 -dot- OCS -dot- DREXEL -dot- EDU>]

I agree with you that the Word Grammar Checker gives too many false
positives. That is why I tried for something I considered more reasonable
in the style checker I wrote, Tools for Writers. This program marks
instances of what MAY be problems in your writing and leaves you to make
the decision. It guides you with exercises on what you can do about the
marked items if you want to change them. Admittedly, this means that Tools
for Writers is more likely to be used by teachers/students than technical
writers on the job. However, I think that, given the difficulties of
parsing natural language in an undefined context (as opposed to parsing,
say, legal language or language in any specific domain), these goals are
more achievable than those of the Word Grammar Checker.

The issue that seems to me to arise is the difference between grammar and
style. For writers who are, like you and me, grammatical most of the time,
the issue is style rather than grammar in the narrow sense. Computerized
checkers are all designed probabilistically (sp?) and thus they are geared
toward what usually happens. When we average your computer manual and the
daily tabloid press, what do we have? A set of averages, perhaps numerical,
perhaps merely formulated as expectations of the program writer that cause
certain tests before other tests. That is just what style is not, the
average. I don't know a solution for this but regard it as an interesting
problem.

PS - I liked diagramming sentences too!