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Professor Finds Fault with MS Grammar Checker
ChuckOp writes "
front-page article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer states: "The University
of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Sandeep
Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue." He includes some twisted prose that the grammar checker fails to find fault with, such as: "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying?" and "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead." The professor also has several twisted examples available."
By visiting his site, I found out that he is the Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce, and I was played right into his hand and visited his site! I bet he's laughing with his colleague from the Department of Statistics right now.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue.
It's a tool that's not meant to take the place of actual proof-reading. The grammar checker included w/Word should only alert you to the possibility of some generic issues. If you are turning in, presenting, or distributing some paper you created I would suggest that you take the time and check over it yourself. After you check over it I suggest you have someone else check it over too.
Microsoft calls that the fundamental issue. Responding to an inquiry about Krishnamurthy's examples, the Microsoft Office group said in a statement that the grammar checker "was created to be a guide and a tool, not a perfect proofreader." Microsoft also makes that point in Word's product documentation.
Why should MSFT be held to some high standard for a tool that they include in their software? They should be forced to change it because some college student doesn't understand that "Marketing are good" isn't grammatically correct? Blame the student and their previous education not a tool that MSFT offers.
"If you're a grad student turning in your term paper, and you think grammar check has completely checked your paper, I have news for you -- it really hasn't," he said.
Perhaps require your students to hand in a draft first and you can tell them. In my experience very few professors cared about grammar, spelling, or even the basic content of the paper. How are these students supposed to know what they are doing is wrong if no one will take the time to teach it to them? MSFT is supposed to do that now?
"If you're including a feature in a widely used program like Microsoft Word, it's got to pick up more things than it currently does," he said. "I agree, the English language is very complicated, but I think we should expect more from grammar check."
Come on. I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me. Most would glance over it and say it's fine. I only had *two* that actually spent the time to tear my papers down and show me what was wrong so that I wouldn't make those mistakes again. Does this professor want to do that or does he just want to berate MSFT for not doing it?
But how did a marketing and e-commerce professor become a grammar-checking crusader?
The professor is careful to point out that he's not out to bash Microsoft. But he says the company is spending too much energy on extraneous capabilities, while neglecting core features such as the grammar checker.
Sounds like bashing to me especially considering he's a Marketing prof with a background in e-commerce. I wonder what his intentions really are for this "one man crusade". The grammar checker is not a core feature IMHO. I use it as a tool to give me some quick direction but I certainly don't consider it to be the end-all and I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor.
I remember in English class where MS Word had found some grammar errors in an essay written by a professor of English.
Why anyone turns that POS on is totally beyond me.
Changing do=>does is not going to fix that statement. In fact, the whole article needs to be retooled with some critisism. (apply within)
That his professor found a hole in Microsoft's algorithm and is exploiting it.
News at 11!
That's unpossible!
M$ gr4mm4 t4ugh7 m3 h0w t0 t4lk
Me not understand problem.
I double-checked this post using Word's grammar checker. I dare you find fault with it!
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Any automated tool that parses something as complicated and subject to variation as English grammar is going to have issues. A serious writer isn't going to rely on the MS Word grammar checker to be their sole indicator if something is written poorly. I think of it more as a tool to catch the blitheringly obvious, not the subtle details. But then again, his examples do seem pretty blitheringly obvious...
You mean people don't turn that shit off immediately after installing Office?
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I mean come on. I'm not even a MS fan and I agree that their product could get better, but if you're going to write like a 4 year old... And it would be different if the product's purpose was souly to check grammar. It's NOT. There's a point at which the user has to step in and use some sense and actually EDIT their work themselves.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
It's worse than goatse.
I wish they would improve the spellchecker too. I myself am dyslexic and often have to use google to correct my spelling when the Office spellchecker lets me down.
Ms Jensen doesn't note that the example is STILL incorrect even if one doesn't assume Gates is a proper noun. Grammatically, it should be, "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft." Plural JOBS.
Of course, the chances of seeing a Jobs in Microsoft these days are probably nil.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Apologies to the young Mr. Wiggums.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Apparently he's escaped Slashdot.
The article title is hardly newsworthy. Maybe "Two-Year-Old Finds Fault With..."
If someone has to rely on a grammar checker in order to write a decent sentence, then something is seriously wrong.
> Why should MSFT be held to some high standard
> for a tool that they include in their software?
You're kidding, right?
Maury
Anybody know how the grammar checkers in alternative office suites are? Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect, etc.?
I have to disagree--I think that making the grammar checker more intelligent is a very important part of the program.
I think that it is VERY annoying at this point, and I frequently turn it off because of that. Would I use an intelligent grammar check? Yes, by all means. It should also have an option for "story mode" or "dialogue", and ignore bad grammar within quotes so that I don't have hundreds of errors (alleged) popping up when I quote someone or when I choose to write about a character who uses bad grammar.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
example of ambiguity: "Fruit flies like a banana"
I agree that there are many shortcomings in Microsoft's grammar checker. However, to what extent should we bother trying to improve it? English is an extraordinarily complex language and it should be easy to construct "twisted" examples which any grammar checker would miss; any standard intro AI course will warn of the dangers of overfitting data anyway. On the other end of the spectrum, I'm sure it's easy to construct examples which the grammar checker will never allow but which are often perfectly acceptable under certain circumstances. English grammar simply isn't as black and white as, say, C syntax, no matter what we geeks would like. :-)
You really should stay out of arguments about grammar.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
So if it thinks "Gates" is a plural form, why doesn't it find fault with the fact that job isn't pluralized in agreement with the noun? ""Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft" is grammatically correct, if rather nonsensical
Either way, this guy has found a flaw in the program.
By the way, can anyone suggest a better alternative for grammar checking than the one in ms office?
I'd rather have a program that points out the typical mistakes that occur when you cut and paste around, i.e. phrases without a verb, or with too many verbs, than one that is giving false alarms all the time. A grammar checker cannot fix a bad writer. Neither a spell checker, for that matter. (Do you write "advise" or "advice"?)
Personally, I don't use grammar checkers (not available for Emacs AFAIK anyway), and a spell checker only if I doubt about a particular word. There are way too many words in the kind of things that I write that make the spell checker freak out.
BTW, I probably made a mistake or two in this posting. My excuse is that I ain't no native speaker. :)
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
heh my openoffice.org caught the mistakes and speeling errors :P
If the MLA would come up with a formal specification of the English language that was a recursively enumerable language it wouldn't be so fucking hard to parse the language. They could at least formalize things like order-of-operations regarding clauses and enumerated lists and give a better set of punctuation to work with. They should choose whether they want the language to be pure communications medium with a formal syntax or if they want it to be a completely flexible means of artistic expression full of nuances and hints that can only be understood by a sentient being who has studied the language in-depth for many years.
--
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Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
I see this all the time in errors in newspapers and magazines. Its obvious that someone ran a checker and just clicked "OK" at whatever was suggested. Spelling and grammar checkers have taken the place of actual knowledge of the language.
I suspect that, in the long run, this will change usage so that Microsoft English becomes considered acceptable. But the trend does frighten me, given the recent issue with open standards in Massachusetts. In a dystopian future, open source eye-balls will only be allowed to read, not write, the language.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
> Why should MSFT be held to some high standard
> for a tool that they include in their software?
You're kidding, right?
This isn't a mission critical piece of software included with Windows OS. It's an extraneous tool included with Word to help and guide people to realize that there might be an issue with their writing.
"I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor."
Why the hell not? It's far from perfect, but it still will catch bad grammar 9 times out of 10, so I fail to see how this makes it useless.
Yes, you still have to proofread. However, proofreading is imperfect, especially when it's your own work and you don't have time to set it down and come back to it with a fresh perspective. At least the grammar checker will highlight most of your mistakes, and the false positives can be quickly evaluated and ignored.
Yes, it could be significantly better, but that doesn't mean it's useless. You just have to know its limitations.
...you'd think he'd be more concerned with the spellchecker.
Come on. I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me. Most would glance over it and say it's fine. I only had *two* that actually spent the time to tear my papers down and show me what was wrong so that I wouldn't make those mistakes again.
I would think that a profs job would be to check content rather than grammer. I don't know much about US high school education, but I would expect that students coming into college would know how to write grammatical English
This isn't something new. People have known for years that the grammar checker is less than perfect. Now, if this were a developer saying, "Well, it would be better if you did..." I would have a lot more respect for the article. I can point out problems with lots of things left and right, and without giving a good, reasonable solution, simply pointing them out is what we generally call complaining.
I'm far from a fan of Microsoft, but since I work for a literacy program funded by the U.S. Government, I am adequately shocked that people use grammar check for anything more than catching where they mistyped "th estory" instead of "the story" and similar such mistakes. Also being a college student, I find myself re-reading my papers quite often, and generally fixing a few mistakes in my original text. Few, if any, of these would have been found by the grammar checker.
Then again, I guess you could also say I have an agenda to UN-automate the process of checking spelling and grammar, as it seems to me it's growing to be one of those automated features that doesn't just serve in time-saving, but also extends to the dumbing of America. Not just the, "I don't care" kind of dumb, but also the "I don't have any need to care" kind.
Please, get over it.
What wrong on no grammer checkings?
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I'd like to know. :P
By all means use a spell checker but if you've spend days/weeks/months writing a paper, the least you can do is spend a few hours reading it for grammatical errors!
Blame the student and their previous education not a tool that MSFT offers.
What if the tool is being used in education - how can you blame a student if said student doesn't know better? My school has Word do a German grammar checker (yes, it's not English, but the principles are the same) and although it knows to change die to der, send verbs to the end with weil, and so on, it does not catch more complex phrases, such as relative clauses or a few questions. I can look up words fine in dictionaries, but checking grammar by hand is a lot more difficult if you are not sure what you are supposed to be doing.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Creating an accurate grammar checker would require writing a program that truly understands human language. That's currently far beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art systems, even with huge amounts of processing power, let alone what can be done in the background while you work on an ordinary desktop machine. I think this professor should read a few books on computational linguistics before he butts his head in where it doesn't belong, he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
"I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor."
:)
were a professor
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Do people really expect any software company to come up with a fail-proof grammar check? It wont happen--or at least in my lifetime. Why should MS have to compensate for the lack of intelligence of its users? They've obviously done it enough, look at Windows XP. It all comes down to this: Those who understand the English language in all its complexity--be it grammar or spelling--are the ones who should be writing documents. Not morons. You can't idiot-proof everything.
pedant who insists that grammar must be prescriptive rather than descriptive. Think different, sir.
"I don't know much about US high school education, but I would expect that students coming into college would know how to write grammatical English"
The latter part of this statement makes me really believe the former.
But I say "good". I'm glad the grammar checker in Word is so fubar. It shouldn't be the catch-all for any paper you write. If it points something out that is incorrect and you fix it - okay! If it points out something correct and you tell it to ignore it because you do have a decent grasp on the English language, then okay. And if you just tell it to "Fix All", then you deserve to get the "wtF?!" at the top of your paper. Sure, English can be a bit of a pain, but you should never completely rely on someone else's grammar checker to take the place of learning the language in the first place.
MS grammar check doesnt work? That's unpossible!
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Yeah, I know. You're right. But hey, this is Slasdot. Let's bash Microsoft all we can!! ;)
Read my blog: HansMast.com
So, what we have here is somebody just saying, in essense, "Gee, Microsoft, why isn't your software at human-level AI? I mean, how hard can that be?" and is so utterly incompetent at assessing how hard grammar checking is that they are utterly unaware of how incompetent they are. (Hmmm, that sounds familiar, though this isn't quite the same.)
I invite Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce Sandeep Krishnamurthy to try his hand at the AI problems he is upset that Microsoft hasn't waved a magic wand and fixed, though I feel obligated to warn him that as an associate professor of marketing, he's likely to be in for a world of intellectual hurt unless he's got some other source of knowledge and skill squirreled away somewhere, like a PhD in Computer Science he is for some reason forgetting to mention.... Perhaps then he would have some understanding of why even the mighty Microsoft has not yet produced the Perfect Grammar Checker....
On that note, check in with actual Linguists on the feasibility of the idea of a Perfect Grammar, too. You probably have a lot to learn there, too.
Me so horny.
In order to correctly determine if the given phrases in the article are grammaticly correct, it would require some form of AI analysis of the semantics of the phrases. Since this is still quite a programming challenge, is anyone REALLY suprised that MS Words Grammar check doesn't work right?
"Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. ... McDonald's and Coca Cola are good brand. ... Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft."
Sounds like they used "offshore" labor to code the grammar checking module... ;)
"Nature bats last..."
*Slashdot
Read my blog: HansMast.com
linux has no comparable feature..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Damn Grammar Nazi.
Or is that Dr. Grammar Nazi?
* * * --they cant all be your best, that would be confusing
The Dutch version of the Microsoft spelling checker changes my name, "Mikael", to "Eikel". This means acorn, in Dutch. "Eikel" also refers to the sensitive part of the male sex. A third meaning is that of "jerk". Needless to say I have never used the Microsoft spelling checker ever since. >:(
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
They should be forced to change it because some college student doesn't understand that "Marketing are good" isn't grammatically correct?
Interesting point there-- is that phrase really gramatically incorrect? What if I was writing a story about a race of aliens called "Marketing" and tried to describe them? It seems that writing a 100% correct checker is so dependent on understanding and context that it's pretty much impossible.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I don't usually miss the joke around here, but I'm stumped. How is this funny?
I would have rated it "Interesting" or "Insightful"...
MiCR050Ft I5 +3H 5UCk. tHeY 5h0UlD M@kE @ 83tter Gr4mM4R ch3CKEr. UN+1L th3y C@N C0rreCT L33T, tH3Y 4rE +Eh nOoB.
Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence --
Is Microsoft going to trademark 'Gates' now as they did with 'Windows' so you'll have to pay him a license fee every time you talk about your 'moveable portion of a fence'?
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Hulk work hard on Grammar Checker for Microsoft! Program many long hours. Very hard to type with huge green hands and puny little keys! Many times get angry and smash keyboard. Many keyboards broken. Hulk also get help with grammar from Yoda. Yoda very wise. Maybe not best work in world, but Hulk take pride in work. Why puny University of Washington professor criticize hard work of Hulk? Criticism hurt Hulk's feelings. Hulk angry! HULK SMASH!
Those who can do.... those whom can't.....teach.
File->Preferences->Grammar
Uncheck "Yoda Mode".
I don't see how MSFT can take the blame, grammar and spelling, and proper English simply are not taught in US schools anymore.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
on a piece of software to check any part of their written work in a tertiary institution, probably has been let down by their primary and high school education in some way. Oh hang on, doesn't the constructivist bullshit that many junior schools rely on as a basis for their pedagogy say that chiildren can invent their own knowledge....... Thats ok then, we'll let some machine help them invent that knowledge.
Is there a decent F/OSS grammar checker? Seems like an important project. I guess a probabilistic approach which could be trained for various different languages would work best.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Perhaps require your students to hand in a draft first and you can tell them. In my experience very few professors cared about grammar, spelling, or even the basic content of the paper. How are these students supposed to know what they are doing is wrong if no one will take the time to teach it to them?
Wow, you must have gone to Arizona State, too! Sun Devils in da house reprezent!
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
They focused on fixing errors in Excel first.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
That should be "if I were a professor". It's the subjunctive mood. Betcha you wish you had a better grammar checker now!
Hmm. I never use proper names in my sentences. Nor am I clever enough to understand that "gates" (the swinging type that keep people out of your yard) "do marketing."
What do people expect when they expect so little from Microsoft?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I don't mind it missing bloopers so much as it underlining perfectly good sentences. I know what the passive voice is and I'll use it when I want to, dammit!
I am trolling
whom.
Instead of moaning, Mr. Krishnamurthy should write a brief and complete Rules of English Grammar for his friends across town. For reference, he can use Elements of English Grammar: Rules Explained Simply (310 pages) or Rules, Patterns and Words : Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching (Cambridge Language Teaching Library) (246 pages).
English grammar is complex and often twisted in its logic. Its amazing that the MS Word grammar checker works so well.
that he is speaking not to harm Ceasar, but to make Ceasar a better person:
...
From his Most common mistakes by students:
"10. Not running Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check."
From this we gather that he does want people to use the spelinng and gramer czechs
and
"11. Assuming that Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check will solve all writing problems."
Which leads us to believe that he has a purpose to this critique of MSFT Word grammar checking.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It should only be used by people who understand grammar. It's the same with spell checkers. You have to know the difference between there, they're, and their before you can use one.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I use in spellcheckers, Microsoft's, Corel's or others', is the spellcheck. I do this prior to an actual proofreading to catch typos, and afterwards as well, to make sure that no word was automagically changed by the software.
You see, Word and Wordperfect have a tendency to forget that I turn their auto-correct and auto-replace functions off, which can introduce errors.
At the same time, I've had a lot of issues with false positives. In a 20 page term paper, I've had as many as 50. In the above paragraph, it thinks "do a Grammar Check" should be "does a Grammar Check." Most 10 year olds know that "you does a Grammar Check" isn't grammatically correct. Also, "most 10 year olds" completely confused it.
Nothing beats a human proofreader, but that's no excuse to hand your professor (or a friend) a paper to proof that is riddled with errors that could have been fixed in 30 seconds.
Free MacMini
It strikes me that the grammar checker is, in fact, an extraneous capability. As much as it pains me to defend Microsoft, I have to say that I appreciate the fact that they're working to make their software more stable (well, I would hope they are) rather than trying to make a perfect grammar check. I'd much rather have to read over a paper twice than go through thousands of lines of source code to find a bug that's crashing Word (and besides, it's not like I could, anyway).
I might give a crap if I used M$ Office.
+1 Insightful
When someone can bring up a full rap song of lyrics with only one green underline, you know there's something wrong with the grammar checker!
I dont know anyone who relys on it, but it should be fixed for the occasional n00b.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Natural language parsing is not yet mature enough for an application like this, which is why most of the time that little green squiggly line shows up in my documents, it's wrong. The only reason grammar checking is in MS Word is because it sounds like a nice feature (and it would be, if it worked). If you really want your documents to be grammatically correct, you'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way and read them out loud to yourself and have a friend proofread them.
Anyone want to go to the National Grammar Rodeo at the Sheraton Hotel in Canada?
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Oops, wrong spot.
What is odd, is the fact that "Marketing are bad for brand big and small." gets me a little green squiggly in Word.
And, his first name, but not last does get a red squiggly.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
if you actually read his curriculum vitae. Apparently he says "My current research interests are in three areas- E-Commerce, Open Source Software and Spam/Permission Marketing. At a very general level, I am interested in the impact of Information Technology(IT) on individuals, organizations and communities."
...
So, yeah, sure sounds like a prof to me
What, did you want an English Professor? They're all working at Starbucks.
As the author of Grammatik put it:
"I've been in a discussion with John about how the grammar checking available today, 2002, is essentially no different than it was in 1992 when I sold my company to WordPerfect and quit working on the code. Essentially, what has happened is that Microsoft has decided that its version of a grammar checker is 'good enough' and has stopped significant work on improvement. No one else in the world has the resources to build a better grammar checker. "Who wants to try to compete with Microsoft Word's 95% market share?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I have ranted to co-workers in the past about this. App's like that grammar checker have an amazing amount of leverage in today's society. When we were young, grammar was taught in a one-to-few setting across many schools. Now, kids can count on the crutch of software tools to handle spelling and grammar. The tool and market pressure have placed this type of technology as a keystone in language use and understanding, errors in these keystone apps have ripple effects far and wide in society. In the old days this checking was done by hand. My grandmother was in charge of a team of women at the FBI whose job (in the 50's 60's) was to examine all correspondence leaving the bureau and fix grammar and spelling errors. I don't say we should go back to a time like that but I do feel that these highly leveraged tools can damage the collective mental acuity needed to write well without the crutch.
Hedley
No, his default MS Word Language setting is: English(India).
Tools:Language:Set Language:English(India)
If not, then how dares he complain?
Ok, English is quite easy, the developers who write MS Word are all English (American) speaking, so that grammar check works best in English. Look at Italian grammar check. Everyone I know just disactivate it, as it is really useless, I mean, Italian is more complex, thus writing a good grammar check program would require a better effort than MS did.
I wonder how the japanese version does work..
The canteloupe. On fire. I'm surprised you didn't get it.
I think it's dangerous that it flags things that are fine- and leave things that aren't. With more than 90% market saturation, our language and culture can be affected by this stupid feature that hardly anyone cares about.
I can't believe he still recommends his students use this. Are they all ESL? Are students so addicted to IM that this thing could be useful?
Trying to think of something profound to say, but the grammar checker is pretty short of profound. I use Word for hours most days, and I certainly feel like the grammar checker is of limited utility. The simple spelling checking part of it delivers far and away the most bang for the buck. The grammar checker only contributes slightly, and that's usually by recognizing ambiguities. It doesn't help fix them, but if I can simplify the grammar to the point where the grammar checker stops complaining, then the passage is often rendered more clearly.
I think doing more would require a level of semantic understanding which is still far, far above the capabilities of our PCs, even given their gigahertz frequencies. Trying to substitute for real intelligence is difficult. The only thing I can imagine might be a very large database of examples of good and bad grammar examples, accessed via the Internet. The problem of deciding good and bad would still remain. Perhaps a Wikipedia-style approach with volunteer evaluators?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
... and Google can't translate texts properly! ... and spell checkers have incomplete dictionaries! ... and in all cases including this one, they're only meant as guides!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Okay, so the grammar check doesn't know 'Gates' is a proper noun and not a plural.
"Television ads do good marketing job in Microsoft."
Oh yeah, that's better.
Why not just say the grammar check is a tool for assistance and not a replacement for using your own farking brain to put together a clear sentence?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Thus far, it's the best grammar checker I've seen. Far from perfect, certianly, but I've never had anyone show me one that was any better.
You have to remember that grammar checking is much harder than spell checking. Basically, all a spell checker needs is a dictonary of words. If a given word isn't found in the dictonary, it is marked as incorrect. You may get a high rate of false positives if your dictonary sucks, but you'll basically never miss anything.
Grammar is harder since now we are dealing with types of words and how they go together. You can't have a database of sentences and check against that, there just isn't the space to hold all that, never mind the ability to generate it. So you have to use hurestics of some kind to analyze the words and see if the match up based on your rules.
Also what the rules are is somewhat hard to decide. Natural languages grow and change. What was fine 50 years ago in English isn't necessiarly fine today. Plus there are different standards to which one might be held. There are things that are allowable in normal conversational speech that aren't in a scholarly paper.
Basically, if he thinks he can make or can point out a better grammar checker, be my guest, but at this point it just sounds like so much whining. He wants perfection in an imperfect field.
Let's not expect Microsoft to fix anything and let OSS fill that gap. To me, this is the kind of thing that OOo (or Amiword or Kwrite) could benefit from. So far, most open source office packages have been playing 'catch up' with MS. However, this is changing.
Before you laugh, take a look at the bibliography project for OpenOffice.org - here:
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/#mission
Imagine: Selecting from whatever standard the teacher or prof expects and then auto-filling in the information through available Marc records from the Internet!
When this gets completed, it will help standardize and simplify the bibilographic process here at our school. MS Office doesn't have this built-in, but OOo will. Chalk one up for OOo!
If academia wants change, they should be encouraged to work with more open source projects. For one thing, they'd be heard more directly and for another, they would probably be able to be directly involved with the process - something MS loathes to do.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It's far from perfect, but it still will catch bad grammar 9 times out of 10, so I fail to see how this makes it useless.
If it's catching bad grammar 9 times out of 10, you have serious issues with your writing skills.
I have occasionally tried running my papers through Word's grammar checker, just for laughs. In every single case, it has flagged at least one thing in every sentence. In every single case, what it has flagged has been a false positive. In at least ten percent of those, applying the suggested correction would have introduced a grammatical error.
That is not a good tool: that is a tool that is WORSE THAN USELESS, because it is claiming to find errors where there are none.
People would not put up with a spam filter that randomly deleted emails from their bank while marking penis enlargement spam "important", so why do they put up with grammar checkers that effectively do the same?
THANK YOU!!!
"... but I think we should expect more from grammar check."
Should be: but I think we should expect more from a/the grammar checking program.
since grammar check is not a noun but a state of being. (As in the grammar is being checked by the program
I know marketing people like to coin phrases - but do they all have to be grammatical monstrosities? Which begs the question of whether or not a marketing person should even try to correct someone else's bad grammar? After all, isn't that a bit like calling the kettle black?
Truly, I'm no grammatical wizard. And, after a few head beatings from the general public on boards like Slashdot, I have come to realize that a vast majority of people really don't give a flying f......er.....they don't care that much about correctly doing their punctuation marks, their spelling, diction, word usage, or even if anyone else can even read what they write two seconds after those bits hit the page!
So, as my parents always said (as well as probably millions of other parents have told their children) - who cares. So long as you get your message across - who cares? (Secretly though - I do. And I have started a secret club called the Secret Word Amalgamens who are going to infiltrate this culture of abusive word users and inject them with our new serum called the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious serum. And it will be Um diddle diddle, um diddle ay to everyone soon!)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Yeah, but it has pretty much killed the market for this type of software. There was a time when you bought a grammar checker as an add-on package from a different vendor.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I have to disagree--I think that making the grammar checker more intelligent is a very important part of the program.
...?
Good point. That's why if you're going to open your mouth to criticize, the least you can do is have some improvements to offer. It's easy to find things that don't work, show us how to do it better.
What was that old saying? Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach,
Wasn't this guy *also* a professor? <shakes head>
damn!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
"Would I use an intelligent grammar check? Yes, by all means. [... goes on to make suggestions ...]"
What you're missing is the fact that this is one of the hardest problems ever tackled by computer science. Not only that, but even a moderate improvement over what MS does now would likely require an order of magnitude more code and run-time computation, making it inappropriate for most usage!
MS Word does an OK job of spotting the most common errors, but if you're better at it than MS Word is, just shut the thing off. There, no problems.
As far as writing something that you KNOW is incorrect... ok, so you get a green line under text that you already know is a problem, but you don't intend to change. No big deal. Why is this an imposition?
It's the language. If the English language was anything close to reasonable you wouldn't need a spell checker much less a grammar checker. Sure you'd need a typo checker.
I wonder how much this twisted language costs humanity in lost productivity and extra effort. For instance imagine children knowing how to spell any word by pre-school and probably have grammar mastered by kindergarten. We'd have so much time to spend on other things.
So for me it's silly that we need such a tool and/or that it's all that important
--
grotop proxtu moxtred fasree
In addition, a good grammar checker is a good teaching tool. It provides feedback customized to the students common mistakes, and pedogogical methods can be used to reinforce that feedback. The issue is that the student thinks the computer is always right, and so improper grammar might get reinfornced. This is one reason I call MS Office a legacy App, especially MS Word. The core functionality, that is the automation of the process of writing, has not been significantly improved in years.
As a marketing person he probably realizes that s prime example of this is the grammar checker. Proper grammar is very important for business. However, the average business writer to going to make mistakes. This would seem to a prime area to add value so as to compete with other packages, even free packages. Five years ago it was cool to just have MS Word catch the common mistakes, but now it should be powerful enough to do more.
In truth this is just another example of the MS preference to add bloat rather than useful features. A word processor should make the process of writing easier, not push hundreds of icons and warning messages onto the user. The computer is not just a new fangled replace for the typewriter. You know I just realized last week that the MS notepad does not even a spell checker? WTF
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I always found that a good 'grammer checker' was to use a text to speach program if you don't have anyone else to read your own paper. This caught more erros for me than MS's grammer check. I can't blame MS for this. The English and I'm sure many languages are really hard to break down in to a set of rules a computer can understand given so much is based on the context.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
"People would not put up with a spam filter that randomly deleted emails from their bank while marking penis enlargement spam "important", so why do they put up with grammar checkers that effectively do the same?"
This analogy is inherently flawed. The two things are only comparable if you click "fix all" which is, of course, incredibly stupid.
I think you're misinterpreting my statement that "it still will catch bad grammar 9 times out of 10". In my experience, this has been true. This doesn't mean that 9 of the 10 things flagged for bad grammar are, in fact, bad. It means that 9 of the 10 actual grammatical mistakes are caught. Along with the actual mistakes, a moderate number of false positives are also flagged.
I plugged this post along with your quote into word and it gives me no errors in either spelling or grammar. So, it seems that either you're seriously overestimating the false positive rate or you have a particularly complex writing style.
I see you is trying to write a letter, would you like some helps?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
From the sound of it, the tool provided with Word is extremely basic. I'd like a statistical breakdown, though, of false positive, false negatives, true positives and true negatives. If it produces more errors than it catches, then it's useless, no matter how simple it is. You'd ALWAYS be better off to not use it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft's grammar check doesn't include a disclaimer that it's not perfect.
For someone who comes from a language in which there is only one correct way to form a certain sentence, it's not hard to think that the grammar checker ought to be trusted over your English-as-a-second-language skills.
I've had plenty of foreign friends who are baffled when I tell them that I'm right and their $1500 computer is wrong.
Ehh? In a topic that relates to broken English and there's no obligatory comments and jokes relating to "All your base are belong to us"? What's going on?
DUH!!!
... and maybe complement that with a copy of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language . 1779 pages for a mere $142.60.
Does anybody know of any grammar checkers for Linux ???
Maybe 9 times in 10 it will not catch a false positive. At best it does about 7 in 10 for problems.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
As the article on The Register pointed out, the MS Grammar Checker is offensive to lesbians, espeically those studying Geology:
The innocent phrase "The dykes which cut the granite are 2m wide" was converted, by MS Word, to "The dykes who cut the granite are 2m wide".
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Simple. He's applying for a job - likes the idea of dividends.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
As it now stands, the tool helps good writers but "really doesn't help bad writers at all," he said.
Well, maybe bad writers should find another profession or take classes that help them improve.
So computers should help everyone become Stephen King or John Grisham? (These are just examples of popular authors, there are many other great authors that I just couldn't think of right now).
A good point; a wise grammar checker would look for consistant errors, and ask the user if they have a special use for "Marketing" as such. When coming into any error, the grammar checker should try, if at all possible, to give the user an option to select that what they did was correct in the specific circumstances, and to try and ignore such a case for the rest of the document, without having to disable that grammar rule entirely.
I once listened to a Philip Glass record for an hour and a half before I realized it was skipping.
Isn't "Marketing are good." a completely valid sentence when talking about your company's department of marketing ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
nothing new this is.
I've always thought that Word's grammar checker
was incapable of complaining about anything other
than run-on sentences, and that it thought every
sentence was a run-on sentence. This is
particulary amusing and/or frustrating with lists.
"We expect to implement these features:
- Spell Checking
- Grammar Checking
- Linux Incompatibility"
** Clippy's mutant descendent FrooFroo the Poodle
has detected a run-on sentence! Perhaps you
should use more commas! **
Ugh.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Not To Capitalise Every Word In Each Sentence?
All of these pass under the radar (Word 2000):
Bill Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft
Bill Gate do good marketing job in Microsoft
Gate do good marketing job in Microsoft
Bill do good marketing job in Microsoft
The Bill do good marketing job in Microsoft
The bill do good marketing job in Microsoft
It's called title case. Look it up in a grammar book.
Classic example of how Microsoft's monopoly combined with their closed document format stifles innovation and evolution. If the .doc format were open we'd see alternative Word-compatible software that would offer competing grammar solutions. Instead our only choice is to make a big fuss!
> "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
Karen Jensen should know that in her version of the word "Gates", the sentence would properly read, "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft." The idea of subject-verb agreement seems largely lost on many these days. As others have said, it is a weak tool and quite uneven in its application of rules.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
evar!
I think that it should be obvious why it is an imposition: I occasionally send documents to others who are not as wise to the many problems associated with MS Grammar check. They open it up and see that there are a bunch of green lines and think that I don't know anything about grammar.
I will grant you that I am NOT perfect in my usage of the English language, but I know it pretty well, and I am probably better than the grammar check. But some folks think that just because the computer told them so, it must be right! Grrrr.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
The biggest problem with the grammar check in my experience is that people just plain trust it too much. I used to work in a writing center in a large private college. We served a lot of English as a Second Langauge students. Smart people, for the most part. They would come in with papers with the most convoluted and aggravating grammar I'd ever seen. When I ask about why they chose to write in that way, about half said that they had originally wrote it like X (where X is actually human-readable), but the grammar checker told them it was wrong so they just accepted it since it obviously knew English better than they did.
It did make for some nice teaching opportunities when I got to tell them they were smarter than they thought, but it's frustrating to think that people accept that "The computer must be right" even with something as complex and human as grammar.
I'm taking your "it's impossible to make [a decent grammar checker]" with a huge grain of salt.
I guess you could always set the ribbon to the unachievable.
I know NLP is Hard, but you're seriously overstating it, especially for something which mustn't necessarily be fully non-interactive or even stand-alone (not that I see it using google anytime soon...). No one (except the truly ignorant) is expecting perfection in that such could even be theoratically achieved (there is no "the one single correct grammar" to check against).
That it's hard just means it's worth doing.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Seriously, who uses the grammar checker? I've usually been more annoyed by the false-positives. I'm kind of surprised that there are problems with false negatives as well. The first thing I do when I have to use a M$ product is turn off Clippy, spelling and grammar. Those things interrupt my train of thought quicker than anything else.
But I'm seriously curious, do most people try to use the grammar checker?
I think it's also important to note that the grammar checker included in MS Office, for all its flaws and faults, is still better than the average high school student. My wife once had a job evaluating essay questions on some standardized test (the California HS exit exam (?)). In any event, she would call me over from time to time when she encountered a particularly egregious example. Even the average examples were much worse than me on a bad day.
This post has been checked by MS Word.
bance.net
There are two open source grammar checkers available (Language tool and Queequeg ). Both have strengths and weaknesses and could do with a lot more work to improve on the number strengths they have. Unfortunately people with the necessary expertise rarely have the time needed to get involved on these kinds of projects. If anybody is interested and has some expertise then send me some email. Perhaps we produce something better.
"Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
As I've said before, until we have some adequate simulation of conceptual processing, this sort of thing is not very feasible.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Come on. I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me. Most would glance over it and say it's fine.
Just having come off grading 50+ papers (granted not for an English class), I'm going to have to say I agree with "most professors" - With all the bone-headed, lousy grammar and style errors students make today, you're going to be hard pressed to do a decent job "tear[ing] papers down" and handing them back to the students in time for the next assignment in two weeks. It's hard enough to grade for *content*, let alone wade into the grammar/style morass. I could handle one paper, if I knew the student was actually going to listen to my advice, but after 5-10, I'd go crazy. But for a class of 50? Shoot me now.
Sounds like Hollywood is taking over the grammar... or is it just the dark side from Redmond?
Yoda Gates: "Help you I can, Yes..."
Yoda Gates: "Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you."
Jar Jar Gates: "Gungans no giben up witout a fight. Wesa warriors! Wesa got a gwand army. Dats why yousa no liken us, I tink."
The more you know, the less you need. [Admin added: from me.]
ussualy they call that thing Dyslexia !
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft."
Hmmmmmmm...
Gates do Jobs.
Jobs do Gates.
Anything wrong with that?
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I have to disagree--I think that making the grammar checker more intelligent is a very important part of the program.
For it to be more intelligent, it would have to understand what you mean, in addition to knowing grammar. If it did that, not only would it be able to correct your text, it would be able to write it for you given only the merest of instructions. What you're asking is not so much a slightly improved algorithm (which would only help in special cases and wouldn't make the grammar checker much more suitable), but true AI. Good luck waiting for that.
You know why no one's complained about the apparent lack of a grammar checker for Linux?
No one uses it! Even when using MS Word, I look at the suggested grammar corrections and say, "Oh, that's nice. Whatever." Then, I go on writing and fix errors myself.
In other words, in order to operate a mule, you must first be smarter than the mule.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
This is close to the most gratuitous attack on Microsoft that I've seen in a long while, which is a huge distinction in Slashdot. :-)
Show me other "grammar checkers" in the market that do better than the one in Word! The guy is a professor of Marketing yet he feels qualified to complain about the grammar checker. The Word grammar checker was the first migration of Microsoft Research know-how to a product. They had a group of 10+ linguists who developed the model and carefully tuned it. After 7-8 years since the first release, it is still state-of-the-art from an AI standpoint. I would blame MS for many things, but the grammar checker is not one. I'd love to see the Marketing professor try to improve it.
I like it best when the Word spelling/grammar checker gets in a loop.
Me: Type a word.
MS Word: Should be hyphenated.
Me: Change word.
MS Word: Shouldn't be hyphenated.
Me: Change word back.
MS Word: Should be hyphenated.
Me: *Arrrgh!!!*
What if the tool is being used in education - how can you blame a student if said student doesn't know better?
No, but I can sure as hell blame the teacher. The grammar checker in Word is the first thing I turn off when I install Word. It's crap. It's always been crap. Everybody knows it's crap. Don't use it.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Word has an indicator at the bottom of the page that indicates if there are grammar/spelling problems in the document.
It gets very annoying to tell it to ignore each problem so that the indicator only lights up when there really are spelling errors.
That it's hard just means it's worth doing.
It most definitly is worth doing, and there are thousands of people working on natural language understanding (me included:-). The results are promising, but with the current state of the art it's not possible to make a usable general purpose grammar checker, and it won't be possible for at least another 5 years of research. Or maybe 15. Grammar checkers will be getting better, but they will not become usable for a long while yet.
In other words, anyone who tries to implement a grammar checker in a word processing program now, is not doing it in a good faith, unless he's naive and ignorant. M$ did not put a grammar checker in M$ Word in good faith either -- they did it for marketing reasons.
the real problem comes when ms word is doing the thing 'wrong' and then is used as 'proof' of that the 'wrong' way is actually the 'right' way.
"oh you wanna bet on that??? let's check ms word! they got billions of r&d in that program it'll know for sure!"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". No wonder i got 5 points taken off on my writing report on M$...
buffering...
I mean is it really a shock to anyone that a grammar checker, Microsoft's or not, is not perfect? Not until you get something that can completely parse natural language will you get a completely accurate grammar checker, and we're obviously nowhere near that point.
It's like complaining loudly that an OCR system doesn't do a perfect job. Of course it doesn't!
Heck, until any other word-processor does it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It *is* important. But that importance should be market driven. Not driven by some self described lone crusader. If the market wants the features to get better, it *will* get better.
Maybe, rather than holding an innocuous piece of a software accountable - and, by extension, the company that proliferated it - we should be wagging our fingers at the much maligned educational system.
That's just one suggestion, however.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
He is using "grammar check" as a noun, the same way people use "spell check".
Also, "begs the question" doesn't mean that.
When complaining about grammar, you should be careful that your own post is above reproach.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The only things it flagged were "all your base are" (suggested "base is" or "bases are") and "for great justice" (sentence fragment).
Grammatical and sociological implications are left as an exercise to the reader.
Maybe some of the French would like the job; they seem big on enforcing language rules.
I'll start putting that on my resume now - ISO English Compliant! *
* ISO Joint preliminary taskforce English committee 2 / subcommittee Norte Americano 14, working group west coast dudes.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
When I was doing my student teaching, every time we were in the computer lab I had to go around showing my students how to turn off the grammar checker. Most of my students simply got frustrated with that squiggly green line and stopped writing altogether when it showed up. Sometimes it found actual grammatical errors, but most of the time it just found ways to piss off my students for no good reason.
I think the concept is a good one, but it sorely needs to be updated.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
Grammar checkers aren't needed by anyone who knows grammar [for them, it's an annoying waste of time]. Thus, people who'd recognize the checkers' poor performance aren't looking. People who don't know grammar well wouldn't know that the grammar checker performs too poorly to be reliable. Thus, the people who "need" this service cannot be sure whether it served them well, or poorly. The only solution: pay attention in grammar classes. Ignorance is only an excuse if it's not willful. If you *want* to be dumb, expect no sympathy from the smart. Of course, if you're dumb, there's no point in telling you this -- you won't take smart advice.
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
Even if the program assumes that "gates" is a plural common noun, and not a singular proper noun, shouldn't a remotely decent grammar checker still find fault with this sentence (beyond it's nonsensical nature)? Along with accidentally repeated double words, mixing singular and plural nouns/verbs is one lf the only things that the grammar check seems to actually be good for.
It seems like a halfway decent grammar checker in this case would at least recommend "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft"
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I don't want big professor to style my definition.
Glad to have cleared that up.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor."
Actually, the correct grammar is actually "if I were a professor." You use "were" instead of "was" in the case of hypotheticals. See Elements of Style by Strunk & White. (I had a wonderful English teacher in HS who practically had us learn every "advanced" grammar rule in that book -- who/whom, that/which, etc. Although it was painful then, I'm now glad I suffered through it.)
I'm not trying to be a grammar Nazi or anything, I'm just throwing that one out there because it's rather esoteric. Interestingly enough, my copy of Word in Office XP doesn't pick this one up.
- shadowmatter
Actually, not necessarily. Although you are technically correct (and I myself prefer "were" over "was"), subjunctive in English is widely recognized as being virtually extinct. Almost no one knows the difference anymore, which is a definite shame considering that there is one.
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
But I do disagree with the disturbingly prevalent opinion here that because we can't make something perfect, we shouldn't attempt to make it better.
The author has found a legitimate flaw in the program, one which, ideally, should be corrected. No program can be perfect, but they should all strive to be as good as they can be.
I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me.
If the professor is teaching a writing seminar, sure. Otherwise, he or she ought to be focusing on the merits of the ideas in your paper, not the grammatical constructs used to present them.
I wouldn't expect the professor (or the teaching assistants) in my Psychology 101 course to have an expert knowledge grammar in addition to their primary field, and I hope you wouldn't either. If you haven't developed a mastery of written English by the time you arrive at college, and I'll acknowledge that most students don't, universities generally have classes or workshops dedicated specifically to that subject. I don't see the benefit of asking lecturers in the general curriculum to double up and act as grammaticians as well.
This guy needs to look up "AI Complete". Natural language parsing is not just a common example, it is *the* canonical example, the one that is NEVER left out of ANY serious discussion of the issue. Of *course* their grammar checker is worthless; *every* computer grammar checker is worthless (unless it's checking the grammar for a computer language, as opposed to a human language).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Grammer checkers dumb. I always think grammer is a way to gauge person by writing. You know if their smart. When they write like this you know. Grammer checkers make dumber people seem like smarters. It is harder to tell that they are wortless human beings who don't deserve more energy being invested into them, since the beginning of time this is the case, which is why the correct grammer is always defined as the one which will make you sound like the rich people, because the point of using that grammer is to show that you aren't mentally defective, and worthy of having resources spent on you because you will show a good return for the investment, since it doesn't cost anything to practice good grammer it is a good way to tell, other ways of determining intelligence and education can be two biased and that means that it is better to use grammer since it is less baised, this is obvious to me.
See what I mean?
That's GRAMMER, you twit!
What does Grammer have to do with grammar? Or Slashdot?
An English prof. who recommends you use a grammar checker should be fired. It is the same as a math prof. who recommends that you just use Mathematica instead of learning the math.
Learn grammar and the checker is irrelevant. If you are in an English class then that is the point of being there!
In business I can understand that you would want to pass yourself off as more competent than you are, or at least not let your bad grammar turn off someone who otherwise have been profitable to do business with.
10. Not running Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check.
Found on his list, 'Top Writing Mistakes Made by My Business Students (in random order)'.
App's
This is known as a grocer's apostrophe - I thought you might like to know. I did this occasionally till someone reminded me last year, now I try to avoid it : )
I don't think current grammar checkers are at the stage where they should be included in widely used applications. They are far too crude, prone to errors, and encourage false confidence of the form - if the computer thinks it's right, it must be ok. It'd be like including a search function which finds documents some of the time, but not always - it's worse than useless, it's misleading.
However spell-checkers are actually a good tool when used correctly, particularly ones which check as you type (as long as they don't correct as you type), because they encourage you to recognise and correct errors which might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Those who can't teach post on /. trying to sound authoritative and informed.
The Farewell Tour II
Now, *I* know enough about computers and language to understand the difficulty in making a perfect grammar checker. But in our school's tutoring center, I've seen a fair number of students whose essays have been mangled by MS Word. These students don't know the limitations of the software. Microsoft doesn't offer any warning or instructions for users to aid them in using the grammar checker. It arrives turned on by default in Word. So students rely on it out of laziness and/or too much trust in computers to always generate the Right Answers. They believe that whatever the grammar checker suggests is absolutely right.
My experiences with these students are much like my experiences with people who click "Yes" in every dialog box that IE shows them, who trust the ads that "STOP SPYWARE NOW!" and so forth. When my classes discuss revision of writing, I always use some mangled examples taken directly from MS Word's grammar checker to show how computers cannot tell the context of what a person writes.
I'm not MS bashing here. But I have to agree totally with the professor in the article. Though many might not call a grammar checker "mission critical," the students who use it often believe it is a magic bullet. MS could make a lot of people's lives easier by either offering a disclaimer for the grammar checking routine, by improving it, or by getting rid of it altogether. I'd opt for getting rid of it.
If you take a look at all of the credits on Word's About.. screen, you'll see that most (if not all) of the spelling technology has been OEM'd. Seeing as how the spelling and grammar checkers are closely related, I wouldn't be surprised if the grammar checker was OEM'd as well. If this is the case, should we really be pointing the finger at MS?
to "embark on a one man mission to Redmond" for,
... but the GRAMMAR checker.... DAMMIT!
Jesus Horatio Hornblower Christ...
go ahead and keep doing your illegal but sanctioned corpo-rape with your big fat monopoly,
Me fail english ? That's un-possible!
Word's grammer checker finds no fault with the obligatory simpson's quote.
SOBER UP! If hewlett packard made calculators like that, "it only gets addition correct about half the time", people would cast them as useless (and rightly so, Intel accidently lost 1 wire connection in their fab design for their '386 processors, with the result that 47 transistors did not get connected. The processors were unable to calculate correctly 100% of the time. It cost Intel 40 Million dollars to recall the processors, fix the problem and move on! As for university, I *Did* have Computing Science professors rip apart papers that had syntax, punctuation or grammar errors. It didn't matter if you got the source code and algorithm correct (along with the math proofs). If you couldn't type it correctly, with grammar, punctuation, syntax, (logic of course) and have it cohesive and comprehensive, then you lost big! They were not in the 'one trick pony' business, and insisted on papers that were 'finished'. Some griped that it was unfair, too bad. One prof. said: "We are in the business of education. What you learn you have to apply, and we expect you to apply it, reguardless of whether it's the focus of this course or not!" The course was assembly language programming. Every grammatical error, syntax error, punctuation error, logic error, inappropriate change in tense, etc. would result in a 1% deduction on the paper. Of course, the source code within the textual description also had to be correct. There just wasn't any free lunch. Quit being an apologist for Microsoft. Their product sucks like a hoover! There are a lot of reasons to bash Microsoft because of their business tactics, but this time you can also fault them for having crappy product! Intel, HP, IBM, Boeing, GM, Chrysler (we won't talk about Ford), do not get away with 'garbage product design/implementation'. If the product is dangerous or bad (either from implementation, design, or just astethetics), they hear about it and in many cases are forced to change it (at their expense). Microsoft has a crappy product here, that most people would be better off without! If their product is bad, it's bad. Don't make excuses for them. Another product (much older) was shown to perform much better. The lame excuse given by the Microsoftie about 'the science isn't there yet' is at least half lie! Other people have gotten there. The professor (reguardless of stripe) is correct in calling a crappy product, a crappy product.
University level English courses do not exist to teach you grammar. That's what elementary school is for. Unless you're in a remedial writing course, you should already know English grammar.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
If someone is discriminating against people with a disability, then something is seriously wrong.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct. And that, my friends, is how Hermes requisitioned his groove back.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
That reminds me precisely why I did not Major in English. Please pass the headache relief medicine.
If I were a rich man, ...
Unfortunately, that's true. Some students write so many (linguistic) mistakes (e.g. at exams) that one cannot even start to take these...
But, the rules are so inconsistant that trying to program a computer with english is maddening.
It's rawther like SQL.
Not that programming a computer with Latin would be easy, mind you.
Lingua::Romana::Perligata.
Jobs? What's Steve got to do with it?
A large number of English instructors at American colleges and universities today are either grad. students or part-timers, most of them earning $14,000 - $20,000 per year. Many of these people have 60 to 100 students per semester. Example: I started out as a grad. student teaching assistant. In addition to a full-time teaching load, I had 50 students to teach. I had to balance my own assignments with planning assignments, leading classes, and grading ~200 essays per semester. Later on, as an adjunct (part-time instructor) at a community college in North Carolina, I got paid $24 per credit hour per week. In other words, for teaching a standard 3-credit course, I was paid $72 per week - and I was only paid for the time I spent in class. No compensation for time spent in my office, grading and working with students outside of class, formulating assignments, etc. When my colleagues and I did the math for all the time we spent on these activities, we found we were making about $7.75 an hour. The majority of American students are being taught English by instructors like these.
Different people react to this shameful situation in academia different ways. For me, when I had 400 pages of writing to grade in a week, the only solution was to go over a paper one time, carefully, and to refer the student to a writing tutor at other times. It's not a question of wanting to help, or being too lazy to help. It's a question of the ability to do so. In a perfect world, tuition and fees paid to a university would "earn you the right" to have individual assistance with each writing assignment. Blame the academic world's focus on profit and part-time labor for the fact that isn't so.
Solely Sole"ly, adv.
Singly; alone; only; without another; as, to rest a cause
solely one argument; to rely solely on one's own strength.
You aren't a Microsoft fan, but you are a Microsoft user aren't you! Thank you for making the professor's point for him, and please take your own advice: "There's a point at which the user has to step in and use some sense and actually EDIT their work themselves." It's too bad that you don't have software to prevent you from wading into the linguistic sewer.
Then why are you using a grammar checker? You can't say "You should know this." and magically people do. The university accepted this person.
Think of a University as a black box where people go in, and four (to 7 haha) years later they come out. Now, say they come in with knowledge level x. Is the goal of the University merely to spit them out at knowledge level x + 10, or is it the goal to output graduates at some level y, where y is a high level of competency?
Obviously it is the latter. So if even if they SHOULD know something, that doesn't mean they get to brush over it. Especially as the vast vast vast majority of people have been failed by their previous schools which did not force them to learn grammar (or anything else) in their childhood.
To make this obvious, suppose someone is taking a math class. Does the person get out of having to learn how to do basic algebra just because they can use a tool like Mathematica or a TI-89 to do it for them? No, they take some sort of placement test and they have to start as far down on the math track as their lack of knowledge requires. Then they have to learn everything they should already know, but don't.
The clear difference is that math is more linear in it's progression early on than other subjects like English. You can have great reading comprehension of complex texts without actually being able to spell or knowing grammar, while you can't do calculus without algebra and arithmetic, for example. That shouldn't get you out of learning spelling and grammar though, if it is important to learn those things at all.
So Universities exist to bring students to a high level of competency. If you need to know grammar to attain this then they exist to teach grammar.
Failure of Public School to teach people isn't an excuse for the University to fail to require people to know stuff to get a diploma.
I'm a senior in the English Department at the University of Washington. I can tell you for a fact grammar has gone by the wayside. Last quarter, in my advanced expository writing class my teacher gave a room full of English majors a grammar quiz. Five out of twenty people understood when to use "whom". Two people could use "to lay" and "to lie" and their respective participles correctly. One person (me) found all the errors in the paragraph at the end of the test. This is not a class filled with freshman--this is an upper-level English class at a major University.
Part of the blame rests on the complexity involved with parsing language. That particular class relied heavily on peer review simply because editing is hard, time consuming work, even if you know all the rules. An instructor reading twenty rough drafts of a ten page paper cannot reply meaningfully to every one in a couple of hours. Content and structure always outweigh grammar and spelling when a teacher had limited time to really look at a student's work.
The other part of the blame arises from hubris associated with grammar. If you tell someone that they need to work on their grammar, they will probably think that you're insinuation that they return to grade school. I think studying grammar should not be relegated the ESL students and middle-schoolers. If you can tell me what the subjunctive mood is without looking it up or use a dash, colon and semicolon without fear then more power to you. If you cannot, perhaps MS Word's grammar checker isn't the only thing that needs a rehaul.
Insightful, lucid, and grammatically-correct writing is a by-product of hard, relentless work that cannot (yet) be replicated.
first those curry bitches steal our jobs, now they bitch at our word processors.
FUCK THE CURRY NATION
Google finds 4,770,000 hits for "if I were", as opposed to 2,970,000 for "if I was" (which obviously includes indicative conditionals, which are uncommon but still account for some of the cases). That's a 61% market share for the subjunctive, in this construction at least. The subjunctive may be widely recognized as being virtually extinct, but I'm not going to give up on it until Netcraft... er, Google confirms it.
(This contrasts significantly with "whom", which seems to appear most commonly in usage examples, old writing, and references to old writing, like the common title pattern "For Whom the * *")
I'm not a WordPerfect user, I downloaded the trial just for this because I've heard that it would be good for this kind of things.
First of all, it's been known for years that the grammar-checkers implemented in word processors aren't very good - this professor is probably one of the last persons in the world to notice! It doesn't take a whole lot more than just common sense to know, that it's some task to program a computer to completely understand just a single natural language. For instance with the sentence "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft" - it's absolutely imperative to understand the context in which this is uttered in order to understand that we are talking about one person and not the plural form of gate. Remove "in Microsoft" from that sentence and even natural language users will have a hard time determining if it's from some abstract poetry or Business Weekly.
As a student of Linguistics, believe me when I say that it will be many a year before we get even remotely reliable grammar-checkers. I've seen lots of seemingly good proposals for better grammar-checkers and parsers of natural language and I've seen tons of reasons why these won't work.
When will they start posting stories about how speech-to-text software isn't a 100% accurate?
"Live free or don't."
Perhaps we should all ditch English and start speaking a more structured language for which it's easier to develop a decent grammar checker.
I'm not exactly serious, and I agree with you, but to the best of my understanding, English is a very yucky language compared with some others when it comes to consistency. I'd be interested to see how well grammar checking projects are going in some other languages.
So bus' out your MLA style guide and lay down the grammar-smack on 'em.
Anybody who wants to step to my mad grammar skills had better check theyself before they wreck theyself.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
That's why I use an acrostic made from the first letter on pages 217-219 of The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Er, wait. Clear cache! Clear cache!
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
All your knowledgebase are belong to us.
(wow, this is actually on topic for once!)
Parent was probably angling for this, but the conversation took off without him getting his point stated: A guy who is a professor of marketing and e-commerce has abso-frickin-lutely NO COMPETENCE to judge what's what in natural language processing. Even a UW professor.
He does on the other hand have the expertise to toss a glib-sounding critique in the direction of some journalist friends, and have it passed off as news. That is thoroughly competent marketroid publicity whoring. Just a stunt to get his name in the papers. And somehow somebody even posted it to slashdot. Sheesh.
You had to begin wondering at his competence when he claimed an "awkward" sentence should be flagged by the grammar checker--especially when he used the word "gates" in an ambiguous context. Then he even crows about putting a list of more such sentences online for people to look at. Pure PR stunt.
Here is a butt-obvious way to get far worse nonsense that "works", that this marketroid propagandist somehow didn't think of:
1) Randomly list a string of words from some dictionary or corpus. Follow it with a period. Capitalize the first letter of the first word.
2) See if the first word is being flagged as "ungrammatical." If it is, replace it with another random word from the dictionary, and keep replacing until the flag goes away.
3) Repeat process (2) sequentially through the sentence until no more words are flagged. [I have to assume the checker consistently defaults to flagging the later of the two possible errors in any internal-conflict situation.]
4) See if your sentence makes any sense at all. Any linguistic statistician can tell you, it probably won't.
5a) For extra credit, do this lots of times and get statistics for what fraction of all possible sentences can pass the grammar checker.
5b) For further extra credit, take the grammar checker sentences and do a series of surveys with human readers to get a ballpark profile of what fraction of checker sentences can be called what degree of meaningful. Again the number will be low, but you may find some fun head-scratcher gems in the noise.
Then contact UW, Seattle Post, and Slashdot, and watch everybody ignore your post because it is too mathematical. Oooh, scary numbers.
...that any mind ever achieves.
After seeing how bad the spelling and grammar checking was in Word, I simply turned it off. I trust my own proofreading more than anything MS has to offer.
Write it today, set it aside, and proofread it tomorrow. That makes it impossible to get the elusive "first post", but who the fuck cares?
Yes, it makes you wonder if Mark Twain could have used Word if he had had access to it. All that Southern dialect would drive Word crazy!
...Hulk from Yoda learn. Hulk then like Yoda good grammer should speak.
Yes, if you're in Remedial English For Morons We Shouldn't Have Accepted In The First Place 101, that's the point of being there. If you're taking Postmodern Literary Theory or something, you're not there to learn grammar.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Considering the Microsoft Grammar Checker tool is about as advanced as any grammar checking tool of its kind that's available from elsewhere, I don't think it's reasonable to expect Microsoft to improve upon it.
It's no big secret between linguists and software developers that defining appropriate English grammar, let alone verifying it, is a very difficult thing to do. It's also not as if competitors like OpenOffice and AbiWord have superior grammar checkers -- last I checked, they didn't offer it at all. It's not even superceeded by unix utilities such as style and diction.
It's okay to expect things from Microsoft for which there's reason to believe are actually possible, but don't expect the unrealistic.
You'd be amazed. Most of the papers I peer-reviewed in my College Writing I class read like stream-of-consciousness prose (this was suppposedly a 'professional' essay, btw, not just a story or other form of paper in which writing in that method would be acceptable). I was shocked to see just how poor it was.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I occasionally send documents to others who are not as wise to the many problems associated with MS Grammar check. They open it up and see that there are a bunch of green lines and think that I don't know anything about grammar.
I circumvent that by having recorded a macro that, after you highlight a portion of the text and press the assigned keyboard shortcut, instructs Word to ignore that passage in its spelling/grammar check. I run those macros when I do my final rereading of the texts just before I submit them.
...trying to sound authoritative and informed.
Wow, I must have really missed the mark. I was trying to sound disgusted.
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
OK, fair point. Now let's reinterpret:
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft." Let's change 'Gates', so you don't think about Bill, to 'people'.
New sentence:
"People do good marketing job in Microsoft."
Karen Jensen thinks that THIS would be OK??? That sentence is by no means any better than the original. I have personally met monkeys with a better grasp of grammar.
For no apparent reason, many of us favor wget -r or curl. All the traffic, without even the risk of comprehension.
Everyone knows Word's grammar checker sucks. We've known that since it came out. It's not news, cus it isn't new!
Quantum causality, and stuff. Y'know.
r rison/Locality/Locality.html
One million geeks thinking about maybe getting around to reading an article...maybe later or something. And there may or may not be something keeping them from actually READING the artice. That could have a powerful effect on the cosmos, I suppose.
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Ha
Link goes to explanation of quantum cause and effect.
MS Word causes the most common errors. "that" and "which" are not the same thing. "who" and "whom" are not the same thing. Fo' Shizzle is not a word.
It saddens me that a lot of people don't have "whom" in their vocabulary. I use it correctly... and I don't exactly have a privileged upbringing or anything. Nor do I know English in any technical sense, so I couldn't explain where you are supposed to use "whom" using the correct linguistic terms.
Ah well. One of the major strengths of English is that it can change, so I suppose there's no point making a fuss about it. But I'll defend my little patch of English :-)
Oh, and, on topic... this is dumb. There isn't a single system in existence for which you cannot construct examples that'll make it look bad. Indeed, I believe attention has moved away from hand-coding rules with the goal of achieving perfection, and towards statistical techniques. 100% correctness might be impossible but they get the job done with a lot less hassle.
Let's see how long I can keep this signature for
<pedantic>Let's see for how long I can keep this signature</pedantic>
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Why should MSFT be held to some high standard for a tool that they include in their software? They should be forced to change it because some college student doesn't understand that "Marketing are good" isn't grammatically correct? Blame the student and their previous education not a tool that MSFT offers.
The truth is, the spell checker in previous versions was done by Alki Software. Alki used to sell a more full-blown version, as well as the foreign language and vertical market dictionaries.
Just like the Solver engine in Excel is (or at least at one point, was) licenced from a more full-featured, stand-alone version.
WP used to ship with Grammatika, which was also available as an add-on for Word, oddly enough. But this was 10-15 years ago at this point. At the time, however, it did whip the spell checker in Word with a llama's ass.
The default, and only, mode for the grammar checker in Word is "business" communications. It's like having a highly concrete, literal-minded savant in your computer while you are typing up a philosophy paper, otherwise.
Any one of the 25000 registered viruses are.
Hallowed are the Ori
No no no.
If they don't care about grammar in this class then screw it, turn in whatever drivel you spit onto the page. Since they don't care there is no point in worrying about it, and you are wasting time.
If they do care then they should have forced you into taking grammar 101, and you are cheating, since you are using the computer to correct your work. This is no different than typing math homework into Mathematica and copying down the answer, or using a spell checker on a spelling test.
The point is that you might not be there to learn grammar, but that is because they assume you know it. If you don't know it they should still dock you points.
Back to math: If you can't do algebra they shouldn't let you write down half the work, then write "Apply algebra", instead of writing the solution.
Fry: Now he's trapped in a book I wrote, a crummy world of spelling errors and plot holes.
Giant brain: The big brain am winning again! I am the GREETEST! Now I am leaving Earth for NO RAISIN!
I would suggest that "ridiculous" is the most commonly misspelled word here. For the love of Bob, THERE IS NO E IN "RIDICULOUS".
qntm.org
Seriously? How else would one use that in a sentence? Do people replace "whom" with "who"? That sounds ridiculous, as in "For who the bell tolls". Do people just leave the preposition at the end, as "who the bell tolled for?"
Admittedly I just finished grad school so my peer group was fairly intelligent, but I'd say I hear that used correctly roughly 50% of the time in speech, and higher in print.
"What was that old saying? Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach"
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, administrate.
Those who can't administrate, legislate.
Those who can't legislate, adjudicate.
That's why the world is so fucked up. It's called the "Peter Principle". Everyone rises to his level of incompetence. Or, as I like to put it, "Every hierarchy acts like a septic tank; the really big ones rise to the top."
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows all the rules of English grammar, which is a twisted, irregular, dynamic beast. Besides, different nationalities, organizations, kinds of writing, etc. use different grammars. There isn't just one grammar to learn!
/.) aren't grammar problems at all, but errors of spelling or usage...
English grammars are made up of piles of different standards. Many are quite arbitrary and silly. Some of the rules MS Word enforces (that/which, don't end sentence in preposition, etc) were invented in the 19th century by English compositionists who thought English grammar needed to be more systematic and like Latin. Or by Strunk and White, the masters of arbitrary rule-creation, who have perpetuated the idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" way to write.
Of course, most of the problems cited in this discussion (and committed on
cbd.
1) People will always try to find shortcuts. By relying on a grammar checker, they will not re-read the document. Don't forget that grammar checkers will also probably not pick up on sentences that do not pick up on sentences which do not make any sense: "The car blew its nose." Gramatically correct but does not make sense.
2) Cultural bias. Suppose English isn't my first language, maybe its: French, Japanese or Swahili. Using my first language as a context, and Word as a reference point for grammar can cause problems. The sentence which may appear "correct" using similar grammar rules to my native language and according to Word maybe incorrect. This isn't to say that no one can write in more than one language fluently. Rather, we have to recognize it will happen.
A friend tried to convince me that Enlgish grammar will be picked up perfectly by a grammar checker in a few years. Not only am I still waiting, but I don't think it will happen for a long time (if ever). Too many rules, exceptions, etc have to be tabulated. It will probably require some for of advanced A.I. to do.
IMO, this article covers most of what this guy says, and is more intelligent about pedagogy:
Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Tim McGee. "The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian." Computers and Composition 19 (Dec 2002), 453-470.
causes?
But even if "gates" was assumed to be a standard noun, "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft" is incorrect - it's still missing an article.
Or better yet, .odt files!
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Me: "I need to get in touch with Jack McGee. I think I spotted the Hulk!"
NR: "I can cover for Mr. McGee. Can you give me any details?"
Me: "Well, there was this one guy who looked suspiciously like the late Dr. David Banner and..."
NR: "Where are you located?"
Me: "I work at Microsoft. The green guy was..."
NR: "Excuse me, did you say Microsoft?"
Me: "Yes, and anyway he was..."
NR: "Excellent! Can you help me with this problem I have in Word?"
Me: "Um, this may be a case of life or death. I spotted the Hulk."
NR: "Yeah, yeah, so you said. Now can you tell me why Word tells me I misspelled..."
Me: "Don't you get it? This green guy was tearing stuff up and..."
NR: "Where can I upgrade my spell checker?"
Me: "Screw the $10,000 reward! I hate myself for choosing this blasted job!" *click*
---
(P.S. To the parent: Awesome Hulk post, BTW. Great idea.) :)
Another phrase that bugs me is "The proof is in the pudding".
It's a messed-up version of "The proof of the pudding is in the tasting", which makes more sense.
Gah - ya know, I guess it really is true what they say about Slashdot people. They just can't take a joke.
:-P
I think from now on I will preface all of my joke posts with the following:
>>>>>>>>>>THIS IS A JOKE<<<<<<<<<<
Maybe then people will take a joke the way it is being given.
I guess the ";-)" is just to subtle for Slashdot readers.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
If I could even give you a 6th point, I most certainly would.
From [a link on] TFA:
Also from [a link on] TFA:
As U of A has a pretty good business program, these two statements are disjoint. Meaning: I find it unlikely that he did not violate his own (#8) rule within his PhD.
Oh, and ... well ... yes, natural-language parsing is difficult. You may see mentions of "n-p" in this discussion thread; suffice it to say that it is intractibly difficult to maximize linguistic flow and fluidity while also maintaining the syntax and "low-level" rules of a language. And, yes, MS Word does give silly suggestions - do something constructive like either turning it off or writing something better. To moan and gripe about software development without having a formal or structured knowledge of it is likely counterproductive - it'd be like your average /. reader, say, griping about a problem in chemical engineering
I am currently in a technical writing class at a university. I don't, and never will, claim to have a complete grasp of the English language. With that said, there are quite a few of my fellow students that have grasped the concepts of the English language equivalent to that of a greased pig. They lack even the most common proofreading skills. Before each assignment is handed in, it must be proofread by three classmates. I have included purposeful elementary errors to see if they actually read my articles. They haven't caught a single valid error all semester. I even got one back with two words on the first page, "looks pretty." Since then I have simply ignored any correction that most of my classmates stumble upon.
The basic reason that a more advanced grammar check is needed is because students do not realize that correct grammar is vital no matter the language.
I see alot a lot.
I always found that a good 'grammer checker' was to use a text to speach program if you don't have anyone else to read your own paper. This caught more erros for me than MS's grammer check. I can't blame MS for this. The English and I'm sure many languages are really hard to break down in to a set of rules a computer can understand given so much is based on the context.
I take it your speech synthesizer was broken when you posted this.
You could call it survival of the fittest then, why didn't you go out and buy one of those? because you settled for the one shipped? It's your decision then.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
...if I was a professor
;)
That's "if I were a professor".
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
You're kidding right? If I type a blazing 10 characters/sec, my system has ~300 million clock cycles to process each keystroke. Computational linguistics researchers have developed tons of programs that can do excellent grammar parsing in far less time than that.
But the proof is in the pudding... dig out an old Windows 3.1 copy of WordPerfect and compare its grammar checking against a current ver of Word. For years I kept that app in a dusty corner of my system for checking important documents like cover letters. It's 10-year-old technology and still does a better job than Word.
To me it seems that mr Sandeep K is fighting windmills. There have been some good grammar checkers since the 90s and technology certainly has improved since then.
However, there is a pretty good reasons not to build them into MS Office: these programs are slow, rather expensive to maintain, and would generate huge amounts of warnings and errors on an average piece of text (note that the demo texts used by Sandeep are by no means representative). That's not what Microsoft's users want, and MS knows that. They want something that's fast, not intrusive, and helps them out in certain cases.
Although I do applaud any attempt to get better language technology into commercial software, achieving all goals at the same time is simply too costly. Or doesn't an Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce understand what that means?
What's wrong with learning grammar yourself? If I write on a piece of paper, there's no grammar check either, yet somehow I manage to write correct grammar.
Interesting.
Well on a grammatical note we're having a bit of a discussion in the office this morning as to the correct past tense of "ping".
So far based on the word "ring" (used in its telephonic sense) we've come down pretty evenly with about 50% on each side rooting for "pung" and "pang" (apart from one idiot who wants to use "pong" but that really is silly)
Personally I think "pung" is superior as "I pang it at 11" sounds much sillier than "I pung it at 11". But then again I'm a well known idiot so I may well be wrong.
So what do y'all think ? Whom have the most bestest solution ?
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Where I really need my spelling checker is in this form right here. I know my spelling is bad, I know I'm lazy (or is that dyslexic), but I would like to submit a correctly spelt post and a spelling checker in slashdot could be great.
Two ways this do this. Either, after a preview run the text through Ispell and print the mistakes. Or, build a spell checker into the web browser so that I can spell check every form I type it.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Real engineers use LaTeX.
While I think the original complaint about the grammar checker is over the top and not justified (I think the current grammar checker it's good enough to be serviceable, and for all practical purposes it doesn't seem feasible to make it something this guy would seem to be happy with anyway) I do dismay at current spell checkers.
/slightly/ better than Microsoft's one I find, both are no where near as good as Google IME. It's not actually that hard to write a better spell checker either (having written one myself), and it makes me wonder why they are so poor at suggesting words for trivial misspellings that should be easy to match.
The Mac OS X spell checker is
I was searching through ProQuest a couple of years ago and came across a research article about the MS grammar checker. In the experiment, a group of high school students in an advanced English class were given their final exam. Half of the students had to use pen and paper to write it. The other half were given Microsoft Word and allowed to use its spell checker and grammar checker.
The students with just pen and paper had markedly better grammar in their essays.
I don't have ProQuest access right now. Otherwise I'd look up the reference....
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
That's how computers will take over the world. The fools will install grammer checkers that actually require an intelligent comprehension of a world gestalt.
But, oddly, I want one.
well, enforces them. If you type which it often trys and makes it that. it doesn't know the differene between who (subject) and whom (object). those are just the two things i notice the most.
What really bugs me is that word does not check the single characters. So if I type s instead of so and m instead of me, word does not check it at all!
He's also looking for OpenOffice users to submit reviews of the editing paragraph to him at: sandeep@u.washington.edu
> As far as writing something that you KNOW is incorrect... ok, so you get a green line under text that you already know is a problem, but you don't intend to change. No big deal. Why is this an imposition?
my biggest complaint about this, (a bit off topic) is I don't use word, but I get complaints from people that open the word documents I create, and are completly red, and green underlined (likely for good reason)
would be nice if their was a way in the document to overide other peoples default grammer settings, when they open my documents for viewing.
Sorry.....
While I don't disagree with you in the slightest...
It seems that you personally going over everybody's paper personally and as often as they ask is just about as possible as Microsoft writing a perfect grammar checker.
It's been known for a very long time that context-free grammars simply lack the power to correctly model natural language. That said, the vast majority of computational linguists use context-free grammars in their work. To get even fairly close to human-like performance, questions about tagging, word-sense disambiguation and state come in to play. Seriously though, why not simply learn to use a language properly before you publish anything? English isn't really that bad - it lacks the extremely deep nesting of clauses that is often present in other languages. The marketting material and packaging for WordPerfect formerly made a good case for this - they featured an image of a hand holding an expensive pen, writing the old-fashioned way. If this study is anything to go by, it looks like spam authors everywhere have not only continued to ignore RFCs, but they're also relying on Word to check their gumpf for coherrency.
Even if Gates did refer to the hinged part of a door, Gates do good marketing jobs. Yes, gates do jobs; a gate does a job.
I'm not sure if a period is better, but a colon would have been best.
As for everyone else who isn't surprised, this has been an interesting "easter egg" of a bug that I discovered by accident while writing my second book. A sentence that included the words "you're married" is marked as grammatically incorrect and the correction prompts me to change it to "you is."
http://img109.exs.cx/img109/9936/youis4pz.gif
I have used this example ever since of why people should really be aware of the actual rules of grammar and not just rely on any program to do it for them. For natural language processing, even simple syntax, nothing beats another natural language speaker (yet.)
Mill Avenue Vexations
Yeah, I settled for the one that shipped because I was already forced to pay for it when I bought Word. This could be seen as a benefit for most (I did), but it's also the classic bundling/monopoly case that people complain about - MS used their 90% market share in one product (office) to push another product (grammer) and destroy the market for any competitors.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Don't consider me the backbone of Slashdot. I'm sort of new here and evidently not quite nerdy enough :/
Who is this guy/girl who's griping about Microsoft's grammar checker? Build your own, you scrub!
No actually I've graduated from college so I don't write papers anymore. I don't waste time thinking about the English language, as long as my code compiles I don't care.
But hey if pointing out my spelling / grammar mistakes floats your boat, you go right ahead.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users. In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Interestingly, for all the fact that native /.
speakers of British English like to believe
that Americans are knuckle-dragging halfwits,
the use of the subjective in casual writing
screams ``educated American''. One might use
``If I were...'' whilst writing a leader for the
Telegraph, or indeed whilst writing a final-year
dissertation, but few British English speakers
would use it in speech or on
ian
Apparently you also lost your ability to laugh.
Yeah, but it has pretty much killed the market for this type of software. There was a time when you bought a grammar checker as an add-on package from a different vendor.
And if you're a newspaper editor, you still do. The grammar checkers they use are heavyweight stuff, which not only checks grammar but hundreds of "rules of style" type of elements. About the only reason obvious errors still get through in papers is that they were snuck in as tweaks just before press (non-obvious ones of course are still beyond the capabilities of the checker)
title says it all
Well, of course they are fluent in conversational english grammar, but it takes effort and desire to learn educated formal english grammar like they expect in school.
I thought it was hilarious. I saw it along the lines of, "Donald Trump leading fight for better hairstyles."
Eh, to each his own.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
No offense intended to people with poor language skills, but for crying out loud, LEARN good language skills. Too many people rely on some stupid machine to do their thinking for them, then, when it can't deliver, they blame the machine instead of taking responsibility for their own shortcomings and doing something about it.
I will make certain that my two boys are taught proper language skills - even if the education system doesn't want to be bothered with it.
The crux of the problem simply comes down to the overwhelming desire people have to get as much as possible with as little real work as possible. Our society tends to define thinking as work, and nobody wants to have to work at anything. We're letting these machines turn us into ignorant, lazy, overweight do-nothings... and it's up to each individual to recognize this problem in themselves and take responsibility for it.
Just my (un-spell-checked and un-grammar-checked, but quickly proof-read) 2c.
The ellipse is unfortunatly placed at the exact point where the error begins.
The origin of the saying is a question that translates best as "I could care less?"
I has, through common use, become the nonsensical statement commonly used today.