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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."
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.
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.
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.
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 * *")
"OO.org doesn't default to my desired preferences! It is obviously inferior! Back to MS-Word for me!" See how silly that sounds?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.