Welcome,
Overview
I knew Microsoft Word’s
“Spelling and Grammar Check” feature was bad.
However, I never realized how bad this feature really was until a
student turned in a poorly written report that was “spellchecked” and “grammarchecked”. I have since tested this feature out hundreds
of times. My conclusion is that the
“Spelling and Grammar Check” feature on Microsoft Word is extraordinarily bad (especially the
Grammar check part). It is so bad that I
am surprised that it is even being offered and I question the ethics of
including a feature that is this bad on a product that is so widely used.
A Colleague Observes- I have always found it interesting that the message we
receive after the spelling and grammar are checked reads: “The spelling and
grammar check is complete”. To me these
are two different types of checking and in my opinion the message should
read "the spelling and grammar checks are complete."
[Thanks, Neosha Mackey]
Show me the Demos
Download these files and run
“Spelling and Grammar Check” on your word processing software. If you have your own examples, please e-mail
me. I will add them here.
Demofile.doc
[This works for Microsoft Word 2002.]
Demofile2.doc [This works for Microsoft Word 2003, Word for
Mac.]
Original
demo [This is a shorter version. It is in text format. Copy and paste to your
word processing software and run “Spelling and Grammar Check”.]
ESL
examples [Taken from http://writing.colostate.edu/wcenter/wchandbook.htm]
Gag
e-mail from friend [My friend, Ron Tilden, sent me this gag e-mail after I
sent out the original demo. It goes
through fine.]
Contribution
from reader (Jim Whiting)
Happy
Birthday Wishes (Thanks, Gael Cooper, Professor of Public Relations,
NEW-
Gag Letter to
Students (Thanks, Karen Watson, TAFESA,
E-mail
from Japan (Thanks, SB)
Sample
from Slashdot thread [A colleague ran this on Word 97 and reports that it catches many of these errors. Thanks, Sonia Jaffe Robbins.]
Who
what where [Thanks, Christopher Thomas.]
1 liner- Type in “How was your son’s wedding?” into a Word 2003 document. The Grammarcheck suggests “How your son was's wedding?” [Thanks, Georges Merceron]
Word does not detect inappropriate use of “ands” (i.e., plural of “and”) [Thanks, Michael Leddy]
How About False Positives?
Some of my colleagues have
pointed out that GrammarCheck frequently flags perfectly good grammar as bad
(i.e., the “false positive” problem). I
think this is certainly something worth pursuing and if you could send me
samples I will add them here. I have not
focused on this since I consider this to be a problem faced by good writers.
The Wrong Initialization Problem[Others
have pointed this out- notably, Daniel Kies]
Sometimes, GrammarCheck does
not detect any errors with a document.
However, if you copy and paste the text into a new file, it flags
several errors. Daniel tells me that
this problem started after Office 97.
Scholarly Work on this Topic
NEW-
Customizing Word’s
Grammar Check (Thanks- C.Clark Helms and Cecelia Munzenmaier from
McGee, Tim and
Patricia Ericsson (2002), “The Politics Of The Program: MS Word As The
Invisible Grammarian”, Computers and
Composition, 19, 453–470.
Burston, Jack,
“A Comparative Evaluation Of French Grammar Checkers”, Calico Journal, 13(2
&3), 104-111, Available at- http://calico.org/journalarticles/Volume13/vol13-2and3/Burston.pdf.
Garfinkel, R,
Fernandez, and Gopal, R. D.(2003), "Design of an Interactive Spell
Checker: Optimizing the List of Offered Words," Decision Support Systems,
pp. 385-397,
Vol. 35.
Kies, Daniel,
“Evaluating Grammar Checkers”, Available at- http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/engl_126/gramchek.htm.
Robbins, Sonia
Jaffee, “Why Not Use the Spellchecker?”, Available at- http://www.nyu.edu/classes/copyXediting/spellcheck.html
[This is based on Word 95.]
Angst
NEW-
Cartoon
summarizing apostrophe-related angst.
My
name is Sandeep Krishnamurthy. I teach at the University
of Washington’s Bothell campus. My
office is about 10 miles away from Redmond, WA.
This is how you say my name- Sandeep Krishnamurthy.
No. I am not.
Competing products do not seem to do much better. WordPerfect, for instance, catches one
sentence in the original demo- but does not offer a better alternative. My hope is that this exercise will convince
Microsoft to invest money in improving this feature. I believe Microsoft has the ability to improve
this feature and I hope it exercises it.
In fact, I hope everybody (including OpenOffice) works on improving
Grammar checks.
I
already have shared it with some colleagues.
My hope is that you can help me disseminate this to a wide
audience. I am especially concerned
about children in K-12 settings using this feature instead of learning the
basics of grammar. This is what a few of
my colleagues had to say-
“This
is shocking.”
“I
used MS Word 2000. I thought that the
grammar check would surely catch something.
It did not! Amazing. You should send this to MS, Gates, and CNN!”
I
used Microsoft Word 2002 SP3 to run the Spelling and Grammar check on
Demofile.doc. I used Microsoft Word 2003
(11.6113.5703) [Part of Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003] to check
Demofile2.doc. Try running it on other
programs in other computing environments.
The files were tested in two ways
(opening the file and copying and pasting the text into a new document). I did this because of a problem with the way
this feature works. I was alerted to
this by a wise friend in an e-mail-
“I tried grammar-checking
your demofile.doc file in Microsoft Word on my Mac this evening. Something
interesting happened. First, I
downloaded the file and opened it in Word for Mac. It didn't detect any grammar
problem, just as you would expect. Then,
however, I remembered something: If the user chooses to ignore detected
mistakes when first running spellcheck and grammarcheck on a Word file, the
spellcheck/grammarcheck doesn't detect those mistakes when the user runs the
tool a second time. It assumes the user wanted to ignore them. I wondered if
that was happening with your test file. Perhaps the test file was
"remembering" that the spellcheck and grammarcheck had already been
completed. So, I pasted the text into a new Word file, essentially resetting
things, and ran the tool again. In fact, it caught a few of the grammar
mistakes -- certainly not most of them, but a few.”
No. I am not saying that word processing
technology is bad. I think all of us
should continue to use this feature.
However, I hope we remember to print out what we type and go over it
carefully before sending it on. These
technologies can help us write better.
But, there are no substitutes for critical thinking and manual
editing.
Absolutely. Forward this link- http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check-
to everyone you know. Fellow educators,
feel free to e-mail this to your students, add to your syllabus and use in
class.
