Dueling grammar tools

In the process of working on today's story about Microsoft Word's grammar checker, I spent time last week running UW Professor Sandeep Krishnamurthy's demonstration documents through the grammar checkers in various versions of the Microsoft program. I tweaked the grammar-checking options to make them as strict as possible, wanting to make it catch as many mistakes as possible. Depending on the version and settings, the Word grammar checker did catch some of the problems, but it let the vast majority of them go by unflagged.

As noted in the story, however, the most interesting test came when comparing Word's grammar checker to the Grammatik grammar checker that comes inside WordPerfect Office 12.

For example, consider the grammatical train wreck that began this morning's story: "Microsoft the company should big improve Word grammar check." As noted in the story, Word's grammar checker didn't see any problem with the sentence. In contrast, Grammatik in WordPerfect flagged the sentence, pointing out that an adjective such as "big" doesn't typically modify a verb such as "improve." Among other things, the WordPerfect tool suggested checking for missing words.

So far, based on my e-mail this morning, the most common reaction involves pointing out that people should learn to write well enough that they don't need to rely on an automated grammar checker. Judging from my conversations with Professor Krishnamurthy last week, he doesn't dispute that. However, if Microsoft is going to offer a grammar-checking function as part of Word, he says the company owes its users a more effective tool than it currently provides. At the same time, he believes, people who use the tool should be aware of its limitations.

And finally, proving that Clippy jokes never go out of style, the P-I's Brian Chin came up with this satirical graphic to illustrate the story on the seattlepi.com home page last night.