Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Do You Use MS Word's Grammar Checker?

Do you use the grammar checker in MS Word? You know -- those squiggly green lines that appear below certain words or phrases that Word thinks are somehow incorrect?

Well, Word's computer brain is far inferior to the human brain when it comes to catching grammar mistakes. (Most editors already know this. I for one don't use Word's grammar checker at all. I consider it to be downright counterproductive, flagging things as incorrect that are actually correct and wasting your time in the process.)

Examples of Word's Bad Behavior

One of my favorite companies, ProofreadNOW.com, has pulled several telling examples of the MS Word grammar checker's inferiority. Read it here (PDF).

I love ProofreadNOW because they fight the good fight when it comes to polished, perfect English-language grammar. I mean, these guys are hard core. You wouldn't believe the strictness of the proofreading tests I had to pass in order to work for them years ago. They have two proofreaders review every job just to make double sure that nobody misses anything. If you need something proofread, I'd go to them if I were you.

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