Unit eight

Proofing

Checking grammar

Over the past few years computer grammar checkers have got better and better. But they are still far from perfect. They miss many grammatical errors and even try to change your grammatically correct sentences to incorrect sentences. Grammar checkers are best used as a guide to help you spot the kinds of errors that you would spot when proof-reading yourself. Trust your own judgement and do not believe everything they say.

Microsoft Word can check grammar in two ways:

• You can set Microsoft Word's Spelling and Grammar feature to check grammar as you type.
• You can run a grammar check on a whole document at any time you want.

On this page, the Turbocharger will explain how to check grammar as you type, how to run a grammar check on a whole document and how to customize your grammar checker. It will also tell what a grammar checker cannot do.

Checking grammar as you type

Microsoft Word can check your grammar as you type.

• Whenever it thinks it has found a grammatical error, it will underline it with a wavy green line.

• To see the suggested corrections, right click on the underlined word and look at the suggestions on the pop-up menu.

• If you want to know what type of error the grammar checker had identified click on the grammar option at the bottom of the pop-up menu

• This menu pops up and says the problem is Subject-Verb Agreement

Sometimes you will be able to select a change to be made automatically. At other times the suggestion will just help you to think how you can change the sentence yourself. Often the suggestion will not make any sense at all. If so, ignore it.

• In this example, the grammar checker seems to be suggesting that "green" is a wrongly formed verb -- "grow/grown/grew". (We could test this assumption by inserting a comma after "dense" -- Why?)

By default, Microsoft Word is set to check grammar as you type.

• You can turn this feature off and on by selecting Options from the Tools menu.

• In the Options dialogue box, select the Spelling and Grammar tab and tick the box marked Check grammar as you type.

Running the grammar checker

Many Microsoft Word users prefer not to check grammar as they type, because it slows down their typing. If you prefer to turn this feature off, you can check the grammar of the whole essay when you have finished.

• To start checking a whole document, click on the Spelling and Grammar icon.

• Make sure that the box marked Check grammar is ticked.

• When the grammar checker thinks it has found an error, it will display a window like the one below.

You now have several options:

• If you agree that you have made an error, and the grammar checker offers an appropriate suggestion, click Change.
• If you agree that you have made an error, and the grammar checker offers an inappropriate suggestion, type the correction directly into the top window and then click Change.
• If you think that your grammar is correct, click Ignore or Ignore all (to ignore similar 'errors' throughout the document).

Note that Microsoft Word always checks spelling at the same time as it checks grammar. If you find this annoying, first clear the Check grammar box and spell check your essay without grammar checking. Then tick the Check grammar box and check again.

Customizing the grammar checker

Many people find some of the Microsoft Word grammar checking options irritating. For example, by default, the grammar checker tries to change all your passive sentences to active sentences. If you wish, you can switch the more irritating features off.

• To customize your grammar checker, first select Options from the Tools menu. In the Options dialogue box (shown below), select the Spelling and Grammar tab and then click Settings.

• In the Grammar settings dialogue box, select Custom from the list of Writing Styles.

• Now go ahead and clear any boxes that you do not wish to check. You can find out what each items means by right-clicking on it.

• To finish off, click OK in the Grammar settings dialogue box, and then click OK in the Spelling and grammar dialogue box.

What grammar checkers cannot do

A grammar checker simply checks your text against a database of grammatical rules. Here are some of the things a grammar checker cannot do:

• A grammar checker cannot tell you what you wanted to write. You must be the judge of that.
• A grammar checker cannot always correct an incorrect sentence. Sometimes it can only tell you that it thinks your sentence is incorrect. Sometimes it will replace an incorrect sentence by another incorrect sentence. You should always check that the final sentence makes sense.
• A grammar checker cannot make decisions for you. Often it will tell you that your sentences are too long. In fact, this means that your sentences are too long for the grammar checker to process. Sometimes you may want to split a long sentence into two to make it more readable, sometimes you will not. That is your decision.

To show you how fallible grammar checkers can be, we pasted the ten ungrammatical sentences used in the Proofing checklist (from The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers (Anson & Schwegler, 1997)) into a Word document. We then ran them through Word's grammar checker. Only two of the ten sentences were listed as ungrammatical. We have first listed the original sentence and comments from the reference book and then a screen shot and comment from the grammar checker.

1 - "Even the promoters promise to reschedule and honor tickets did little to stop the crowds complaints - (Problem) lack of possessive apostrophe"

As you can see below, the grammar checker was successful here and agrees with the reference book.

But in the second example below, notice that it has missed the pronoun reference problem and instead is questioning whether "grounds keeper" is two separate nouns together ("noun pair", a structural mistake) or a compound noun (which it is, even though it is written out as two words)

2 - "After talking with the grounds keeper, the security chief said he would not be responsible for the safety of the crowd - (Problem) unclear pronoun reference"