The Truth About Grammar Check and Spell Check

A while back, a friend of mine showed me her daughter’s English paper. Her child’s paper was riddled with grammar and spelling errors. Accompanying it was a note from the teacher requesting a parent-teacher conference to discuss her daughter’s English skills. My friend was clearly affronted by the suggestion that there was anything wrong with her daughter’s work and firmly stated that she had personally run the grammar check and spell check before her daughter turned it in. I didn’t think much of this incident until a few days ago when I received a error riddled email from a well-educated friend who, while not a native English speaker, is well known for his precise sentence structure. He also happens to be the harshest and most precise editor I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. I called him later on and learned that his IT department recently turned on MS Outlook’s grammar check and spell check on all the computers. Although he was puzzled by some of the errors reported, he assumed the program was correct and accepted each and every change. Horrified, I suggested he return to the old-fashioned method and walked him through turning off the spell check and grammar check. Then, I did a little research and discovered some startling facts.

• Several studies suggest spell check and grammar check increase errors.
• In tests, the best grammar check program tested only caught 50% of errors.
• According to surveys, most school-age U.S. children regularly use a computer. Logically, they also use the grammar check and spell check.
• Some teachers require printouts showing that the child used grammar check and spell check. This printouts include word count and readability statistics including grade level.

Considering my personal experience with these programs, these facts are not surprising. Even in graduate school, our professors routinely advised us to use grammar check and spell check. In the same breath, most of them gave us a list of problems they’d experienced with these tools. Personally, I have not run grammar check in several years and rarely require the spell check feature, although I do leave it turned on. I regularly post to blogs, forums, and message boards and frequently write articles and short stories without using these features. The reason I don’t use them is simple- the word “maybe”.

English grammar contains many instances of maybe. It relies on an evolved, loose syntax that frequently borrows from other languages that use different grammatical structures and everything is contextual. The result is a set of rules with phrases such as “if you have this, you may want to do this or this, but you can also use this”. Grammar check and spell check programs are all written in computer programming languages. These languages are built using strict logic chains, specific syntax, and grammar. In many ways, they are more mathematical equations than languages and as I have tried to explain many times in the past, you simply cannot program “maybe”. Even the more sophisticated algorithm-based programs suffer from this affliction. Computer programs are not a substitute for knowledge!

Grammar check is not a substitute for a good understanding of the English language and a grammar handbook. I keep a well-worn copy of Stunk & White’s The Elements of Style by my desk and use it frequently. I check my spelling using several dictionaries. One is a large unabridged dictionary, which no office should be without. The others are discipline specific. Since research suggests people are more likely to skim computer screens than paper, I print out my writing. Then, I manually proofread it and enter the revisions. I normally repeat this process several times, checking the revisions each time. In my experience, this is the most accurate method of producing clean, consistent copy and I apply it to everything I write. Yes, it takes longer, but clean copy is worth an extra ten to fifteen minutes.

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