--- Doug Ewell <dewell@...> wrote:

> Nicholas Bodley <nbodley at speakeasy dot net>
> wrote:
>
> > What really disappoints me is that homophone
> > checking software is so rarely used, especially
> > when <flamelet> a significant portion of our
> > writing population is pathetically ignorant about
> > homophones. </flamelet>
>
> I would have thought existing grammar checkers would
> be able to detect that "they drove off in there car"
> was incorrect.
>
> I hate the grammar checker in Word, since it is
> constantly telling me that I have run-on sentences
> when I don't, and complaining about the length of my
> sentences based on raw word count. It's doing its

job

> correctly, but I hate it anyway.

I don't know of any grammar checkers which are useful
at all. I'm pretty sure the only reason word
processors
come with them is because buys won't buy the product
with fewer features than their competitors and because
they think computers are smart enough to be able to do
it. Many also believe their own knowledge of grammar
is bad and trust the machine now matter how stupid it
is.

I often think it shouldn't be hard to make a better
grammar checker but I bet the current ones do very
little parsing and something that works a bit better
might need a lot more parsing. And that will need a
large dictionary and will be effected by unknown
words.

Now I must apologize because this topic truly is
unrelated to writing systems )-:

Andrew.

> Plain spell-checkers are useless for homophone
> detection, of course.
>
> -Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California
> http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
>
>
>

=====
http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl





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