Grammarly redux

After my previous post on the Grammarly grammar and plagiarism checker, in which I noted that the test on the web page reported errors but was rather vague about saying what they were, someone from Grammarly contacted me and urged me to give it a more thorough trial. So I did.

I ran my original paragraph through it, and then made all the changes that Grammarly suggested.

Here is the original version:

In Western Europe and in North America, however, there were witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which thousands of people accused of witchcraft were executed after a legal trial. In most societies, and at various times, the most favoured method of killing witches was to burn them to death. The fear of witchcraft and sorcery seems to be endemic to human society, though the killing of suspected witches seems to be epidemic rather than endemic. Terms like “endemic” and “epidemic” are normally used of physical diseases spread by germs. I use the metaphor deliberately, because I believe that witchcraft and witch hunts can be seen in theological terms as aspects of a spiritual sickness, as I hope to show in this article.

And here is the modified version, following Grammarly’s suggestions:

In Western Europe and North America, however, there were witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which they executed thousands of people accused of witchcraft after a legal trial. In most societies, and at various times, the most flavoured method of killing witches was to burn them to death. The fear of witchcraft and sorcery seems to be endemic to human society, though the killing of suspected witches seems to be epidemic rather than endemic. You normally use terms like “endemic” and “epidemic” when you speak about physical diseases spread by germs. I use the metaphor deliberately because I believe that witchcraft and witch hunts can be seen in theological terms as aspects of a spiritual sickness, as I hope to show in this article.

I then ran the modified version through Grammarly again, and it scored 75% rather than 55%.

I’ll say what I thought of the recommended changes, but before you read that, I’d be interested in knowing which version of the text you prefer, so please use the poll if you have strong opinions about it, and expand on it in the comments section below.

The first time round, Grammarly suggested that I substitute “flavoured” or “savoured” for “favoured”. After I had done that, it reversed its advice, and suggested (correctly, in my opinion) that I should change it back.

In the first line it suggested that I leave out the second “in” in “In Europe and in North America”, so I did. I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference, but my reason for including the second “in” was that I was treating “Europe” and “North America” as two different places rather than as a single entity.

Grammarly also suggested that I leave out the comma after “deliberately”: instead of “I use the metaphor deliberately, because I believe” Grammarly recommended “I use the metaphor deliberately because I believe”. That seems to me to change the meaning slightly, though I’m not sure how.

The second time around Grammarly found another superfluous comma, which it had missed the first time. That was the comma after “spiritual sickness” in the last sentence.

Grammarly, like MS Word, didn’t like the passive voice, so I changed “thousands of people accused of witchcraft were executed” to “they executed thousands of people accused of witchcraft”. Grammarly seemed to approve of that, but I have my doubts. It looks more like the kind of thing a Grade 5 schoolboy would write in an essay.

I likewise changed ‘Terms like “endemic” and “epidemic” are normally used of physical diseases spread by germs’ to ‘You normally use terms like “endemic” and “epidemic” when you speak about physical diseases spread by germs’.

Grammarly seemed to think that that was an improvement. Again, I’m not so sure.

I was also interested to see the result of Grammarly’s plagiarism detector, and it had indeed found a blog that had nicked my article without permission, here, though it did cite the source.

I don’t think I’ll be using Grammarly much myself, but I would recommend it without hesitation to the Department of Nursing Science at the University of South Africa, where the use of the passive voice was strongly recommended they strongly recommended the use of the passive voice, and urged students to avoid the use of the active voice altogether.

I would also recommend it to people for whom English is a second language, but with a caution — the recommendations are sometimes misleading, as in the “flavoured/favoured” substitution, though I thought the “savoured” alternative had distinct possibilities in the context.

The plagiarism detector might be useful to academics who have to mark lots of undergraduate essays.

And my recommendation to Grammarly is: please make your taster sample a little more informative.

Grammarly issues

Grammarly is an automated proofreader and plagiarism checker. It corrects up to 10 times as many mistakes as other word processors (from the Grammarly blurb).

I was reading an article about plagiarism: Olive Tree Genealogy Blog: Personal Opinion About Copyright and Plagiarism Online. At the bottom of the article was an ad for Grammarly that invited me to “Check Your Writing For Plagiarism And Correct Grammar Errors Now!”

I thought I would try it, to see how well it lived up to its claims, and posted a paragraph from an article that I had written for a scholarly journal, and later placed on the web, where it was plagiarised.

Here is what Grammarly reported:

At first glance I thought it was saying that I had spelt “issue” wrongly. On looking more closely, I saw that it was referring to commonly confused words, and then thought that it was saying that I had confused “issue” with another word. Then I realised that Grammarly had made the common error of confusing “issue” with “problem”, and I take issue with that.

So it was saying that there were problems (which it chose to call “issues”) with my text, but it did not say what those problems were. It then offered me a 7-day “free trial”, after which I would presumably be expected to pay for its vague and unhelpful advice. Thanks, but no thanks.

So what is the problem with Grammarly?

• It told me that there were errors, but did not say what those errors were, and which part of the text they were in.
• It told me that there was a prob… sorry, “issue” with plagiarism, but did not tell me what it was or where it was. If someone has plagiarised my text, I would like to know, because people have done it before.
• It says it has generated a word-choice correction for my text, but doesn’t tell me what it is.

For what it’s worth, here is the paragraph I asked it to check:

In Western Europe and in North America, however, there were witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which thousands of people accused of witchcraft were executed after a legal trial. In most societies, and at various times, the most favoured method of killing witches was to burn them to death. The fear of witchcraft and sorcery seems to be endemic to human society, though the killing of suspected witches seems to be epidemic rather than endemic. Terms like “endemic” and “epidemic” are normally used of physical diseases spread by germs. I use the metaphor deliberately, because I believe that witchcraft and witch hunts can be seen in theological terms as aspects of a spiritual sickness, as I hope to show in this article.

The MS Word spelling checker has flagged “witch hunts” and “societies” in this text. I know that “witch hunts” is sometimes written conjunctively as “witchhunts”, but I chose not to do so, and tried to ensure that the spelling I used was consistent throughout the article. I’m not sure if that was the word choice for which Grammarly generated a correction, because it didn’t tell me.

What else? MS Word suggested that “thousands of people was executed” would be better than “thousands of people were executed”. I chose to exercise my right to veto that one. Grammarly said there were two “issues” of passive voice. MS Word usually gets its knickers in a knot over the passive voice, but it didn’t utter a squeak in this instance.

For what it’s worth, the title of the article is Christian responses to witchcraft and sorcery and you can find a copy on the web here.

But I am less than impressed by the less than informative analysis of Grammarly, and I don’t think I’ll be missing much if I forgo the 7-day free trial. I have no doubt that my writing could be improved, but Grammarly seems unlikely to be helpful there. The MS Word spelling and grammar checker seems adequate for my purposes, and is much more informative.

Twenty-one years old — the best word processor

It’s now 21 years since I began using XyWrite III+, a program whose word processing functionality has never been surpassed.

It seems that rival word processors, unable to compete directly, have got ahead by reducing hardware functionality.

How do they do that?

It now seems to be virtually impossible to get a computer printer that doesn’t require Windows to work (what do Linux users do?)

So I find that XyWrite and other MS-DOS programs I use every day cannot have their output printed directly. Hardware limitations reduce the efficiency of the program to that of its bloated competitors. Any time saved by greater ease of use is lost by having to find workarounds for less capable hardware.

One of the hardware limitations was introduced quite early — the “enhanced” unergonomic keyboard. Whoever decided to move the function keys on keyboards from the left to the top must have hired a whole team of inefficency experts to come up with the most ergonomically clumsy design.

The result is that the two-finger XyWrite functions for delete word, delete sentence, delete line etc now become two-hand ones, which take longer to perform, and probably increase the liklihood that one will get carpal tunnel syndrome and some other weird typing diseases.

After all, how difficult is it to manufacture an ergonomic keyboard with function keys on the left?
After learning to do things the easy way, I still, after 15 years, find it annoying to be forced to do things the hard way by the stupidity of keyboard manufacturers.

One has to jump through all sorts of hoops to print a doccument, like finding a way of importing the output into a Windows document.

One of the programs I use for this is XyWrite 4.0. It can convert documents to RTF, which can then be imported into Windows word processors like Open Office or MS Word to be printed. And Open Office and MS Word are still clunky compared with XyWrite. Oh yes, they have lots of bells and whistles. What they lack is basic motive power.

The analogy of bells and whistles is taken from old-fashioned steam locomotives. You can design a steam locvomotive that can play tunes on its whistles in four-part harmony, which is just the thing if you want to park it at a fairground and use it as a steam-organ once a year. But if it means that you have to break a train in half and haul one half up the hill and then go back for the other half, and you have to do this every day, are the bells and whistles worth it?

The fancy Windows word processors can do all sorts of things you might want to do once a year, or once every five yesrs. What they don’t do as well is process words — the kind of stuff you want to do once every five minutes.

XyWrite remains the best word processor I have ever seen. I still use XyWrite III+ every day, even though it is now 21 years old.

One of the nice things it does is that it can take output from other programs and turn it into fully-formatted word porcessing documents. One can write a report for a database program that does this.

It was very useful for writing journal abstracts. Just enter the abstract into the database, and set up a report that inserts XyWrite formatting commands (which are Ascii, and similar to HTML codes). One can’t do that with MS Word, and not even with WordPerfect (though at least with WordPerfect you could see the formatting codes in a document).

Why is it that whenever you have to upgrade your computer, you have to accept a downgrade as well?

Another problem — I keep getting urged to upgrade to MacroMedia Flash 9.0, and every time I do so, it breaks my batch files, and I have to go to a system restore point and undo the installation. I use my batch files every day. I use Flash 9.0 once a month or less, and when I see something that needed Flash 9.0, it wasn’t really worth it.

So there’s my rant on computer development — that minor conveniences come at the cost of major inconveniences. Now we’re offered Windows Vista. I’ve looked at a list of stuff that it’s supposed to be able to do, and can’t think why I’d ever want to do those things. Not one of them.

The typewriter is dead: long live the typewriter

Somewhere at the back of a cupboard is an Olympia typewriter I bought more than 30 years ago. With the electricity supply being as erratic as it is, perhaps I’d better get it out and dust it off.

Maybe others will be doing the same in offices around the country.

However, it was always predicted that the mechanical typewriters would outlive electric and electronic typewriters (both of which went out of circulation with the advent of printers).

clipped from www.business-standard.com

Even in this age of supercomputers, 12,000 typewriters are being manufactured and sold annually.

Its obituary was written a couple of years ago, and you will generally find the old ones being used in police stations, courts, government offices, or being put up for sale on eBay.

Yet, in this age of computers and supercomputers, 12,000 typewriters are still being manufactured and sold annually in India.

Godrej — one of the only two manufacturers left in the world (the other being Olympia), and the sole manufacturer of typewriters in India — expects manual typewriters to live for another 3-5 years before they fade into history.