Microsoft Word - Not your friend for grammar checks
Here are a few paragraphs that I wrote when I woke up this morning on my laptop. They are in italics below.
Swahili are language for Africa big, small. I owe What you am Telling no? No own wandering at bar racing are bad for company in Africa English, whether Congo, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand-image won’t bad for processes in one Africa or and many Asia companies.
Woody woodlands aren’t grassy main. Woods are good. Woods am great. Woods is good as McDonald’s is good brand. Maintain are good brand. 1Keychain are good brand. MFC and Nikes extinct ex exogenous exotic extraterrestrial exuberant exorcist good grand. Mike’s and Adidas is good brand.
Adverts good for copious cleaner company none Finance. Show me honey money??!! I.T, IT, it , operations or, and accounting ; good for is human / resources. IT, : humans and is resource accounting not great though good for branding for bad is company and good as manager. Management manage manger mongrel is meager merger ampersand moisturizer moisture manure on mistake is no mistake.
The Problem with Microsoft Word
What did you notice in the above few paragraphs? Apart from the fact that most of the sentences are plain non-sense, can you guess what is special about this gibberish? If you cut and paste the above text into a new document in your latest version of the Microsoft Word software and run a grammar check, this text goes through as a completely flawless, faultless and golden document! MS Word suggests zero corrections in spellings and grammar. There are no refinements required either. No punctuation is wrong here, and hence you are a flawless writer for writing this - that is, if you depended on Microsoft Word to verify your grammar credentials.
First of all, a disclaimer. Microsoft has never claimed that its Word software is anyone’s Grammar teacher.
Due to the pervasiveness of Microsoft Word across the globe as the de-facto editor of business documentation, it is often mistakenly identified also as the de-facto spell checking and grammar checking tool. It does a great job of spell-checking and also provides you with a facility to custom-build your own dictionary. It does a great job in many other aspects of documentation as well. Its user-friendliness, seamless integration with almost any other document editor, internet protocols, its internationalization, plug-ins, add-ons, etc., are the stuff of legends in terms of the last quarter century, an era of the evolution of business and personal computing.
Why Grammar Checking is Complex
The above write-up which is ridden with complete non-sensical phrases and ungrammatical usage of the language is testimony that Microsoft Word simply does not have the engine behind it to understand the language constructs that is required to do grammar checking. Checking the spelling is trivial when compared to checking the grammar. Spellcheck involves at its core, a finite, even if it is a huge number, set of comparisons with a static list of all potential terms in the language. In the case of checking for grammar, effectiveness and accuracy depend on the number of ways a sentence can be correctly and incorrectly constructed, and the ability of the software to identify the correct and the incorrect usage, flag them where and why they are incorrect. It is a much bigger challenge.
The inherent complexity of grammar checking also lies in the fact that a sentence can be correct only in a few ways but can be incorrect in multiple ways. Also, the number of ways a thought can be expressed can be innumerable. The different contexts, senses, moods, tones, diction, idioms and phraseology that writers use can often be bamboozling to even the best of the language practitioners and scholars. If one were to codify all of that into a computer program, however sophisticated and modern it might be, and with whatever technological advancements it might employ, it is a humongous task. In this light, we can safely suggest that the beauty of a language is in its infinite ways of branching out creatively yet remaining firmly fixed in a few sets of basic grammatical rules!
Conclusion
The conclusion is that Microsoft Word should not be taken as your grammar teacher, mentor or even a reliable companion for English grammar. It must be used for purposes for which it is hugely popular. Writing properly within the rules of English grammar is something one must learn. Sustainable and effective learning cannot happen through a tool that corrects you as soon as you commit a mistake. The reason why we see so many language mistakes around us in text written on paper (and paradoxically, very few spelling mistakes when we see a document edited with a computer software) is that people in general and students in particular are not given a chance to learn a language the hard way, but are mollycoddled with spelling-checkers, auto-suggesting and auto-correcting software, on their laptops, mobiles and on the internet. In the case of spelling, this is not as damaging. However, in the case of the usage of grammatically correct language, utmost care should be taken in picking the appropriate process of learning.
As you know, the use of good grammar can make or break your personal image, your institution’s brand and good-will. And in the end, the joy of encountering good writing and the proper use of any language is a joy that cannot be put into words!
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