I do most of my writing on OpenOffice’s word processor. It’s a reliable program, and it can do just about everything that Microsoft’s word processor can do, along with a few things that it can’t (PDF exporting, for example). And, best of all, OpenOffice is free. However, when I began this fifth revision cycle for Leah, I opened up an old version of MS Word that’s on my computer and used it to run Word’s grammar check program. What I like to use the grammar check for is to identify potential problems that don’t usually occur to me, such as overuse of the passive voice. It’s a quick and easy way for me to run through the entire manuscript and find additional problems in my writing that I might have missed.
When I teach word processing, though, I tell my students to never use MS Word’s grammar checker. The reason is that while it does sometimes offer good suggestions, it just as often offers bad suggestions. I use it because, hopefully, I’m experienced enough at writing that I can make a judgment call as to whether the grammar checker’s advice is good advice or not. Most of my students don’t have that same level of experience, and if I don’t discourage them from using the grammar function, then many of them will just blindly make whatever change the program suggests — and that’s always a bad idea. The problem, obviously, is that the word processor doesn’t know what a writer intends to write. The program is simply following an algorithm, and when the right words appear in a particular order, the program flags it and offers the best available suggestion. It makes a lot of bad suggestions, though.
For example, following a line of dialogue by Leah’s father, I wrote, “Mr. Nells said.” The grammar checker flagged this, however, and suggested that I write, “Mr. Nells, said.” What?! Why? Inserting a comma before “said” makes absolutely no sense in that context. So I know when I run the program that I’m going to see weird suggestions like that, but for me, the overall benefit of the grammar check function outweighs the potential risk of accidentally following one or two bad suggestions.
