Go ask your Grammer

Why I Use WordPerfect

Honestly, this is not the reason I use WordPerfect. I don’t much care for WordPerfect’s Grammatik or any other Grammar Checker. I do love the underline feature on misspelled words. But this article is a good example of how monopolies do not encourage innovation and improvements.

Here are excerpts from the article “A Word to the unwise — program’s grammar check isn’t so smart” (Click the link for the full article)

“Microsoft the company should big improve Word grammar check.

“No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. That sentence is a confusing jumble. However, it is perfectly fine in the assessment of Microsoft Word’s built-in grammar checker, which detects no problem with the prose.”

Microsoft debuted a grammar checker in Word back in 1997. (WordPerfect debuted Grammatik much earlier, around 1990 if I remember right, because we tried to get it for our WordPerfect 5.0 and found it only worked on the current WordPerfect 5.1 program, but anyway…) The checker apparently is not that good. Here are samples that the current Word 2003 passed without questioning…

“Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. … McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. … Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft.”

I decided to run my own tests. That paragraph, in my trusty copy of WordPerfect 9, was stopped 10 times for suggestions. In Word 2000, I pressed Tools, Spelling and Grammar, and it said it was complete. I tried it again, thinking I must have done something wrong (see the word “advertisings”) and it again told me it was complete, press OK to finish. (As the article points out, they even “dialed down the sensitivity” of the checker in the 2002 version, so mine should have been an even better test)

It’s just that if a company can take in $7.1 billion last year on Microsoft Office products alone, they should be able to afford some of that complex research they complain is so difficult in the article, to find a way to do what their stamped out competition has done for years.

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