Have you ever sent an email to a colleague or potential client only to realize afterward that you wrote ‘form’ instead of ‘from’? Or, have you ever turned in a paper to a professor thinking, this paper is perfection incarnate, only to receive it back with red slashes marking verb agreement errors and sentence fragments? If you have ever found yourself in a similar situation, then you know the frustrations of relying on a grammar checking software to proofread your work.
Software companies have made enormous advances in technology, and every time my spell check finds where I’ve written ‘teh’ instead of ‘the,’ I am grateful. But language is complex, and while computer programmers are excellent at generating code that follows rules, it is nearly impossible to generate all the rules for a given language. Studies that have been conducted on the strength of software that attempts to generate these rules have found that, at best, grammar programs catch only about 50 percent of the 20 most common errors made by writers (see this University of Washington professor’s page regarding the Microsoft version).
It is becoming increasingly clear that the more we generate rules about language, the more we realize that ‘rules’ are really ‘guidelines’ and as such, are very difficult to manipulate into a computer code. People like Noam Chomsky have dedicated their life to figuring out the ‘rules’ of language. If you’ve ever studied Chomsky’s work, you’d find that for every rule, there are exceptions, and this creates an extremely complex network of guidelines about language. And Chomsky is only describing how language works, not how to use it. The folks at the Modern Language Association do more of the prescribing. But even if you read the MLA handbook, you will find exceptions to most grammar rules. This is precisely why depending on a computer program to ensure that your grammar is correct is a mistake.
What one needs with an important document – and let’s face it, when that email goes to a client, or that paper goes to a professor, it’s important – is a set of human eyes. Where a computer may not be able to understand complexities, a human can. When you want to present your work to someone who it is essential that you impress, you want to make sure it is the best that it can be. You may have brilliant ideas, but the moment a reader sees a misspelling or an incorrect semicolon, you will lose their trust. If you want to ensure that a reader is evaluating you on your ideas, rather than your grammar, you must be sure that the text you produce is clean. The best way to ensure a clean text is to get someone to read it who knows the rules of language, but even more, who knows when these rules have exceptions.
Lane Patterson is a writer for Alphabetix, Editing and Writing Services. Alphabetix is committed to helping students, writers, and marketing professionals craft their best work with the best proofreading, editing, writing, and manuscript consultation available.
Visit www.alphabetix.net for more information.
Source: www.isnare.com
