Many of us, no matter native or non-native speakers of English, often have problems with grammar, spelling, sentence structure and references when it comes to academic purposes. And no wonder since we don’t apply all those complicated rules in daily use. With this in mind, some students proofread the papers multiple times by themselves, others trust MS Word grammar checker and other services or do both. But which option is really reliable and what threats do automatic grammar checkers carry?
Grammar checkers appeared in the early 1970s to improve punctuation and style inconsistencies in printed documents, but not actually grammar. By 1992, when Microsoft Word included proofreading as a feature of Word, such checkers were add-on programs. However, some years after, a huge number of them appeared throughout the internet. One of the old ones is more or less famous LanguageTool.
Modern checkers, growing like mushrooms under the rain, try to focus on grammar and stylistic issues. The algorithm of their work should recognize those issues based on the context of the surrounding words, thus, the programs are artificially intelligent, being able to detect different sentences and their structure, correct various errors, etc. So, are they really that almighty?
Muphry’s Law is when you make a grammar mistake while trying to correct someone else’s grammar.
— Fact (@Fact) 20 января 2016
Nowadays, when you google online grammar checker, dozens of them start flooding your searching page at once. Obviously, you pick the one from the top, hoping that this one is more popular because it is more trusted, therefore, may provide a quality check. So we’ve decided to follow these steps. We take the random website out of top 5 which has appeared on our screen, so welcome Reverso with its Ginger software. Along with grammar check, it offers spelling improvement, definition and synonym search. Quiet cool, huh? But right now we’re interested in the former. So we put “I does homework”, where the mistake is obvious and here’s what we get:
Wow, look at the result, the grammar is even automatically corrected for you! However, we’ve decided to test this checker with another, a bit complicated task, “I and Bob goes to school” (the correct variant would be “Bob and I go to school”). Pretty simple, let’s give it a go. And here it comes:
Oops! No mistake detected, not even close. But this sentence is so easy that anyone can fix it without a robot helper, so how can we trust such thing? Our experts don’t give up and check another leading service, SpellCheckPlus, and we repeat the procedure:
Looks good with the first example, this checker explains our mistake and gives some examples to show its competency. Moreover, you can even get a so-called grammar score to see the percent of your mistakes. But no way, what a coincidence, the same failure with the second one! Can we sum up the topic already and forget about the mentioned software? Don’t hurry, these were only some free tools to quickly check simple sentences.
Don’t hurry, these were only some free tools to quickly check simple sentences. You won’t be surprised to hear the famous name here, which is Grammarly, an intelligent grammar and plagiarism checker. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it either per month or per year, but the good news is – it works! Here how it deals with the problem
We are sure, you will be pleased with such professional help. Grammarly boasts to be
- the most powerful engine to fix grammatic and structural mistakes in academic writing;
- the most sensitive plagiarism checker and reference manager;
- spelling and punctuation helper;
- vocabulary enhancer.
Assignment Expert service, taking one of the top positions in the field of homework help providers, also advises customers to also rely on self-proofreading apart from Grammarly. And also, we can always help you with your papers as well on even more professional level because our company gathers the most prominent experts in grammar who are ready to check your work or help with an advice. Our staff counts many teachers of English who are able to explain any material from your course program that you don’t understand, help in writing essays and projects, making presentations and speeches. You will get help from real people, not machines, so think twice before choosing a method of checking your work. Good luck with that!
