Good English Grammar checker?

users
#1

Hi all,
I'm running on an old G5 Powermac on OS 10.5.8 Leopard.

Does LibreOffice have a good grammar checker?

Cheers!

eclipsenow.wordpress.com
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#2

That would depend on what you mean by "good".

./tony
(a linguist and former English teacher)

#3

Catching passive voice and other basic grammar?

http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/
Integral Fast Reactors are GenIV nuclear power plants that eat nuclear waste! There is so much waste to burn that we could power the world for 500 years just on today's nuclear waste! Nuclear waste is now worth $30 trillion dollars because it could run the global economy for 5 centuries. IFR's also burn plutonium from nuclear bombs. Nuclear waste, it's not the problem, it's the solution!

#4

It will catch disagreement between subect and predicate, in most
cases, although sometimes erroneously,
as well as adjective and antecedent disagreements, usually.
I wouldn't expect it to catch passive voice.
I believe it allows folks to get away with mixing up
your and you're;
they're, there, their;
to, too, two;
and, it won't stop anyone from committing such atrocities as
"There's apples in the fridge".
I would consider that the most basic of grammar.
It won't correct the use of object pronouns for subjects, or
vice-versa, which is a common error.
It seems to know little or nothing of standard punctuation.
It does not recognize either, run-on sentences, or incomplete ones (fragments).
It doesn't mind dangling participles.
The vast majority of errors it will catch are so obvious as to render
it useless,
and the less obvious "errors" it catches are often not errors.
It allows, for instance, the following abomination to go uncorrected:
"Me and her went to by one horses."
I find myself frequently correcting its corrections.
Personally, I'd like to know how to disable it, while retaining
spellcheck for catching typos,
but, it seems it's an all-or-nothing affair, sadly.
http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/04/dont-mind-your-language…/

./tony

#5

Thanks you, tony, that seems to sum it up rather nicely. I think it
will occasionally catch the homonyms you listed, but rarely.

I too would prefer it wasn't there. One thing that really drove me up
the wall was in an earlier incarnation where I was using an ordinary
noun as a proper noun, and it kept not realizing that a first letter
capital actually meant something different.... (That's been fixed.)

#6

Are you telling us there is a Grammar Checker that will catch
more then a miss spelling ward or too?

Being someone who has suffered a stroke and has problems
with catching anything that is not a misspelling that is not caught
by the spell checker withing the word processor or the email client.

I would love to have some system for American English that would
highlight my mistakes without me having to listen to a bad
text-to-speech system reading my document back to me.

So Yes or No. Is there something for LibreOffice to do more
than just grammar checking or underline a sentence and you
have to figure out that you got the parts of speech wrong or
it was to be "aunt" instead of "ant"?

#7

Not sure which "you" you mean, but I have never seen a good grammar
checker anywhere. Period.

Way back in the stone age (of WordStar), there was a thing called
GrammaTek that did a really bad job of grammar-checking, but things
have progressed a little since then.

Word's grammar checker is the best one I've seen although recently
I've noticed that LO is flagging some grammar errors and flagging them
for me. Some are intentional due to the way I write or a point I'm
trying to make, but in general it makes me look at something that
might be wrong.

If you right-click a grammar-highlighted word or phrase, it should
tell you what it thinks is wrong with it.

However, grammar checkers don't catch misspelled words (spell checkers
do that), they sometimes catch misapplied homonyms, which is not the
same thing although it is or can be useful.

Personally, I prefer a human proof-reader, even if it's me, because at
least with English, grammar is too complex for most (not all) programs
to do it justice, whereas I can usually spot a grammo while reading
because they tend to jar my understanding enough to look twice.

#8

Hi :slight_smile:

Yes, re-reading a document yourself is quite effective but if you made the
mistake in the first place you are the least likely person to spot it. Another
person, almost anyone is often better.

There is a similar problem, perhaps the same one in many ways, to do with
translation software. Things like Babel fish or google-translate can give a
good starting point but do create some hilariously bad errors.

Take a phrase "out of sight, out of mind" meaning something like "if you can't
see the problem then don't worry about it (yet)". Translate it and then
translate it back and find it warped into something bizarre like "invisible
idiot". Or try "Pull the other leg (it's got bells on)" presumably a reference
to Morris Dancing and means something like "I think you are trying to fool me
into believing something ridiculous for fun". Sometimes it is difficult to
avoid odd phrases but even if writing is kept bland enough there can still be
problems that are unclear until a translation is attempted.

The line "Good English Grammar checker?" looks fairly appalling to me but it
makes sense and is perfect for a subject-line as it gets straight to the point
and is very informative. Subject-lines are often good when they are a bit like
txtin language but less extreme (Xtrim?).#

My grammar is often bad but at the moment she's in the kitchen making tea.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#9

What I really need to find is a Grammar checker that will spot
things that I miss with my "stroke damaged brain" or someone
with the symptoms of Dyslexia. People like me have a problem
with spotting missing words or wrong words for the text sentence.

The spell checker works wonders for someone who find it hard to
remember how to spell words that were ease before the stroke.
Actually it is easier for me to type at times then speak the words.

I use to be able to have my wife proof read my documents, but
she developed Alzheimer's and now lives in a nursing facility
not remembering who I am or how to read well. She was the
daughter of a college professor and use to proof read his student's
essays for misspelling and grammar errors. She was in high school
at that time and she was "grading" college level papers for their
spelling and grammar. This was before the computer was a desktop
machine.

I need some system that can do even half as well as my wife did for
me. I need a system to go over my documents to check all the errors
that it can find for wrong word usage, part of speech error, and
other things that are common besides spelling errors. I want my
documents to read at the college level, instead of something that
has mistakes a 12 year old would be able to figure out and fix.
There was some Internet service that was able to look at your
document and tell you at what level of communication it was for.
Personal, Business, Technical, or even Legal, or something like
that. So it would be nice to have some extension to my word
processor to find these grammar issues and help me fix them
easily.

#10

You're asking for way more than a computer will EVER do.
I'm a language professional (translator/interpret), and a hacker, and
I tell you, computers will
never fully replace translators or editors.
Computers may be useful in such areas, but their work will always, always
have to looked over by a competent, human editor prior to being
"perfected" for publication.
The idea of a "universal translator" (as seen on Star Trek) is just a
pipe dream.
A universal editor would be no different.
No system or program, not MSOrifice or LibreOffice or any other includes
the feature with the level of accuracy/capacity that you seek.

./tony

#11

That pretty much says it all.

In webmaster's situation, I would just use what's available and hope
for the best.

LO picks up some of the problems you've mentioned, but not all, and
you still have to look at each one to see what the problem is.

IMO, Word is slightly better than LO, which is better than what OO had
when I was using it (before LO beta1 came out). Don't know about
others like WordPerfect, etc.

#12

Hi :slight_smile:

Don't aim at being perfect. There is no such thing anyway and it takes too
long. The trick is probably to respond well to criticism and perhaps build in
some way of correcting later. Don't worry.

People here might be willing to quickly proof-read some things if there is
somewhere such as google docs that you can place a rough draft?

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#13

I know that no system is perfect, but I could use whatever help there is
out there for these tasks. There was talk on the OOo list a while back
about a Grammar add-on project, but I do not know it it ever got finished.

It would be nice to have an option for "sound alike" words like "aunt" and "ant".
Of course it would be nice if I could spell properly, or close enough for the
spell checker to give me a list that has the word I am looking for.

So does any one know of some free system that would run on Ubuntu
that does more than LO does for grammar checking? Even a stand alone
package would help.

#14

The one that I really hated was an OOo extension - language lab, I
think. They had two grammar checker / thesaurus add-ons and I thought
this one was better, then I wound up turning it off because it flagged
every possible error (most of which weren't). I didn't see anything
like this on the TDF site.

You might find it more useful than I did, but again I don't recommend it.

As for stand-alone grammar checkers, you might have luck with Google....

#15

The one on LibrePlanet for LO is listed as LanguageTool. [OOo has it as well].
I installed that one the other day. Is this the one you hate or
the one you like.

#16

:

The one on LibrePlanet for LO is listed as LanguageTool. [OOo has it as
well].
I installed that one the other day.  Is this the one you hate or
the one you like.

I think that was the one I hate. The one built into LO works fine for
me right now.

Try it out and see what you think, don't take my word for it. YMMV.

#17

You can try LanguageTool (www.languagetool.org), which is what I use. I'm
also helping out a little with the English rules.