I often notice that my Microsoft Word spelling, grammar and sentence checker can be somewhat misleading. Is it wholly reliable?
Wholly reliable? Nope. But definitely use it as a "first cut". It catches a lot of the stupid stuff you're not watching for.
Definitely don't leave your work without it. Although I a dinosaur t do the grammar and spelling for me: WordPerfect
My dinosaur made an error. I meant that I use a dinosaur to do the grammar and spelling for me: WordPerfect. One of the neat things is that WP offers lots of goodies, including many different languages to choose from without buying extra language packages. Very handy when you're living in Europe ;-)
It's an amazing tool to help you with your writing, but it doesn't replace you completely. We're not there yet.
Another WordPerfectionist! We will not be assimilated! That said, I will not run my texts through WordPerfect's Grammatik or MS Word or any other word processing program's grammar checker. If you want literal hours of wide-eyed hilarity and gape-mouthed disbelief, be my guest. But having subjected gobbets of major published works to its techo-mercies (just for a test), I would say that the typical grammar check program is about as reliable as a leaky thermometer.
I actually recommend turning on most of the grammatical rules that Word can check for, even the ones marked as stylistic suggestion. You can easily ignore the things that Word complains about if you know it is grammatically sound, but often times, I find that it does help in rethinking how you can better write your sentences. That is beside the fact that Word may be able to catch errors you may have overlooked.
Yes, but you're from the greatest nation in the world (my daughter went to High School in Pennsylvania in '08 for a student exchange program), but I'm from a small country. We all speak Dutch down here. At least, 17 million people are. And The Netherlands is even smaller than Florida, if I'm not mistaken. So to me the Spell- and Grammar offered by a leaky thermometer, are quite handy. Erm, does this mean that I write like a leaky thermometer
Want to hear something funny? I learned WordPerfect 5.1 in Dutch! I was studying in the UK and bought my first computer used from a couple (American husband, Dutch wife) who bought the computer and the software in the Netherlands. Do I speak Dutch? No, but I had enough German to figure it out. Oh, yeah. The dictionary was set on Dutch, too. Took me a long time to figure out how to switch it to English.
I'd only ever recommend the spell checker as it's generally accurate like 99% of the time. Sometimes, certain odd words are underlined but a quick check online proves it wrong. The rest of the time, it catches typos and mispellings without issue. Grammar checker is unreliable for the most part. You should have little need for that if you're writing to be published in, assumingly, English. Any real issues should be caught by you, beta readers, or the editors and proofreaders though there should be very little, if any, grammatical issues.
Use every tool available to you, but trust none completely. No grammar tool is completely accurate, and not every correctly spelled word is the word that is correct in that context. There is no substitute for mastering your most fundamental tool - language. There are no viable shortcuts.
