I have not found any that I would deem adequate. I don't personally believe the technology is quite there yet. Perhaps some others will know of some programs with which I am not yet familiar. If you find one let us know.
THe best software is in one's brain, isn't it? Upgradable and can be updated. What's better as a grammar help than writingforums.org, with its ecletic range of brains, to assist anyone with a question. How does a computer with the computing power 1 thousandth (random number to add credibility ) of that of a bee compare to the human brain?
Aside from the Microsoft suite checkers, which are adequate but not to be trusted implicitly, Cogito recently gave me this link for a browser-integrated spell (not necessarily grammar) checker. As he said, it may or may not work for other spelling checkers or other browsers. The referenced site is http://www.iespell.com/.
English (and other natural languages) are what are known as context sensitive grammars. This type of grammar is computationally impossible to check completely, even without the added complication that some words can have multiple meanings which can alter the structure of te sentence (the parse tree). What this means is that any such software will be inherently imperfect. It can make assumptions and guesses that may be helpful, or may be very misleading. You won't find software that can correctly analyze all English writing for grammatical correctness, and some things will remain ambiguous. Fortunately, many of these cases will make a human reader ho "Huh?" as well.
Your average word processor has the ability to check grammar. On the other hand, because of the reasons already mentioned, you really are better off learning how to proof read for yourself, or find friends who can do it for you.
folks who want to be writers, really need to not need a grammar checker! lacking the requisite skills to write marketable work, one just won't make it in the tough world out there, whether or not one has a 'good' grammar/spell-checker...
Yeah, I would curious if there is a software that is good as a human proofreader. Usually once I am done my story, or novel I send it to a critique who butchers it, and I revise, revise, revise.
of course we can't always catch our own goofs, which is why writers need to be able to proofread their own work and must be good enough at grammar, punctuation, spelling, syntax, et al., to be able to catch their own mistakes and not rely on a software program that is so flawed it can't be relied upon...
Some slip-ups will still fall through the cracks. I find them in the writings of the best authors in the business. All you can hope to do is to produce a clean enough manuscript that it looks like a professional wrote it with pride.
