5 ms·
I never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be designated to write something, shouldn'
by dartharva 1y ago
I never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be designated to write something, shouldn't you at least be capable of verifying its semantic "correctness" just by reading through it once yourself?
Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?
- jordanpg 1y agoI'm a lawyer. I write 10s of pages of text every day. "Reading through it once yourself" is obviously an imperfect solution. See, e.g., Poisson statistics. It's also slow and I bill in 6-minute increments. There is significant value in a grammar tool that protects confidentiality and is more effective than my wetware.
- Semaphor 1y agoI use it (well, languagetool) in the free version for comments on sites like this. It directly catches mistakes I make, that I'd normally only catch on re-reads. From typos, over my brain doing weird stuff, to sometimes things I simply didn't (actively) know.
- facundo_olano 1y agoAs a non native English speaker/writer there are a bunch of errors I miss, no matter how much attention I pay and how much I proofread, and these tools are useful to catch those.
- speedgoose 1y agoHave you considered that some people aren’t 100% fluent in English but still competent?
- victorbjorklund 1y agoI know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.
- Veen 1y agoPeople are bad at proofreading their own work. Professional writers often use third-party copy editors and proofreaders for that reason.
- Finnucane 1y agoI’m a production editor at an uni press, and I can tell you there’s not a strong correlation between professional/academic level and writing well.