English Grammar Checker Reviews

We decided to put some free and commercial grammar checker software to the test. The results were surprising.

With the march of globalization as more and more jobs become outsourced to India and to the Philippines certain skills such as good written English are becoming more important than ever. These are skills that outsourced workers typically lack as you may have already discovered with your outsourcing. Sadly, a lot of us (including Maggie and I) didn’t put much effort into English at school, and it’s reflected in our writing style. However, there may be a solution for those of us with grammar and spelling phobias.

It can be difficult to find someone to review articles and blog posts for grammar and spelling. Even if you are good at English it’s all too easy to let errors slip into your work. Even expert writers need to submit their articles for independent review. Our solution to this problem was to find out what was available in the way of automated grammar checkers.

I am no English Professor so I decided to use some grammar tests for evaluating grammar checkers developed by Daniel Kies from the Department of English at the College of DuPage. From his study, the grammar checkers built into Microsoft Word and WordPerfect did surprisingly well even against the dedicated grammar checkers at least on the Apple platform. We also found the same to be true for the spelling checkers we evaluated for the Windows platform.

Grammar Check Anywhere and Gramatica were mentioned by a very good article on grammar checkers at Wikipedia. Because they both offered a free introductory trial, we decided to test them out. In addition, from our Google searching, we found that White Smoke was particularly popular. White Smoke also has a free online grammar checker where you can cut-and-paste individual sentences, so we decided to test White Smoke out as well.

TIP: White Smoke’s free online grammar checker is a great on-the-fly option if you are unsure of the grammar of a particular sentence.

We also tested AbiWord and its grammar plug-in but since it only underlines possible mistakes and does not offer any suggestions on how to correct the mistakes, we decided to discount it as an option.

Here are our results based on a tally of what each tool identified from Daniel’s 20 grammar mistake tests.

PRODUCT	SCORE	%
White Smoke	9/20	45%
Microsoft Word	6/20	30%
Grammar Check Anywhere	5/20	25%
Grammatica	2/20	10%

We were quite disappointed with Grammar Check Anywhere and Grammatica as they gave a lot of wrong information as well as scoring bad. However, you also need to keep in mind that some of the products may perform better with completely different test data. Our suggestion is that you just use the online free version of White Smoke and supplement this with a Microsoft Word grammar check.

Realizing that some of our previous posts are less than satisfactory we actually did decide to purchase White Smoke and will be correcting a lot of our older posts over time. We will also use the grammar checker built into Microsoft Word as an added precaution.

It could be argued that bad grammar and spelling even in a great article only leaves your readers with a bad impression of your business. It implies that you don’t really care and are unprofessional in your approach. So join us on an old blog post grammar bug hunt today!

About Danny Sheehan

Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
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