Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's look at grammar checking on your Mac.
So here I've typed a bunch of sentences which all have grammar mistakes in them.
I've done them in TextEdit.
Now in TextEdit, as you can in Mail and some other Apps in the Mac, you can go to Edit/Spelling
and Grammar and turn on Check Grammar with Spelling and this will add grammar checking
to the Spell Checker here.
Instead of getting a red underline for a misspelled word you get a green underline for something
that it feels is grammatically incorrect.
So how well does it work?
Well, not too well because most of the mistakes here have been missed.
See there is no magic to this.
Spell checking is very easy.
It simply looks at a list of words and if it is not in the list of words then it must
be a misspelled word.
Grammar checking is very difficult compared to that because it has to look at all the
context of the words around it, figure out certain rules and everything like that.
So it is very difficult for a computer to actually do accurate grammar checking as we
are going to see here.
So it will do some simple things basically to have you avoid some mistakes but it is
no substitution for knowing the correct grammar yourself.
So let's take a look at what it did here.
It was able to correctly figure out that I used the wrong form of the word its here.
If I were actually able to roll over it I can see that it gives me the grammar rule
or at least it gives me an idea of a substitution here.
I can also Control click or right click on it and I can get the substitution right there.
Also I can select Ignore Grammar if I know I'm right.
Because just as it won't get some errors it will show you some that are not really there.
Here it completely missed the fact that I should be using whom here.
The rest of these all have various different mistakes in it.
Some are really obvious like the wrong form of the word your, it should be you're, and
also like down here I am using the wrong to, it should be too.
But it did get the error here and it did figure out here that it should be have.
It is interesting if I Control click on been it says it doesn't really give me substitution
but it says it may not agree with what is going on.
If I go over of it says consider have and that's where the real problem is.
It should be have instead of of.
So how about Pages.
You would think Pages would be able to do better.
But Pages, believe it or not, doesn't have any grammar checking.
Well, at least not any obvious grammar checking.
You go down to Edit/Spelling it is just missing from there.
But you've got proofreading.
You can go to the Proof Reader here and it will give you suggestions.
So the very first suggestion here has nothing to do with grammar, it is just giving you
a notice that nice is a weak modifier.
Let's go to the next and yes it did pick this one up.
It should be have instead of of.
But that's it!
It really didn't pick of any of the rest here.
So it does do a little bit of grammar but it certainly not enough here.
So you think the best App for this might be Microsoft Word.
After all it has been around for so long, so many versions of Microsoft Word.
They've had plenty of time to improve it.
And sure enough when I put the same text here I see it gets a lot more.
It gets the its, it gets the who, and it also figures out here like things which, if I Control
click on it will say things that.
It figures out that it should be nor instead of or here.
It misses some of these.
You get to this one here and it figures out here it should be have and even figures out
that this should be too.
So it is better than the rest but it is still not perfect.
Even a web based app that I was able to copy and paste some text into, didn't catch everything.
See it got a few of the things in here and you can see that each one of these, the web
site, Word and Pages and just TextEdit, got something different.
So you can see that they are all using different ways of checking for grammar.
So the conclusion is that there is no fool proof way to have your Mac check your grammar
for you.
You have to know the grammar yourself.
But you can have these grammar checkers as kind of a backup.
Actually they are more useful as spell checkers because when you spell a word incorrectly
but you spell it so that it is a different word it won't catch it because it is a correctly
spelled word.
But a grammar checker may see that as completely not making any sense because you are using
the wrong word there and may give you that green underline so that you can then identify
that you put the wrong word there or misspelled a word and make the correction.
So grammar checker is actually more useful as a spell checker and also it will help with
some general rules.
Keep in mind just because some of the examples I showed didn't catch common grammar mistakes
doesn't mean that that grammar mistake isn't in those databases.
It is just perhaps that sentence, the way I phrased it, didn't trigger it.
So you might find that for instance too instead of to or vice versa in another circumstance
just not in the one I used.
I hope you found this useful.
There is certainly no reason not to have this turned on so at least it can catch a few more
grammar mistakes than you wouldn't otherwise.
But it is also not a good idea to rely on this at all for actually checking your grammar.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.