thewho@portia.Stanford.EDU (Derek Fong) (03/13/90)
Has anyone received their complementary copy of Grammatik Mac via the
contest yet? How long does it take to get the thing?
Then again, I just read a review which dampened my enthusiasm of getting it.
Here's the review:
Computer Comment
United Press International
Writing is difficult for many people, but a new writing aid for
Macintosh computers could make it downright impossible.
Reference Software boasts its new Grammatik Mac writing-improvement
program ``will improve your writing in 30 days or your money back.''
Spending 30 days with Grammatik Mac, however, could render users
incapable of writing the San Francisco software publisher to request the
promised refund.
The program is a mishmash of bells and whistles that calls
attention to what it perceives as errors and suggests revisions. But the
errors it cites often are not errors, and the revisions it suggests are
sometimes inane or, worse erroneous.
An excerpt from a basic reading primer -- the old story of Dick and
Jane and their dog Spot -- stumped Grammatik Mac. The program was tripped
up by the sentence: ``Dick and Jane play with Spot.''
``No verb found,'' Grammatik Mac protested. ``This may be an
incomplete sentence.''
Wrong.
In another test, it checked the sentence, ``The advice Grammatik
Mac gives is hard to accept.''
The program flagged the word ``accept'' and advised:
```Accept' means to receive: `Please accept my offer.' `Except'
means to leave out: `Except the last provision of the contract.'''
Beside the ``Replace With'' button it displayed the word
``effect.'' That is dead wrong.
While the program was only suggesting that ``accept'' might be
wrong, it appeared to be recommending the incorrect word. That is not
the kind of help a writer unsure of grammar needs.
The program had similar problems with ``affect'' and ``effect,''
and provided equally misleading advice.
It also is inconsistent. It will detect a grammar error in a
document, and miss the same error in a copy of that document.
Some errors it will not find at all. It detected nothing wrong with
this sentence: ``Programmers work in an office wear people talk strange
and where odd clothing.''
Grammatik Mac features an array of eye-catching features -- like a
chart that compares the readability of your document to the Gettysburg
Address, a Hemingway short story and an insurance policy.
It also allows users to customize the comparison chart by replacing
the readability statistics for one or more of the three standard
documents. You could, for example, substitute a first draft of something
you are writing for the insurance policy, then use the comparison
feature to track your progress.
Or you could replace the Hemingway story statistics with your
company's model sales proposal and check your work against that
standard.
Grammatik Mac provides readability statistics on the Flesch Reading
Ease scale, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale and Gunning's Fog
Index.
It also provides statistics on the average length of paragraphs,
sentences and words -- in both letters and syllables -- and a plethora of
other trivia.
But it fails to accomplish its primary tasks. Its grammar and
punctuation checkers are inconsistent, and its spelling checker is
cumbersome.
As for style, when fed a passage from Shakespeare -- Portia's speech
from ``The Merchant of Venice'' about the quality of mercy -- Grammatik
Mac pronounced it choppy and suggested revision.
Grammatik Mac also is plagued by bugs.
Running under MultiFinder, icons in the Grammatik Mac folder would
frequently disappear when I quit the application. When I closed and
reopened the folder, they reappeared.
The program also failed to recognize paragraphs -- an significant
shortcoming, since the number of sentences per paragraphs is one factor
used in assessing readability.
Only once could I make it discern paragraphs -- and that was when I
used it to check the ``Read Me'' file in the Grammatik Mac folder.
It failed in all other attempts, using documents in Macwrite and
Microsoft Word 4.0 formats as well as documents created with those word
processors and stored as plain text.
The supplemental documentation cautions that Grammatik Mac may not
recognize paragraphs unless documents are stored using the ``Save As''
option. I tried using both the Save As and the quick Save options, and
in no case could I make the program recognize paragraphs.
Strangely, paragraph marks appeared on the screen when documents
were checked in the program's fully interactive mode, but the document
statistics file consistently showed the documents as one long paragraph.
Ironically, the program comes with an excellent book on writing by
veteran newspaper editor DeWitt H. Scott. Scott's book, ``Secrets of
Successful Writing,'' should be standard equipment for anyone who
writes.
Grammatik Mac, on the other hand, should be avoided.
------
Software: Grammatik Mac by Reference Software, 330 Townsend Street,
San Francisco, Calif., 94107; System requirements: Mac Plus or greater,
two 800k floppy drives or hard disk, System 5.0 or higher; Microsoft
Word, MacWrite, MacWrite II, WordPerfect; Write Now or word processor
capable of saving documents in text or RTF format; List price: $99.
Write protection: no; Reviewers evalutation (on scale of 1 to 5) 0 --
(program disks would be better used as coasters).
adv sun march 11 or thereafter
What a flame, eh? What do other users feel about it? Do you guys concur?
---Derek Fong
fong@cive.stanford.edu
thewho@portia.stanford.eduhnewstrom@x102c.ess.harris.com (Harvey Newstrom) (03/15/90)
About Grammatik Mac from Reference Software: Norman Graham says: |[....] and got an error 32002-408323 from it before I could do anything. |[....] Grammatik Mac 1.0 has a problem running with 32-bit quickdraw[...]. |[....] |In summary, kudos to Reference Software for being so cooperative. Mark Nagel says: |[....] about the MS Word 4.0 crashing behavior, [....] |[....] Time frame until a fix is available? About 2 months, maybe more. |[....] |Oh well, I'm impressed enough with the product that I'll give them a chance. I have also run into problems with Grammatik Mac. It won't work with MacWrite II and the multifinder. Like Mark, I was told that they would send me a new version, but it will be a couple of months. I also am impressed enough with the product to not want to send it back. __ Harvey Newstrom (hnewstrom@x102c.ess.harris.com) (uunet!x102c!hnewstrom) formerly (hnewstrom@x102a.harris-atd.com) (uunet!x102a!hnewstrom)
nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel) (03/16/90)
thewho@portia.Stanford.EDU (Derek Fong) writes: [scathing review of Grammatik Mac] >What a flame, eh? What do other users feel about it? Do you guys concur? I do. However, I also do not think this program (or any automatic checker) should be used as the sole source of error correction. I'd expect someone writing to have a passing acquaintance with grammar rules, etc. For myself at least, Grammatik Mac points out some obscure things that I might otherwise miss. It also points out a lot of other things which are often not problems. And yes, it even offers incorrect solutions to non-problems. I generally just ignore the bad stuff, just like I ignore it when MS Word's spelling checker says I've misspelled a word I know is correct. Of course, Grammatik Mac has no "User Rules" file... I'm somewhat distressed to hear that it is inconsistent, though. I haven't seen this, but perhaps I haven't used it enough yet to notice it. -- Mark Nagel UC Irvine Department of ICS +----------------------------------------+ ARPA: nagel@ics.uci.edu | Help! Somebody! I'm being repressed! | UUCP: ucbvax!ucivax!nagel +----------------------------------------+
frank@mnetor.UUCP (Frank Kolnick) (03/16/90)
In article <10120@portia.Stanford.EDU- thewho@portia.Stanford.EDU (Derek Fong) writes:
-Has anyone received their complementary copy of Grammatik Mac via the
-contest yet? How long does it take to get the thing?
-
-Then again, I just read a review which dampened my enthusiasm of getting it.
...
- Writing is difficult for many people, but a new writing aid for
-Macintosh computers could make it downright impossible.
- Reference Software boasts its new Grammatik Mac writing-improvement
-program ``will improve your writing in 30 days or your money back.''
- Spending 30 days with Grammatik Mac, however, could render users
-incapable of writing the San Francisco software publisher to request the
-promised refund.
- The program is a mishmash of bells and whistles that calls
-attention to what it perceives as errors and suggests revisions. But the
-errors it cites often are not errors, and the revisions it suggests are
-sometimes inane or, worse erroneous.
Ah, that makes me feel better! I don't have Grammatik, but I have both
Sensible Grammar and MacProof. The above description could be applied to them
as well. I tried both on various manuals and a book I was writing, and
eventually gave up. To sort out the poor advice from the good, you have to
know more than the program does in the first place. I now doubt whether
any program (now or in the near future) can analyze style and/or grammar.
I'll admit that I bought the programs because I was lazy and thought
they could get me past the tedious mechanical errors, so that I could
focus on style and presentation. That turned out not to be the case.
A good spelling checker will weed out a significant number of typos,
especially if it checks for capitalization and common errors like
double words ("the the").
(On the other hand, if anyone *does* know of a good grammar checker,
I'd like to hear about it :-)
--
Frank Kolnick,
Basis Computer Systems Inc.
UUCP: {allegra, linus}!utzoo!mnetor!frankmwilkins@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Mark Wilkins) (03/17/90)
In article <5315@mnetor.UUCP> frank@mnetor.UUCP (Frank Kolnick) writes: >Ah, that makes me feel better! I don't have Grammatik, but I have both >Sensible Grammar and MacProof. The above description could be applied to them >as well. I tried both on various manuals and a book I was writing, and >eventually gave up. To sort out the poor advice from the good, you have to >know more than the program does in the first place. I now doubt whether >any program (now or in the near future) can analyze style and/or grammar. Well, the approach I would take if I were to attempt a new and innovative grammar-checking program would be to create a simulated (or hardware-implemented) neural network. An example of a similar project was done by a man named Sejnowski, who created a system called NETalk, which was able to read aloud, and in fact learned almost all of the common pronunciation rules of English in about sixteen hours. At any rate, a grammar-checking system could work in much the same way: the system would be "trained" by the programmers and the rules solidified, then the distributed program would use the neural net to apply the rules. One question would be whether such a thing could be efficiently implemented in software. Assuming that the minimum acceptable rate of checking is about the printing speed of a laser printer on 12 point text, or 3000 words per minute. Could it be done on a small computer like a Mac? Followups to comp.ai.neural-nets -- Mark Wilkins mwilkins@jarthur.claremont.edu