Grammar check fever (he got it bad)
Say you’re a professor in America today, and you want to help your students improve their English grammar. Do you:
a) Assign lots of small papers and stock up on red pens
b) Hint to your classes that the campus writing center has really good coffee, maybe they should check it out sometime
c) Launch a public crusade to villainize word processors’ grammar checkers for not doing their job
d) Launch a public crusade to villainize public school English instructors for not doing their job
e) Blame it on the internet
(Okay, so e was just for fun.)
A marking and e-commerce professor at the University of Washington has decided on a version of option c. Sandeep Krishnamurthy has been running tests on MS Word to demonstrate its grammar checker’s inadequacies, ever since a student turned in a terrible paper which she swore had been grammar checked. MSNBC has the story (originally in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but that link will probably run out in a few days):
The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue.
“If you’re a grad student turning in your term paper, and you think grammar check has completely checked your paper, I have news for you — it really hasn’t,” he said.
The articles (and Krishnamurthy’s website) are quick to point out that this isn’t just Microsoft’s problem - every word processor’s grammar checker is inadequate - and that the task of making a sufficiently human-like processor is just plain really, really hard. I don’t know much about natural language processing programs, but I can only imagine the difficulties of getting them to interpret grammaticality (which, let’s not forget, is different in important ways from everyday notions of grammar) with the same level of nuance that a human being does. And so can MS:
Microsoft calls that the fundamental issue. Responding to an inquiry about Krishnamurthy’s examples, the Microsoft Office group said in a statement that the grammar checker “was created to be a guide and a tool, not a perfect proofreader.” Microsoft also makes that point in Word’s product documentation.
The statement added, “It is possible to list a number of sentences that you would expect the Word grammar checker to catch that it doesn’t. But that doesn’t represent real-world usage. The Word grammar checker is designed to catch the kinds of errors that ordinary users make in normal writing situations.”
It would be possible to “dial up the sensitivity” of the Word grammar checker to catch more errors, the company said. However, that could also cause it to flag sentences considered correct in colloquial usage.
Dude. If there’s a problem here, it’s not that grammar check is inadequate, it’s that we have access to grammar check. This is an obvious point: we come to rely on the machine to fix our crappy prose for us. This is an interesting case of blame on technology, because this viewpoint isn’t anti-technology; it’s, like, hyper-pro-technology, asking more of technology so we can use it even more. But it is really misplaced blame, and it brings up some important issues about technology and language. If we hold Microsoft accountable for having an imperfect grammar checker, don’t we admit to our reliance on it? We relinquish trust in our own intellects and abilities - and isn’t developing those the ultimately edifying, self-satisfying part of the process of learning to write and communicate? It seems that making grammar check better will just make us more incompetent than we already are by removing any impetus to improve. [Note: There are also obvious issues to discuss here regarding prescriptivism (i.e., Whose grammar?), but I'm not going there for now. Comments?]
I admittedly come from a middle perspective: I learned to write before word processors were standard, indispensable tools, so I learned to edit myself; yet, I’m young enough to have had computers completely integrated into my life by the time I hit college. I’ve had it both ways. But critically, I was a decent enough writer at a young enough age to understand that many of the things my word processor told me were wrong were actually exactly right for my purposes (e.g., Word’s annoying insistence on the active voice). So even if someone told me, “Your word processor is 100% accurate,” I would not have believed them, and I would never, ever hit “accept all changes.”
I recognize that not everyone has a natural tendency toward well-formedness. According to Krishnamurthy, those people are the ones who get really screwed by Grammar Check:
As a result of my testing, I am convinced that this feature works well for good writers and not for bad ones. Good writers follow most of the rules and this feature can help them on the margins. If you are a bad writer with a poor understanding of the rules, this feature will not help you at all. This is, clearly, a problem. The feature does not help those who can most benefit from it.
No offense, but - duh. If you don’t write well, no machine is going to fix it for you - there’s simply too much to be done. If you do write well, you either a) don’t need the machine, or b) know how to negotiate the machine. Krishnamurthy’s site includes a handout on “Top Writing Mistakes Made By My Business Students,” in no meaningful order. Number 11 reads, “Assuming that Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar check will solve all writing problems.” Perhaps the list should be de-randomized with that as Number 1. Krishnamurthy is definitely right that MS has a business stake in improving its grammar checker, because wouldn’t we all be flocking to Word then even more than we already do?
It seems that a better use of our time would be to invest in multiliteracy projects - not just to teach “grammar” better, but to truly start educating students about the complex relationship between language, speech, writing, in/formality, grammaticality, grammar, and technology. Then they’d have the wherewithal to know when to use Grammar Check and when to turn it off, when to “accept changes” and when to “reject.” And who knows, maybe their writing would even go up a few notches on that handy dandy Flesch-Kincaid reading level scale thingy (stay tuned - that may be the next victim in this battle).
[For more perspectives, also see Linguist List, the AoIR list, Slashdot, and A Capital Idea.]