A couple of months ago we came across some rather favourable comments on StrongWriter, RightWriter and Grammatik 4. At the time we had been testing RightWriter for a while, and although we had found the programme basically sound, its shortcomings were certainly conspicuous enough, particularly in confrontation with the written English of Norwegian upper secondary students.
And now two other programmes offered to do more or less the same excellent job as RightWriter! Our confidence in the underlying research was wearing thin, and we decided we wanted to see for ourselves what this was all about.
Grammatik 4, a very promising programme indeed, we are still testing; and in the following we shall focus on StrongWriter, which The Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities gave us the opportunity to get acquainted with.
The unique feature of StrongWriter is its friendly, personal tone. As it were, you are not submitting your paper to a computer programme, but to the good Dr. Strong – who never forgets that you are a person.
The trouble with Dr. Strong, however, seems to be that he knows too little and falls apart when he has to work outside the surroundings in which he was created. In addition you cannot teach him anything except general lists of "words to avoid".
At our test he behaved rather strangely. One of the upper secondary papers we asked him to check, he refused to read – although it had been prepared for him in strict accordance with his requirements. The others he did read, allegedly in a state of mind vacillating between fascination and ecstasy; and generously bestowed strikingly similar comments on one and all of them – including an essay in Norwegian smuggled into his hand by an academic misfit with a grudge against disk-borne professors.
Dr. Strong started out sensibly by giving basic statistics: total number of words, of sentences, of sentences with less than 7 words, 7 to 16 words, more than 16 words, average number of words per sentence etc., etc. This service is useful if you are sufficiently unprejudiced to take advantage. But you must be considerate enough to allow the old sport a certain amount of inexplicable miscounting.
After this systematic and promising start his performance deteriorated. His wisdom turned out to amount to no more than unapplied general statements: Having set the student shivering by stating that "some blunders in writing simply must be avoided or corrected" and that "the following words (or misspellings) in your paper" are of that kind, he produced the following comments on a two-page insult to spelling, idiom and syntax alike:
1. Pronouns like "we" can blur the paper's focus.
2. Using digits for small numbers is informal.
3. Pronouns like "you" can blur the paper's focus.
Then he raised his pen again and declared that "some pairs of words are blunders that must be avoided", and went on to admit that he could "see no such words" in the paper!
At that point he introduced his "suggestions for revision" ... that "are not errors" (sic.); declared that which, where, and there are commonly misused and should be double checked, that over-frequent use of forms of to be does not make a text lively, and that words ending in -tion harm sophistication as much as present participles and gerunds enhance it. Forms like PUDDING, he said, should be used more frequently.
Poor old professor! It is hardly his fault that in glaring contrast to what the enclosed folder leads one to believe, the programme does not "point out howlers and blunders" and gives few "suggestions for improvements" that are of any use.
StrongWriter is a small programme. Consequently, the wordlists and particularly the rule dictionaries (error dictionaries) are inadequate. Norwegian learners are obviously beyond its scope.
If a style and grammar checker is to perform well abroad, one has to face the fact that several versions will be needed, simply because the learners' first language is bound to interfere. This is self-evident and cannot be ignored.
The adjusted versions, therefore, must be made by people who
a. pay continuous attention to the relevant differences between English and the language in question,
b. know from experience what typical errors the learners' idiom and grammar tend to produce in written English,
c. are willing to put into the programme the necessary information, versatility, and capability (which will cost time) and finally
d. are aware of the fact that such a programme is of little value if it is not open to improvements.
One simply cannot take for granted that it is possible on the basis of English alone to produce a useful and relevant style and grammar checker for all foreigners.
The situation we are in right now makes it imperative to be very alert. Good style and grammar checkers are being developed and will soon be important educational tools. In this process clearly inadequate software is a waste of time and should be duly demasked before any harm is done. The futile red pen is threatened and leans heavily on scholarly prejudice.
Asbjørn Hoem teaches Norwegian and English at Nordreisa videregående skole.
