by Corinne
27. September 2011 10:20
At atom42 we like to make sure we're making use of all the high quality resources available to us. Online tools such as AdGooroo, AdInsight and Crazy Egg come in very handy for the work we do, for example.
Content tools can be a little more complex, since a robot will read and process text in a very different way to a human brain. One example of this phenomenon is Grammarly, a content checking tool which markets itself as 'an automated proofreader and your personal grammar coach'.
I tried the basic version of Grammarly, which asks you to paste a section of text into a box for it to check for problems. Annoyingly, the two hour free trial of the advanced version asks users for credit card details, so I decided against it. I'm really glad I did....
Using the tool
It was interesting that Grammarly did a plagiarism check. However, those who work in content will know that it's also quite straightforward to paste a section of copy into Google on 'exact match' to check for duplicates. Grammarly also found huge numbers of mistakes in everything but it wouldn't explain what they were unless you signed up and gave credit card details.
I got fed up of seeing so many alleged mistakes on various internet pages, including the ones I'd written, without it letting me see what they were. So I chose two of my favourite classic novels (below) and checked their first pages on Grammarly - I reasoned that if the tool found fault with these works of art then it was not going to be a terribly useful service for me.
Hemingway and Suskind: 'weak'
Grammarly's opinion of both Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea' and Patrick Suskind's 'Perfume' was a dismissive: 'weak, needs revision', with Hemingway's classic receiving a particularly dismal overall score of 42/100.
But there's still hope: fortunately for Hemingway, the tool generated a number of 'vocabulary enhancement suggestions' for the text.
Keeping the pulse in proofreading
In conclusion, it's one thing making use of the tools on Word to check spelling and grammar, it's quite another asking a robot for an overall 'score' on your text and expecting it's detailed critique to really help assess the value of the writing to a human being - we're much too complex for that.