How Your Mac Can Teach You Better Grammar.

I cannot be the only Mac user who admits to using a spell checker. You use a spell checker on your Mac, right?

Guess what? Bad spelling isn’t the only thing that needs checking. Bad grammar still exists, and it’s something I’m guilty of. Too.

Spell checking we’re used to. It’s in Mail. It’s in Word. It’s all over the place, so there’s not much excuse for poor spelling these days.

Guess what? Spell checkers don’t do a good job of spelling checking in context. For example, if I write the phrase “here this” in a sentence, I won’t see a squiggly underlined visual cue that tells me I’ve misspelled “here” which should be “hear.” Did you catch it?

Spell checkers are fast but they’re not too smart and they’re absolutely digital zombies when it comes to grammar. If computers are so smart, why can’t that correct our grammar?

One reason that grammar checkers are not built in to the Mac is because English is pretty tough, so about all a grammar utility can do is check and recommend. Correcting automatically is a rather tall order.

Enter Ultralingua’s Grammatica Spelling and Grammar Checker for English (and French, and Spanish, and German-- Mac lovers, all).

What Grammatica does is rather simple. It watches everything you type on your Mac and tells you what it thinks of both your spelling and grammar via suggestions. Grammatica recognizes your spelling errors even better than the spell checker in OS X Leopard, and offers even more suggestions.

Spell checking is just one part of the communication efforts performed on our Macs. Grammar is checked, too, including my favorites context, syntax, and punctuation.

Getting deeply into all you forgot in high school or college English (or, French, Spanish, and German), Grammatica gives you suggestions on how to improve or clarify what you wrote. Beyond spelling, one of the more difficult areas for me has always been verb tense, and Grammatica shines, showing 500,000 forms, including conjugated verbs in more tenses than I knew existed.

Even better, you don’t have to copy and paste your text into a separate utility to check spelling or grammar. Grammatica can handle text in most windows or text fields and can even handle changes in language.

You’re even allowed to train Grammatica by providing additional words and meanings to the program’s lexicon, which then show up in the next spell check and grammar check. If you’re in to writing, you need tools, and Grammatica helps out in one area where OS X Leopard doesn’t-- grammar.

Do you write for a living? What do you use for spell checking? What do you use for grammar checking? Talk Back to Mac360 and share your experience and perspective in the Comments section below.

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