Take charge of grammar
March 31, 2005
Mom always said, "You're not doing 'good,' you're doing 'well.'"
Had you listened to her, you wouldn't be relying on grammar check to help you form correct sentences.
UW professor Sandeep Krishnamurthy recently launched a crusade against Microsoft's Word grammar check, saying too many errors go unnoticed by the program that decorates our papers with red and green underlines.
"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," Krishnamurthy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
His efforts should be applauded -- but not before students have reread and double-checked their work before turning it into a professor.
Maybe we should expect more from grammar check, like this UW faculty member does. Or maybe we should expect more from ourselves.
Is it too much to ask students to learn the English syntax? When did we stop thinking and start relying on Microsoft's grammar check to make sure our papers are grammatically correct?
We are all guilty of relying on the easy, convenient method. But grammar check is a service, not an infallible grammatical calculator. If we rely on a computer program to help us write a sentence, we lose not only our grammar skills but also our ability to think critically.
By relying on it solely, we become too much like the program itself: mechanical and unreliable. Computer programs should be our last line of defense against errors -- not the first.
People still control the machine, and it is our own responsibility to do good work.
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