WhiteSmoke Review–“Very Good English Grammar Checker, But Not Perfect “

A lot has been written about the WhiteSmoke writing software product which is featured here on this blog.  The software checks grammar, spelling, style and offers corrections and suggestions. Overall, I feel that WhiteSmoke offers some good value and I use it often. It is especially helpful for spotting missing and duplicate words, and basic grammar and spelling mistakes. It’s like having a personal proofreader, with an English degree, checking my writing. The software is quite sophisticated as it associated with a computer network that “reads” newspapers and other material, daily, to stay up to date with the rules and practical uses of written English.

Now even though it’s basically a good product, it is not without flaws. First, it can cause other text editing programs to crash if they are both open at the same time and you use WhiteSmoke to automatically correct your writing rather than just flagging it for errors. For example, you can activate WhiteSmoke by pushing the “F2” key on your keyboard and the software will go ahead and check your text for errors (internet connection require). Sometimes, if you ask WhiteSmoke to not only check your writing, but fix it also, it causes other programs, like WordPress, on which this blog is written by the way, to inexplicably crash. This isn’t really a big deal as you can reopen the crashed program again (save your work before opening WhiteSmoke). But it can be a minor annoyance. I sometimes deal with this issue by making the corrections myself rather than letting WhiteSmoke do it automatically, which is when most of the crashes happen. So I just use WhiteSmoke to survey my text for corrections, but I work on these myself.

WhiteSmoke  2010 FREE 3-Day Trial

Second, there is a lot of criticism that WhiteSmoke isn’t perfect, that it makes mistakes. Well, duh! It’s a computer program, not a person. Since when did computers ever interpret language perfectly? They may be good or better at playing chess than a human, but with language it’s a different story. Language contains so many idioms and context sensitive meanings, I doubt a machine will ever be perfect for grammar checking. (Spelling is a different story–that can be automated.) So my basic feeling is the program is good enough. I don’t expect perfection out of it and it’s useful enough to stay on my desktop. Newer versions of the program include WhiteSmoke 2010 and WhiteSmoke T-GEN, to be reviewed in future posts. Please let me know your thoughts and experiences with this product.

If you want to learn more about WhiteSmoke, get a free 3-day trial, or watch some videos I made about it, you can check out this page:

English-Writing-Tools.com

Overall: WhiteSmoke is basically a good product with some minor flaws.  It helps me to feel more confident in my writing  and it’s a decent value for the money.

(This post was checked by WhiteSmoke. And for disclosure purposes, the owner of this blog, Mount Baldy Press, Inc. has a commercial relationship with the company.)