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.)