Whitesmoke?

Williebee

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hmm. not familiar. Maybe start with the free toolbar?
Have you used the free, online test drive? There's a place to cut and paste in a writing sample and test it.
 
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blacbird

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MS-Word satisfies my needs for grammar- and spell-checking, which thankfully are pretty minor. Both are among the limited tool set I have pretty well under control. For me, it sounds completely unuseful, but I'd be interested in seeing anyone's review of what it does better than MS-Word's grammar and spelling facilities.
 

adnan

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I've tried both WhiteSmoke and StyleWriter, and I recommend StyleWriter. WhiteSmoke is not worth the effort even if it is free.

I gave a 1000 word segment to WhiteSmoke on my Core i5, 4GB laptop. It did not return after a long time. I cut down my segment to 500 words. It returned in a couple of minutes, and the tips it gave were not quite good.

On the other hand, StyleWriter 4 is comparatively very good. It analyzes many things and give reasonable recommendations. It can be used with either Microsoft Office as an add-in, or you can use it with clipboard (copy/paste) text. Download its trial to see the results.
 

Jamesaritchie

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Whitesmoke is wrong even more often than MS grammar check. Like most all such programs, it doesn't actually check grammar, and unless you already know enough to not need it, you'll make serious mistakes by listening to what it tells you to do.

A good test of any such program is running a a classic, published story through it. If it tells you that story needs all sorts of changes, you know the program is junk.
 

adnan

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@James

Thats a good suggestion :)

Let us see what it does to works of Dickens or Bronte sisters or Frost or Ludlum :)
 

zeuslee

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Thanks for the information, guys and gals. I'm going to download the trial version and compare what it does to microsoft. I'll let let you all know how it goes.

So how was the program? I am thinking of getting a new grammar checker. Currently using ginger's proofreaderhttp://www.gingersoftware.com/proofreading, which is not exactly what I am looking for. I wanted something that has translation function as well.
 
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Lunatique

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I have tried using StyleWriter to detect things like often repeated words, which is kind of eye-opening because you may not be aware of the problem until StyleWriter reports them all to you.
 

HonestBabe

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When I downloaded WhiteSmoke, I got a virus.
 

HonestBabe

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I just tried Perfect It and it found lots of inconsistencies in the whole document and did it quickly. But this is more of a proofreading software: it did NOT check grammar or word usage. It checked hyphenation of phrases and words, spelling variations, numbers in sentences, common typos, contractions, compound words and abbreviations. Nice clean up job as I didn't 'see' these errors.
 

Delvianna01

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I tried it and hated it. Every time I pressed the check button it would mush a whole ton of words together. It took out a LOT of spaces and I had no clue why and then incorporated its mess-up with suggestions that made no sense. Yea, not worth the money at all.. the only thing I liked was thesaurus suggestions and you can get that in another program or just use their website.
 

BAY

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Agree with Honest Babe at # 14.
 

HonestBabe

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I just bought Perfect It by Intelligent Editing and it worked beautifully on my novel of 74,000 words. It caught a lot of inconsistent spellings, capitalization, hyphenation, compound words and numbers (24 vs twenty-four vs twenty four). I would have never seen these typos in a million years in such a long document. And with one click you can delete extra spaces after a period. This software is worth the money (reasonable at about $75.00). Really saved a lot of time and torture.

I would love software that flagged grammar issues to double check myself, but honestly, the best grammar and word usage is human!