This is a different kind of proofreading test.
The challenge is this: can proofreading software provide an effective shortcut to good text checking?
Of the five options I’ve chosen, four are digital tools that claim they can help you with proof reading/checking your copy.
They are Grammarly, Ginger, After The Deadline and the built-in grammar and spellchecking talents of Microsoft Word 2010.
The fifth option is my wife, Kate. She obviously doesn’t like to be referred to as a ‘proofreading system’. But she is a trained magazine production editor who dissects raw copy for a living. Often brutally. She plays the part of a proofreading service for hire.
Read on to see the results.
The proofreading test copy
If you’ve already tried our quick proofreading test then you’ll be familiar with the compact chunk of copy below:
When Apple Corps launched their first iPhone in 2008, it didn’t dissappoint. In fact, it immediately captured the collective imagination with a geeky allure driven by Apples slick design, the phone’s smart flexibilty and it’s inovative multi-touch approach.
There are eight mistakes in it – two factual errors, three spelling errors and three grammatical errors. See our proofreading test answers page for a full run-down and explanations.
For the purposes of this test, I ran the text through the four digital options (and gave it to the wife) to see how many errors they could highlight. Consequently, each one is rated out of eight.
Grammarly review
Grammarly positions itself as the ‘World’s Most Accurate Grammar Checker’. It boldly promises to identify over 150 text errors, offer synonym suggestions and to check for plagiarism.
While it’s free to get your text checked, you need to sign up for a seven day trial to see what the problems actually are in detail. Beyond the trial, there are a trio of pricing options – you can pay monthly ($19.95), cough up quarterly ($13.32 per month) or opt for a yearly subscription ($7.95 per month).
In our proofreading test, Grammarly found five ‘issues’ with our sample text and instantly identified the three spelling errors – ‘dissappoint’, ‘flexibilty’ and ‘inovative’.
But that was it. It suggested replacing ‘didn’t’ in the sentence: “When Apple Corps launched their first iPhone in 2008, it didn’t dissappoint” with ‘did not’. And while it highlighted the incorrect use of ‘it’s’ in the final sentence, it suggested ‘it has’ rather than ‘its’.
Grammarly scored: 3/8
Ginger review
Like Grammarly, Ginger touts itself as a do-it-all grammar and spellchecker. The big difference is that this downloadable software (PC only) adds proofreading functionality to a number of popular applications – Microsoft Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer and Firefox.
A small Ginger control bar appears whenever you’re actively using a compatible application. You simply click on the bar, or press F2 to start the copy checking process. Ginger then identifies any spelling errors or grammatical mistakes and suggests corrections.
You can test-drive a 600-character demo for free. The premium version of the software costs $198 (one-off fee), $132 (for Contextual Spelling & Grammar Correction only) or $19.80 for a monthly subscription.
The premium version also boasts a clever text-to-speech function, which enables you to hear your text read aloud in a surprisingly decent digital voice. Lastly, a ‘Learning’ feature acts like a virtual tutor, helping you identify common grammatical gaffes and understand how to fix them.
It’s a shame then that Ginger had the same success rate as Grammarly, correctly highlighting the three spelling errors, but glossing over the remaining five mistakes. Of course, you wouldn’t expect a digital tool to get the factual errors in this proofreading test. But the grammar checking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. A spellchecker could probably do better…
Ginger scored: 3/8
Microsoft Word review
Could a spellchecker REALLY do better? Microsoft Word includes spellchecking and grammar functionality and so it’s interesting to see how the 2010 edition compares to the so-called proofreading tools like Grammarly and Ginger.
Quite well, as it turns out. In our proofreading test, Word automatically highlighted the three spelling errors (‘dissappoint’, ‘flexibilty’ and ‘inovative’) in red. It also pointed out the incorrect use of ‘it’s’ (underlining it in blue).
Microsoft Word scored: 4/8
After The Deadline review
I had high hopes for After The Deadline. You can download it and use it with bbPress, Confluence and OpenOffice. You can bolt it into Firefox or the Google Chrome browser and you can access it via a WordPress plugin. You can even cut-and-paste the copy you want checked into a web page.
That said, it didn’t fare well on this proofreading test. At least not at first. The online version only picked up one of the spelling errors (‘flexibilty’), ignoring the other two. And it didn’t spot any of the grammatical flaws.
Yet when I tested it again using the WordPress plugin, it picked up all three misspelled words. So if you write content straight into the WordPress dashboard, After The Deadline is useful for making a final pass through your posts in search of spelling errors you might have missed.
After The Deadline scored: 3/8
And my wife…
My wife is an experienced proofreader and has worked in the publishing business on a variety of magazines including Official Windows XP, Digital Camera magazine, Computer Arts magazine plus various books.
She picked up all eight of the errors. Obviously. Using our proofreading checklist, she performed one pass over the text to double-check the facts before going through it again to root out spelling and grammar mistakes.
My wife scored: 8/8
Proofreading test summary
What we take away from this five-way match up is that you can’t beat the eye of a human proofreader. Digital tools can be useful as spellcheckers, grammar fixers and synonym suggesters. In some cases, they can help you improve your basic writing skills and steer you away from embarrassing copy-editing errors as you create content.
But there’s more to proofreading than hunting for typos and making sure you haven’t written ‘your’ when the sentence structure calls for ‘you’re’.
What digital tools like Grammarly, Ginger and After The Deadline CAN’T do is check that web links point to the right pages, that names are spelled correctly or that facts and figures are accurate. So while they might claim to ‘proofread’ text, they actually don’t. You’d be better off doing it yourself or getting somebody else to check copy for you.
For more about proofreading
There’s an expanded version of this article in our book ‘Don’t Trust Your Spell Check’. It’s packed with pro proofreading tactics, looks at why we make mistakes, why we’re bad at spotting them and wraps up with 25+ challenging proofreading tests for you to try.
You can find it on the Amazon (US) store here and on the Amazon (UK) store here. For all other Amazon regions, simply search for ‘Don’t Trust Your Spell Check’.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I really enjoyed reading through your text. I was just going to purchase a monthly subscription with grammarly and I googled it to see if it really works. Your text was on top in google and now I am not going to pay them anything as MS word can provide better results for free. Grammarly lost a customer because of you. lol… Although, in your test, your wife got the highest scores but I am still bound to use MS word for at least few coming years as I don’t have any wife right now…so sad! Might be having one in few years…
Or, you can combine any of these tools. I usually use a text-to-speech engine, Word 2010, Ginger and WhiteSmoke (in that other) to check a piece.
That sounds like a good process. What’s WhiteSmoke like? It’s on my list of things to try.
http://www.whitesmoke.com/ is another checker software
Try to check Whitesmoke as well, Please.
Your phony “test” was just a setup for your wife. A) No software pretends to be able to pick up factual mistakes in things like dates and corporate names. That’s a job for copy editors, not proofreaders. B) It’s foolish to pay text-checking software to catch simple spelling mistakes. Any good word processor will do that. (So will my e-mail program.) The spelling mistakes that proofreading programs can and should catch for writers are “contextual,” made of multiple words correctly spelled–Loan Ranger, weather vein, by in large–which Word doesn’t catch. All your “test” showed is that the “grammar checkers” don’t catch the three possessive mistakes. A good grammar checker should probably catch 2 out of 3.
It’s nice to show off your wife as a competent copy editor. But as for testing grammar checkers, get real!
Hi John. I think you’re missing the point. A word processor will certainly pick up spelling mistakes and some basic grammar problems; so will paid, so-called ‘proofreading software’ like the Serenity Software you represent.
But if you’re working online (and working on your own), there’s a good chance that proofreading and copy-editing disciplines now blur into one. The idea behind this short test was to show that commercial proofreading programs won’t always make you a better writer. There’s much more to accuracy than a spell check and getting somebody else to read your work is always a good idea. Time permitting, I’m going to test the software again with a longer and more varied text excerpt, which will feature more of the contextual issues that you mention.
Thanks for the share, i tried using ginger and it is quite good, above than others. but the problem is if you make so many sentence and grammar mistake, none of the tool will be able to correct it, so ultimate choice is hiring a proof reader.
As an aspiring editor, I found this article to be very helpful. I am trying to figure out if it would be worth using any of the paid tools as a back-up to my own editing. After all, no one is perfect (except maybe your wife), and I want to make sure my clients receive the best editing services I can offer, even if that means I have to pay out-of-pocket for a software program to double-check myself. Your comparison of the different software programs was immensely helpful. I won’t waste my money on any of these when Microsoft Word can do the same for free. I am mildly disappointed no program can truly act as a good back-up yet, but it is comforting to know that my services cannot yet be replaced by a computer program.
Thank you for your work.
Joy
Thanks for the comment, Joy. My take on it as that software can’t truly ‘proofread’ like a human can. There are so many errors that we make beyond spelling mistakes and grammar goofs that these packages just won’t spot. One of the things I have found is that it’s often a good idea to run text through different software packages. For example, if you run the sample proofreading test through Google Drive (formerly Google Docs), it picks up the three basic spelling mistakes, but misses the incorrect use of ‘it’s’. Yet Google Drive spots the missing apostrophe in ‘Apples’, which Microsoft Word misses. Ultimately, some of the software here can be useful for basic error-checking, but only when used as part of a proofreading process, not as a replacement for it. There’s an expanded version of this article in our new book ‘Don’t Trust Your Spell Check’, which you can find on Amazon.
I’ve been using free Grammarly for a while. Here is what I’ve noticed:
1. It seems to be ubiquitous, showing up (unasked) in many applications. It caught my initial misspelling of the word “ubiquitous” but it does not seem to catch “grammarly” which, AFAIK, (also not flagged by Grammarly) is not a legitimate word and appears to be a noun masquerading as an adverb.
2. It almost always incorrectly asks me to replace the word “too “with “to”.
3. It asked me to replace the possessive “Dad’s” with Dads, thought I’m pretty sure the former was correct. (It wants me to replace it in this sentence with “Had”!
In short, it is a good free tool, but IMHO (didn’t flag that one either) it needs to get much better before it is worth paying for (ending with a preposition – will it be flagged – is it even wrong?),
We’ve all bought too much software where we are paying someone to do their beta testing for them.
To be honest I didn’t find this review very helpful – all it did was leave me deflated
. The reason I am looking at proofreading software is because I do not have somebody like your wife on hand to check my stuff and really don’t want to be forking out $15 – $20 every time I need a proof reader – and end up waiting hours or even overnight — and no, I’m not interested in a proofreading service. It’s too expensive when you’re churning out lots of copy. I just need something that will catch some of the errors that slip through. I also don’t find Word to be particularly good – I just wish there was some software that could do a good job.
Thanks anyway.
Thanks for the comment Colin. Although I’d argue that that this article has been somewhat helpful in showing you that automated proofreading software isn’t an effective replacement for manual proofreading. At least not yet. I’m sure that the technology will improve. Right now, there’s no substitute for re-reading through anything that you write, checking for errors. This process doesn’t need to take very long and there are some good ways to approach it – reading text aloud, reading it backwards, tapping each word as you read it, and so on. There’s lots of good advice in our book – Don’t Trust Your Spell Check.
Have you compared Serenity Software’s Editor? Would be very interested, if not. They claim to have made similar comparisons with a larger list of programs, always coming out on top…
I did an expanded version of this article covering Serenity’s editor in my book. But basically, if you use the same text here, it queries the hyphen in ‘multi-touch’, suggests that ‘in fact’ could be sliced out to tighten the copy up, and spots the misused ‘it’s’. It also picks up the three spelling errors. Pretty good really. So I’d rate it at 4/6.