The thing is, here we face something more than Nietzsche’s famous postulate, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” The 21st century writing tools are, quite literally, doing some of the writing, correcting and editing for us, both as we type (via Auto-Correct options) and, more recursively, as we write-and-revise (responding to those squiggly lines).īy implication, such tools are also intervening into and shaping the written work of our students, who may be more tech-savvy than us but not necessarily more informed and confident when it comes to evaluating writing (and evaluating how well, or not, a piece of software does that). The even-more-ubiquitous MSGC, on the other hand, by now is so common and obvious to us that its seamless workings have become invisible. Ginger, at least, declares its presence loudly. Once installed on the PC, it would not stop popping up on my screen and commenting on my writing in all its iterations (emails, word documents, online web forms…).

This changed recently by the obtrusiveness of Ginger, a promising relative newcomer to the market of grammar checking software. You just get by with stuff that’s placed in front of you. it failed to recognize some fancy proper names (thinkers and writers whom I aspire to) Īlso, I simply never bothered to venture into exploring unfamiliar areas – like advanced options and settings of a programme – unless I had to.it doesn’t have good-enough knowledge of my native tongue (Latvian), which makes me a bit grumpy.I had never asked MS Word to check my writing (it’s turned on in the software by default).“I know my grammar” and am a confident writer/editor.I do not like being told what to do – especially by a machine.I was suspicious of any suggestions given by MS Word’s Grammar Checker (MSGC) because, There were different reasons for my deliberate nesience (and how about yours?). My response to the programme’s automatic suggestions became automatic: ignore. Much like dealing with spam in online environments, I accepted it being there without giving it much attention. I, for example, used to ignore or disable Microsoft Word’s squiggly underlines that frequently decorated the texts I wrote with it, just like in the sentences above, captured in a screenshot below: Or how much work they do for our students – I’m thinking of you, teachers of writing. It seems curious that so rarely we stop to reflect on the word processing software and other digital tools of writing we use every day, given how much work they do for us.

Wordrake very slow