This probably isn’t news to people who are both good writers and use MS Word, but its grammar checker sucks.

I personally find it a frustrating mix of useful and extremely annoying. It does occasionally catch a word I misspell (something that I do rarely), but it almost never gives me good grammar advice. Ninety percent of the time (probably more) its recommended changes are either of no value, or would actually be wrong (I notice in particular that it has problems recognizing subjects and objects when recommending singular or plural forms of irregular verbs). I’ll probably keep using it, but given my writing style, I wish that I could disable the “long sentence, no suggestions” feature, because that’s the one that I most often get false alarms with.

Anyway, as the article says, if you’re a student (or worker) and think that your product is spelled correctly and grammatical just because Microsoft says so, think again. There’s still no substitute for a human editor, whether yourself or, if you’re unsure, another.

[Via Geek Press]