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While I can't really disagree with you about the quality of software grammar and spelling checkers (and there is a LOT that could be improved with a modest investment if anyone cared to make it), I still see these tools as having value if used appropriately.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that a red squiggly line tells me I should look more closely. And a green squiggly line also tells me I should look more closely (for non-Word users, those are the devices Word uses to mark spelling and grammar "errors" it detects, respectively).
These marks don't tell me that the software knows more than I do or that I should defer to the judgment of some programmer somewhere. They tell me that there _might_ be an error.
When I'm editing something written by a non-writer, if it is just chock full of egregious errors of all kinds, I'm going to go through the thing word by word under my own brainpower. But inevitably the more errors the piece starts out with, the more errors are left when I've finished that first pass. At that point the squiggly lines are a big help.
When I'm drowsy (like around 4 pm every day), when I'm in a hurry (like when a good writer just wants me to give a letter a quick once-over), when I'm staring at something I've written myself, spell checkers and grammar checkers help me zero in on things I might otherwise miss.
The problem comes when someone whose own skills are not what they should be abdicates responsibility to the software. And I hope nobody on this list would do that!
>
>I recommend The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed., and an editor.
>
>Software solutions have always been poor, in part because I don't think
>they were created by editors, because the logic of the language is not
>straightforward, and because, in recent years, they have continuously
>been subordinate to other features when it comes to getting programming
>resources for updates. Additionally, the inclusion of these features in
>popular tools has probably killed the market for third-party tools.
>
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