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Kimberly wrote:
>
> A colleague of mine, who doesn't speak English as his first language, asked
> me if I could recommend a grammar-checking application that is more
> comprehensive than Word's built-in grammar checker.
>
> I've never heard of such a thing, so I thought I'd pose it to the List.
>
> Anyone? Anyone?
I haven't been following this stuff in 10 years, but here's what I can
recall:
I think the first grammar checker (certainly the earliest research I
know of) was part of Bell Labs "Writer's Workbench" on Unix, late 70's
or early 80's. Lorinda Cherry was one of the main players. There were
a number of conference or Bell Labs Tech Journal papers, including one
from a US university evaluating it as an aide to foreign students.
There was also a group, I think at U of Utah, working on a "Reader's
Workbench" project. Anyone know if that ever produced anything tech
writers should know about?
