Grammar checker

[1][2] The earliest "grammar checkers" were programs that checked for punctuation and style inconsistencies, rather than a complete range of possible grammatical errors.

Aspen Software of Albuquerque, New Mexico released the earliest version of a diction and style checker for personal computers, Grammatik, in 1981.

Development of Grammatik continued, and it became an actual grammar checker that could detect writing errors beyond simple style checking.

The earliest writing style programs checked for wordy, trite, clichéd, or misused phrases in a text.

The heart of the program was a list of many hundreds or thousands of phrases that are considered poor writing by many experts.

The fact that a natural word may be used as any one of several parts of speech (such as "free" being used as an adjective, adverb, noun, or verb) greatly increases the complexity of any grammar checker.

In voice recognition, parsing can be used to help predict which word is most likely intended, based on part of speech and position in the sentence.

research has focused on developing algorithms which can recognize grammar errors based on the context of the surrounding words.

The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum argued in 2007 that they were generally so inaccurate as to do more harm than good: "for the most part, accepting the advice of a computer grammar checker on your prose will make it much worse, sometimes hilariously incoherent.