Scholarly Tools: Grammarian, EndNote, and others
Royal Van Horn · Phi Delta Kappan · 2003
IN THE EARLY YEARS, this column was called Power Tools. chose that title because it implied that technology could be used to magnify human potential and help people do their work. This column to that theme and discusses several great tools that help people write and cite their sources. am fortunate that the Kappan editors do such great job cleaning up my writing. The editors manage to find and fix my mistakes without altering the column significantly. They do tone down my rants and raves some, but that's probably good thing. Occasionally[,] feel guilty when send them column that is not quite as well edited as it should be. Feeling one these guilt pangs recently, decided to review the latest version program used years ago titled Grammarian. The latest version is Mac OS X compatible and has lot [many] new features. You can download 15-day free trial the program at http://www.linguisoft.com. Unfortunately[,] it is only available for the Mac. will discuss Windows grammar checkers later. To out [omit] the new version Grammarian, had the program check and correct this paragraph. The edits suggested by Grammarian are in brackets. As you can see, Grammarian likes to add commas while am an anti- comma type. Grammarian also catches worn-out or wordy expressions such as a lot of and try out. Years ago, used Grammarian regularly for about six months on nearly everything wrote. At the time, was making two mistakes: used lot vague adjectives such as very thoughtful, and was also writing in passive voice. Grammarian flagged nearly every instance both. This helped me write in more active voice and stop using vague adjectives. Perhaps need to use the program again for few months. Here are few suggestions on using Grammarian and few details about program options. First, installing Grammarian is tricky. You have to download it, unStuffit, and start the application. Then print out the installation instructions. Next, restart your Mac and follow the install instructions. When you can finally see the Flag icon, put check by it and the Unicode icon. The makers Grammarian forgot that you must have two icons checked for OS X to place either in the menu bar -- sort an OS X glitch, suspect. When you finally get Grammarian installed, you will see pencil icon added to the Mac menu bar. Grammarian has several settings for Writing Style that substantially change how the program works. The settings include academic, business, casual, common, formal, legal, technical, personal 1, and personal 2. The personal settings allow you to customize Grammarian to your writing style. To check the writing above, used the common setting. If you use the academic setting, Grammarian replaces words with more scholarly synonyms. For example, on the academic setting, Grammarian suggested that change the word returns in the first paragraph to reverts. The Grammarian menu has an option labeled Statistics. When you select Statistics, Grammarian gives you readability and other statistics about your writing. Grammarian reported that the writing above has Reading Age 13 years, Readable Grade Level grade 9, Human Interest 67% dramatic, and is comparable in difficulty to Mark Twain's Adventures Tom Sawyer. don't know how to take this last remark. To compare Grammarian and the grammar checker in Word 2001 for the Mac, copied the passage above and pasted it into new Word document. Word ships without the grammar checker enabled, so you have to open Spell and select the Check Grammar option, then close and reselect Spell Check. Word found almost all the same mistakes Grammarian found, except it did not like the phrase I am basically and suggested omit basically. Word made small mistake in checking the subject/verb agreement compound sentence. …