Here's a story to warm the cockles of the heart this morning. A professor in Microsoft's home state of Washington has started a campaign to improve the quality of the company's grammar-checking function in Word.

It seems that the professor finally cracked when he noticed the poor quality of students' essays after they had been run through the software. Now he wants Redmond to do something about it.

As someone who spends more time than most hunched over a hot keyboard this can only be welcome news. I've long ago learnt to smother the annoyance that flares every time the computer asks me to make a duff change, but if students are relying on Microsoft alone to teach them grammar we're in for a garbled new century.

To be fair this kind of thing is a real pain to code successfully. Speech recognition software has similar problems. We humans are a capricious lot; our spoken and written languages might be organised along broadly accepted rules, but they're jam packed with the kind of exceptions and eccentricities that drive software developers nuts. 

I wish the professor luck, although I don't rate his chances.

29 Mar 2005