Help in writing right - Grammatik IV software - evaluation

Nation's Business, July, 1990 by Albert G. Holzinger

Help In Writing Right If you are even slightly insecure about the quality of your personal and business communications (and who isn't?), you could find Reference Software's recently published writing program almost too good to be true.

Like most other grammar checkers, Grammatik IV identifies common mistakes such as misspellings, split infinitives, incorrect punctuation, and subject-verb disagreements. Beyond that, Grammatik checks for more arcane errors, including incorrect use of homonyms (their, there, they're), archaic or foreign words, sexist terms, and jargon. The program also allows establishment of a custom stylebook, which can help ensure uniformity among your firm's communications, regardless of author.

More self-assured users also will want to use a feature that evaluates the readability of their work, using standard indices and analyses, noting such things as average sentence and paragraph lengths and numbers of prepositions and passive constructions used.

Grammatik is something of a teacher, too. Plentiful are help screens explaining the nature of mistakes made and how to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

Despite its power and scope, Grammatik is easy to install and use. In fact, it operates on the fly with most common word processors, including Word-Perfect, Microsoft Word, WordStar, Professional Write, MultiMate, and XyWrite. And, with a list price of $99, Grammatik is cheap.

Those firms doing business in Europe or contemplating expansion as a result of the EC92 process should note the recent release of a British edition of Grammatik. I haven't run this edition, but the publisher says punctuation rules, style, and spelling were changed to reflect British English.

More than 120 American phrases considered incorrect in British English were removed from the edition, says Reference Software, and more than 100 new phrases were added.

The company says work is under way on editions that will proofread documents in American or British English but provide menus and help screens in French or German.

All editions of Grammatik IV will run on an IBM PC or compatibles with DOS 2.0 or higher and at least 512K RAM. Versions also are available for network and Apple Macintosh users.

To order, write to Reference Software International, 330 Townsend St., Suite 123, San Francisco, Calif. 94107, or call (800) 872-9933.