Rob Clement [mailto:[email protected]] copied-without-trimming everything including the kitchen sink before saying:
[snip] > As a ghostwriter (a writer who does not get the BY line but > writes for > someone else) I often need to write books of the order to 10,000 to > 20,000 words and it gets mighty tedious checking all that lot > by hand, > especially if I am writing for an american client when I am a > native UK > English speaker. Grammar checkers are an essential tool not > just a help > for those who are writing in a second language. Are there actual grammar differences of note between Brit English and Yank English? Spellings, to be sure. Word choices, certainly. Phrasing. But grammar? Perhaps what you want is a style-checker - an add-on that would look for occurrences of any of the known-different terms and flag them... from the obvious lift/elevator, corn/maize, etc., to the not-so-obvious. Examples escape me just now, though there are many. Also, you'd want to catch cultural usage differences. For example, USians and some Canadians use 'quite' in a way that would be jarring, or possibly confusing, to the British ear, while UK English can include a sarcastic or disdainful use of "quite" that would go unnoticed by us-in-the-colonies. Oh, and is that term still used over there? Referring to us as "the colonies"? Or is that reserved for stereotypical upper-class twits in television shows... er... I mean 'programmes'... ? There's no end of niggling little things you'd need to catch in a 20,000 word text. Does a grammar checker do that for you? Is there such a beast as a style checker for OOo? I think if somebody wanted to make one, they could get a lot of free assistance to develop the rules used by their engine, if they created a Wiki for the purpose. Drop a note in some writers' and editors' mailing lists, and you'd be flooded with responses. - Kevin <bumpf-start>The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
