OK, OK. I was being mean to it without any data to go on. And apparently feeding the site your email address (not “e-mail,” WhiteSmoke!) gets you a 3-day trial of the web version, so I went for a test drive.
I fed the checker an article I wrote a few years back. Here’s a sample.
The check highlighted my repetitive use of “particularly,” which is entirely fair. Score 1 for WhiteSmoke.
I fully expected “aeromagnetic” to not be in the system’s dictionary, as it’s an industry-specific term. I was given the option to add it to the dictionary, so that is perfectly fine, if no different from pretty much any spell checker out there. I was quite disappointed to discover that, like pretty much any spell checker out there, WhiteSmoke treated “aeromagnetic” as distinct from “Aeromagnetic.” I shouldn’t have to add the same term to the dictionary once for capitalization, once for pluralization, and once for possession. Not when I’m paying $7/month for the privilege of using the service.
Now let’s talk about the elephant in the room: The suggestion that I add a comma after “results.”
This is blatantly, obviously, wrong. This isn’t just wrong, it’s wrong in a way that isn’t present in Word 2013. I can sort of kind of see what the system is trying to do: It’s interpreting the sentence to read
“aeromagnetic survey results [, which are] particularly useful to gold explorers[…]”
and seems to be ignoring that the phrase ends in a colon, not a period.
I’ll keep playing around with this, but my preliminary sense is that WhiteSmoke is doing interesting things. It just isn’t doing them well enough to actually be reliable for a professional writer or journalist.
edit: Just ran the check on a few paragraphs of my own work. The clipping above was pre-editorial review, so maybe I’m just bad at writing and not even aware of it. Alas, the edited text produced similar results: Repeated words are marked as such with no consideration for their significance to the content, and some of the replacement suggestions are altering meaning in unwelcome ways.
I also tried a few paragraphs from a current NY Times column, with similar results. I’m by no means good enough to write for the Times (nor, I suspect, are my editors good enough to edit for the paper), but I do feel that the difference is quantitative rather than qualitative. WhiteSmoke seems best aimed at a different class of user: People who aren’t spending hours polishing a single paragraph, and for whom writing is a necessary activity but not the focal point of their work.
