Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 April 15

= April 15 =

Grammatical Tense Checking Site?
I'm curious if there's a site where one can copy and paste text into a box to check grammatical tense the same way this site works with word count. I've already done quite a bit of internet searching myself, and I have yet to find one that's free. --JDitto 05:30, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't know of one. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing a computer program could reliably do. Counting words is easy, but checking tense is much harder. For example, if it encounters the word fell, even if it can correctly identify it as a verb and not the noun "fell" meaning "animal's hide" or the adjective "fell" meaning "deadly", how will it know if it's the past tense of "fall" or the present tense of "fell" meaning "chop down"? It would probably only be as successful as Microsoft Word's grammar checker, which is to say, a miserable failure. —Angr 08:46, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Agree with Angr, though I'm sure we could find one and give it the old Buffalo try. Jfarber 00:15, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Oh well, thanks for your help guys. Though I'm not sure what you mean by "the old Buffalo try", Jfarber. Am I to replace it all with Buffalo? Or do you mean that if we do find one we should mess it up by typing in 'buffalo' 9 times? --JDitto 06:28, 20 April 2007 (UTC)