Grammar Checker

[Neto]

Does anyone know of an OFF-LINE grammar checker? (It's for a client, an Amish businessman who want to improve his writing skills. as he creates documents and messages.) Could also be an old version of some free program that has since switched to an all on-line approach.

[RZehr]

[Bootstrap]

Does anyone know of an OFF-LINE grammar checker? (It's for a client, an Amish businessman who want to improve his writing skills. as he creates documents and messages.) Could also be an old version of some free program that has since switched to an all on-line approach.

What software does he use to create documents and messages? Microsoft Word actually has some decent grammar checking.

[Neto]

Does anyone know of an OFF-LINE grammar checker? (It's for a client, an Amish businessman who want to improve his writing skills. as he creates documents and messages.) Could also be an old version of some free program that has since switched to an all on-line approach.

What software does he use to create documents and messages? Microsoft Word actually has some decent grammar checking.

I believe he just has LibreOffice for word processing, and Thunderbird for email. LO has a built-in grammar checker, but he said that is not the type of help he wants. I downloaded and tested an add-on for T-bird, but it didn't work for me, although it DID create a button in the menu. (For instance, it didn't flag an error like "an dogs".)
I still use Word 97, and it always picks out passive constructions, and want to change them to an active construction. (I saw this all of the time when I was doing Banawa back translations, because Banawa has a non-typical use for the passive construction. But that's getting off of the topic here. I almost got carried away...) It did about the same as LO, although the latter doesn't pick on passives. My wife has either Office 2007 or 2010, and I had her run it on a letter she was writing at the time, but I doubt it had any passives. It found some errors, and flagged incomplete sentences (which she was using intentionally).
The problem is that i don't really know what type of errors he is thinking of. (I've written a couple of emails to him, asking for a better idea of what he's looking for, but he hasn't responded to those questions.) So I don't know if he's mainly concerned about 'Dutchisms", like "What do you work?", and I didn't test any of these programs on things like that.

I think the advantage of the on-line tools is that the higher end programs analyze the test for genre, then compare it to a huge bank of example text of the same type. Some of them also test for plagiarism. (I imagine English teachers use those tools in grading creative writing reports. Reminds me of second grade, where a teacher accused me of copying a sentence out of some book. I denied it vehemently, but now I would say that I suppose I did, but it was completely out of my head, w/o looking at any book at the time I was writing my little story, so I didn't think of it that way.)

[Neto]

I didn't look at books very much, but some did come up in my searching. Thank you for taking time to answer, but he wants a program that will scan what he has written and point out errors. (Actually, he didn't really say that he wants to learn to write better, he just said he doesn't write well, and wants to send out better sounding messages. You probably know that there are some pretty common errors that PA German speakers tend to make, and I do the same in my secondary languages, especially in Portuguese.)

[Neto]

I had already tried the oldest version of Grammarly I could find, thinking that an older one might be an off-line one.

Now I just tried out Ginger and Grammar Slammer. The first one just sat there at the initial stage, and didn't proceed to install.
Grammar Slammer installs, and DOES appear to be off-line. The version I downloaded was, again, an older one, something like 2013. [EDIT: I THOUGHT it was an older one, but apparently what actually downloaded was the latest, version 4.2.] I installed it in a Win 7 environment, but the ReadMe file said a certain Microsoft file would also need to be installed to use it in Vista. (It was just a file to read the help files, from what I saw.) It works, but it seems that you have to copy your document into the Grammar Slammer window. It has lots of options you can set for what you want to check. It DID suggest changing a passive to an active sentence. (I don't know what they have against passives - I don't remember anything about that from HS English classes, but then there's a lot I don't remember from back then.)
But it entirely missed sentences like: What for car do you drive? and What do you work? (And all of the options of what to check were check marked.)

[ken_sylvania]

But it entirely missed sentences like: What for car do you drive? and What do you work? (And all of the options of what to check were check marked.)

What for problem is there with sentences like that?

[Bootstrap]

Does anyone know of an OFF-LINE grammar checker? (It's for a client, an Amish businessman who want to improve his writing skills. as he creates documents and messages.) Could also be an old version of some free program that has since switched to an all on-line approach.

What software does he use to create documents and messages? Microsoft Word actually has some decent grammar checking.

I believe he just has LibreOffice for word processing, and Thunderbird for email. LO has a built-in grammar checker, but he said that is not the type of help he wants.

I would drill down on that. What kind of help does he actually want? Would he be better off with an English grammar class that includes some composition, perhaps something at a high school level? There are some online, but perhaps there are also people who would be willing to teach him if his dignity would permit. A grammar checker is useful for people who understand enough about written grammar to "take the hint" when it suggests something or ignore it when the grammar checker is wrong. It doesn't substitute for learning to write grammatical English.

Or you could see if there is something like that offline.

Does he have time to put into learning? If he doesn't, then does he know someone who can help him write when he needs to?

[Bootstrap]

FWIW, here are the grammar checking extensions available for Libre Office. There are at least a few choices worth exploring there. After The Deadline does need to communicate with a server over the Internet so that one won't work for him.

[Josh]

Does anyone know of an OFF-LINE grammar checker? (It's for a client, an Amish businessman who want to improve his writing skills. as he creates documents and messages.) Could also be an old version of some free program that has since switched to an all on-line approach.

Microsoft Word