WhiteSmoke 2009 General Writing Version review

WhiteSmoke is a standalone grammar checker that you can use with almost any PC text editor.

It also works when entering text in a web browser, which is handy for Google Docs users, and runs in the background, detects when you start typing and updates itself online to maintain its database of English usage.

By default, a small window pops up whenever WhiteSmoke finds fault with your English. If you blink and miss this, you can request a check at any time by pressing a customisable short cut key or clicking a small blue icon that floats in any active text entry window. This opens WhiteSmoke's main display, which shows the paragraph you're working on. Corrections are marked between the lines, with grammatical errors in green, spelling in red and style suggestions in blue. We pitted WhiteSmoke against Word's built-in grammar checker on a business letter containing various grammatical mistakes and some awkward phrasing. We also tested some examples of general writing from various sources, including the Daily Telegraph.

WhiteSmoke spotted an incorrect preposition that Word missed ('ours' for 'our') but, like Word, stayed silent when we omitted the preposition altogether. It had nothing to say about our use of the passive voice - not a mistake, but often better avoided - while Word flagged some instances and missed others. Of the two, only WhiteSmoke advised us to add commas after phrases such as 'Dear Mr Smith' (a slightly old-fashioned convention) and 'in other words', but neither program offered the required comma after 'As you know'. Word alone managed to change 'with regards to' to 'with regard to', but amusingly corrected 'Your faithfully' to 'You're faithfully', while WhiteSmoke ignored this error.

When it came to the trickier areas of grammar, Word was overly keen on the subjunctive, offering 'If it were' for 'If it is' (the correct wording in context was 'If it be', but most people find the subjunctive archaic now anyway). WhiteSmoke, unlike Word, was fairly good at spotting when a question was missing a question mark. Neither program flagged repetition unless exactly the same word appeared twice. Where WhiteSmoke scored significantly over Word was in identifying disagreements, as in 'I would make two point' or 'We awaits your response'. This could be very helpful to less confident English speakers, but suffered from inconsistencies: 'She aim to deliver this project by July' produced the plausible suggestions 'aims' and 'aimed', but 'Mrs Smith aim...' and 'The company aim...' went uncorrected.

Despite WhiteSmoke's claim to 'enrich' your text with idiomatic style suggestions, we saw very few of these in practice. They mainly run along the lines of replacing 'But' or 'Yet' at the beginning of a sentence with 'However', which may or may not be an improvement.

Besides the checker, you get dozens of templates to help you write documents such as business letters. These might have been useful to people who are unfamiliar with British English, but they sound as if they were written by someone in exactly that position. Almost all contain glaringly inappropriate turns of phrase, some are badly punctuated and we'd have thought grammar-checking software was designed to avoid such horrors as 'In accordance with your request to reschedule your meeting, we have accordingly rescheduled your meeting.' Users would be ill-advised to rely on the templates for legal documents, and the Family section, although a rather sweet idea for speakers of English as a foreign language, is perhaps a step too far. One fantastic example is: 'I just wish there was a way to help you understand what I am going through ... The most important reason is because <describe why it's important>.'