Grammar is important…it’s the vessel that carries your ideas.
Many of us depend on various tools to correct the errors in our write ups because we fail to identify the silliest mistakes which we keep repeating every now and then. Its very much important to read and re-read our letters, memos, reports, responses etc in corporate words to ensure that we are conveying the right message to every we deal with. Any ignorance towards spellings and grammar can result in helpless situations and we make fools of ourselves in front of customers.
It was hard to find a good tool in Linux to make corrections to my documents so far. I have been searching for some tool which can help me with this task for years now. Yes, Firefox does come with good spell checker now but we are talking about “Grammar” which more important than spellings. While reading text, we just ignore the spelling mistakes many times. I have come across various novels in which I found many spelling mistakes but I couldn’t give much attention towards it to report back to the writer or publisher just because some of those novels were very interesting and I was unable to put them down.
OpenSource language checker found at LanguageTool dot Org is just great and it proves that FOSS community is not far behind any other proprietary software developers in anything. You won’t believe this tool is available for free and you can even go ahead and plug it into any application you want. LanguageTool is a tool which can detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect. So far this tool supports 11 language. If you have OpenOffice you can integrate this tool into it.
Try LanguageTool via Java WebStart: I found this stand alone application very much useful for my needs at home and also for my office work.
Start LanguageTool (9 MB)
Download:
LanguageTool 0.9.1, 9 MB, requires 
Java 5.0 or later
Online Demo (If you don’t want to take pain of trying it): Click here
License: LanguageTool is freely available under the LGPL.
Brain behind this tool: LanguageTool was originally written by Daniel Naber and is now maintained by Daniel Naber and Marcin Miłkowski. To contact him, subscribe to the mailing list or visit his homepage at www.danielnaber.de.
Software requirements: Make sure Java 5.0 or later from Sun Microsystems is installed on your system. Java versions which are not from Sun Microsystems may not work. Then make sure this version of Java is selected in OpenOffice.org (under Tools -> Options -> Java).
For hackers: The source is available at Sourceforge
Few Screen Shots: available here.
Presentation by Daniel: Integrated Tools for Spelling, Style, and Grammar Checking
You rock when you make no mistakes, when you make one no one will buy it.
