ProWritingAid proofreads Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes
We ran this test on a series of short nonsense rhymes by Edward Lear.
In ProWritingAid, the default language setting is “English General” dialect (whatever that means). For experimental purposes, we changed the writing style to “Business.”
We also slightly modified the original text by changing capitalised nouns, adjectives and adverbs into lowercase words.
Here is the report summary, with eight issues found altogether (click on the image to enlarge it):
In terms of grammar errors, the machine spotted only two unnecessary commas after the flagged nouns (underlined in blue):
ProWritingAid missed the typo that starts the second sentence (in lower case, with a missing letter “T”).It also missed the typo in the third sentence: the cow who “sate” (sic) in her red chair.It had no problems with the fact that the text consisted of sentence fragments.Neither did it take issue with the noun “ass,” which could have denoted something quite different from a furry four-legged animal. Just for fun, we tried putting in some other obscenities. ProWritingAid let them pass as suitable language for business writing, flagging only those that it was not familiar with (e.g., “assbag”).Finally, the machine had no comment to make on the nonsense contents of the text. Like all other non-human text editors, ProWritingAid is unable to understand the meaning of what one writes.In terms of style, ProWritingAid suggested deleting the adverb “absolutely” and changing the word “resided” for “lived,” for ease of reading.
It also correctly identified the three nonsense words invented by Lear as containing possible spelling issues. For the fourth flagged word, “goodnatured,” instead of suggesting hyphenation (“good-natured”), ProWriting Aid recommended changing it to “indentured” or “denatured”:
To be fair, de-capitalizing the nonsense words may have helped clue ProwritingAid into them – unlike in our experiment in Grammarly.
Text used in the experiment: Edward Lear’s “Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures,” Edward Lear Homepage (2012).