Computers. [Hur.] What are they good for? Absolutely... • 27 October 2007 • The SnowBlog

Computers. [Hur.] What are they good for? Absolutely...

          
The solution?

... nothing when it comes to proofreading. 

Answer me this, linguistics fans. (That'll be you then, Rob. We really should find some other way of communicating rather than via this blog. If only there were some sort of cable-based system where individual handsets, incorporating both a speaker and microphone, could be allocated a number, and if entered on an associated keypad the handsets could connect to each other? Maybe in the fantastical, far-off future. But I digress.) Is written language so blinking complicated that a computer can't be told all its rules? I thought not. So why do I still have to spend 48 hours proofreading a book manually? 

Surely - surely - there must be a program somewhere that automatically flags up things like missing punctuation, capitalised letters where they shouldn't be, inverted commas the wrong way round, hyphens where en dashes should be, doubled up words, words that shouldn't be next to each other and so on? 

I should really get on with my Java coursework, then write an application to do it. It can't be that hard.  
Emma