mike's web log/comments

Here's some software that flies in the face of what most of us writing types are after. WhiteSmoke is "text enrichment" software that complexifies your English. For example, it can take:

I am happy with your performance.

and help you turn it into:

I am completely thrilled with your outstanding achievement.

The whole thing is just a little bizarre. They have a Flash demo (here's a text version) that shows how WhiteSmoke can be used in Microsoft Word to turn a simple statement into something more baroque.

Poking around on the site, I get a pretty clear sense that the tool is meant primarily for non-native speakers to create more "professional" English. There are what they call trade-specific databases -- medical, legal, etc. -- and I can see where having a tool suggest appropriate vocabulary for a field you're not that familiar with, but are obliged to write about, could be handy.

Some of the language on the Web site itself is just slightly off as well -- for example, their slogan is "Writing better is now made simple," which sounds a wee bit stilted to me (is that an enriched phrase?), and they make the amusing claim "Whitesmoke was examined by worldwide professionals to ascertain that it does not contain any kind of Spy ware Ad ware or malicious code." As opposed to local professionals, I guess, who are experts in Soft ware.

I have no argument with ther claim that the software is technologically revolutionary. I don't know how their parsing and analyzing algorithms are different from a grammar checker, but it's clear that there is a lot of interesting technology in what they do, since the software does, in their examples, seem to understand entire sentences at a time. This particular utility aside, that type of logic seems like it could have a number of interesting applications.

The idea that computers can help improve writing is seductive. Spellcheckers are obviously a great help to people. Grammar checkers in products like Microsoft Word are also pretty good these days.[1] A computer-based dictionary is vastly easier to use than a book, as is an online thesaurus[2].

In all cases, though, they work well only if used as augmentation of a writer's art, not a substitute for it. As an obvious example, everyone's familiar with the various problems of spellcheckers, which famously do not catch homophone errors (they're-their-there) because spellcheckers are for the most part word-at-a-time checks. And grammar checkers suggest, they don't dictate -- it's still up to the writer to determine how the text should be, which sometimes means overriding the perfectly valid suggestion from a grammar checker.

Thus WhiteSmoke. The most obvious problem is that the product can be used to obfuscate otherwise clear writing, although that is certainly not its stated goal. The second is that, more or less by definition, the person who uses the software is probably not a good judge of whether its suggestions are helping or hindering the text. And software, however good, should never be allowed to have the last word in matters of language.

Via Mike Gunderloy.


[1] Practically every editor I know is dismissive of Word's grammar checker. However, a) their examples of grammar-checker bloopers are often drawn from old, old versions of Word, and b) they tend to forget that grammar checkers are to help people who aren't editors.

[2] The arrogant Simon Winchester had an article in The Atlantic once in which he said that Roget's noble goal of creating a semantic web out of the English word corpus had been cheapened by poor writers who used it to make their own writing sound better with the indiscriminate use of poorly understood synonyms. He himself, he could not resist saying, had not used a thesaurus in writing the article.

Update Here's Winchester himself on the issue: "My point was very simple: to present a catalog of synonyms from which we may pick and choose words to put into our essays or speeches is a very bad thing because there is no such thing as a true synonym. Every word has its particular place in the language, and to give a basketful of words that allegedly say the same thing, to pluck willy-nilly from that basket and insert a word into a sentence because you think it to be synonymous with the other...well, you choose the wrong one. You ignore the subtle differences. It degrades the language. It makes us sloppy in our use of the language."