I am terrible with grammar, as you will likely observe somewhere in this post or elsewhere on my website. This is often very embarrassing. These days however, I should be able to spare myself the embarrassment given the plethora of language checking softwares.

There are two main reasons these softwares do not do the job for me:

1.  I do most of my writing in LaTex with Texstudio, and Texstudio only comes with a rudimentary spell checker with little grammar checking abilities (it’s a pain to copy paste in Word, mostly because Word’s checker gets caught into LaTex syntax).
2. I am so bad that even state-of-the-art language checker do not catch most of my mistakes. For instance, I am very bad with homophones. I often get words like “to” and “too” mixed up when I write, which even Word’s checker misses most of the time.

Regarding 2., what I really need is a language checker in which I can set up my own rules. When I realize I’ve made a mistake, I know I am likely to make that mistake again. Thus it is just a matter of making the effort to write down a rule that will catch that mistake for me in the future.

I’ve wanted to do just that for a while, but never found the right tool. My salvation might come from LanguageTool.

1. LanguageTool works with Texstudio (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYIY7bbSv4Q for a simple installation tutorial) and natively improves upon the default language checker in Texstudio.
2. LanguageTool gives you the ability to add your personal rules using a relatively straightforward syntax (there is a learning curve, but it’s not too bad).

For instance, I can easily tell LanguageTool to look for instances of “It is not to bad” (which Word’s checker does not flag) and suggest to replace it by “It is not too bad”.

Rules in LanguageTool are quite versatile and allows for regular expression via the regex syntax.

LanguageTool’s tutorial explains how to create and add rules very didactically at http://wiki.languagetool.org/development-overview#toc4. Because the previous link has broken in the past, here is a direct quote describing the basics:

“Most rules are contained in rules/xx/grammar.xml, whereas xx is a language code like en or de. In the source code, this folder will be found under languagetool-language-modules/xx/src/main/resources/org/languagetool/; the standalone GUI version contains them under org/languagetool/.

A rule is basically a pattern which shows an error message to the user if the pattern matches. A pattern can address words or part-of-speech tags. Here are some examples of patterns that can be used in that file:

• <token>think</token>
  matches the word think
• <token>think</token> <token>about</token>
  Matches the phrase think about – as the text is split into words, you need to list each word separately as a token. This will not work: <token>think about</token>
• <token regexp="yes">think|say</token>
  matches the regular expression think|say, i.e. the word think or the word say. You can write simple rules without knowing regular expressions, but if you want to learn more about them you can try this tutorial.”

LanguageTool even has a handy rule editor that you can use to create new rules if you don’t want to learn too much about the rules’ syntax (community.languagetool.org/ruleEditor2/index).

You can download a list of the custom rules I find most useful here. I will try to update the list as I write down new rules.