Scrivener is a wonderful piece of software which I am trying to get into the flow of using.
However the grammar check seems to be inconsistent sometimes. I can type something like ‘I went too shops’ into a document I have open now, without a green line showing at all, but other times I get green lines on things that I would rather keep that way such as “Truth be told”.
A right click menu option to ‘ignore grammar’ along with a more comprehensive grammar check would be greatly appreciated.
Personally, I’ve yet to find any computer English-grammar check that is reliable at a level that makes it worth depending upon on a long-term basis. The most common problem in my experience is too many false negatives. So periodic inconsistency is certainly nothing out of the ordinary. YMMV.
Oh, and welcome to Scrivener and the forum, hackinatrix!
This is why I never have grammar checking turned on. Scrivener’s spell checker and grammar checker are both provided by Apple - they are built into the text system Scrivener uses. Although I have heavily customised the text system for Scrivener, the spell and grammar checkers are “black boxes”, so they are entirely Apple’s domain, which means I cannot change them in any way, I’m afraid (they’re the same ones used in most apps across the system, excepting those few programs that provide their own, such as Microsoft Word).
Thanks for the kind words about Scrivener, though! And as Hugh says, welcome to the forums.
If you want to use your language fully and say things like “Truth be told”, you definitely don’t want to use anybody’s grammar checker.* They are all quite obtuse.
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The idea of being able to click a flagged sentence to be ignored by the checker is a function I would never have thought of for a grammar-checker. I have some doubts about whether it would be genuinely effective, because all the logged “ignores” would be just specific sentences. Seems like you would be flagging innumerable sentences and their innumerable variants forever. The grammar-checker would never learn anything by this, but to exclude those exact sentences.
Thank you for your feedback all.
I did not realise that the spell and grammar check was tied so closely to Apple’s system.
Reading the creative language of ‘Walden’ recently, I see that perhaps conforming to a writing ideology, being constrained by the red and green ‘squiggly line’ is perhaps just another way of limiting your own creativity. I will turn off the grammar check for now and let my writing flow.
Scrivener’s spell checker and grammar checker are both provided by Apple - they are built into the text system Scrivener uses. Although I have heavily customised the text system for Scrivener, the spell and grammar checkers are “black boxes”, so they are entirely Apple’s domain, which means I cannot change them in any way, I’m afraid (they’re the same ones used in most apps across the system, excepting those few programs that provide their own, such as Microsoft Word).