Ginger vs WhiteSmoke - A duel of grammatic software

After spending two articles lauding Apple to the moon, let's come back to reality and examine assistive software for Windows PC. A few articles ago, I wrote about Ginger, a grammar assisting software that may provide tremendous help for people with dyslexia. However, thanks to Google Adsense, I was introduced to another grammar software that purportedly does the same thing. That was when my curiosity kicked in, and I could not resist buying a copy of my own to compare.

There is another less high sounding side story to why I bought the Whitesmoke software: Mainly, I was duped.  On their website, it stated that a discount offer of 80% on their software was going to end on April 21st 2010, well a month later, the same website still offers the identical discount with the dates changed.
https://buy.whitesmoke.com/incp/purchase.php?

I am not here to discuss whether such antics are ethical, as ethics always take second place in the face of profits; the point is that I now have both Ginger and Whitesmoke, so let's do a comparison in the form of scoreboard.

Large document capacity:
A 96 page document Ginger took a little more than three hours, but Whitesmoke gave up because it could only handle three thousand characters.

Ginger 1 vs Whitesmoke 0

Toggle between British and American English
This is important to me because I use British English more than I do the American counterpart. Ginger offers the capacity where Whitesmoke does not.

Ginger 2 vs WhiteSmoke 0

Offline capacity:
Both software depend heavily on external Internet servers, so neither of them has the offline capacity and both can be construed as online security vulnerability.

Ginger 2 vs WhiteSmoke 0

Software compatibility:
Ginger only works with several designated programs where as WhiteSmoke will work with most Windows programs.

Ginger 2 vs Whitesmoke 1

Simplicity of operation and friendly interface:
Ginger uses far bigger fonts and visual friendly interface, and requires fewer clicking than WhiteSmoke does.

Ginger 3 vs WhiteSmoke 1

Level of sophistication:
WhiteSmoke purportedly uses three English Dictionaries, they are general dictionary, business dictionary and creative writing dictionary. And yes! WhiteSmoke caught my Split Infinitives.

Ginger 3 vs WhiteSmoke 2

Therefore, I hereby conclude Ginger won by a narrow margin of 3 to 2, my reader may wonder why grammatical accuracy was not featured in a duel between grammatical software. Well, computers will be computers. They both require human tweaking and neither corrects dangling participles. However, for people like I, who values sophistication and software compatibility more than other features, they may still find WhiteSmoke a more attractive alternative to both Microsoft and Ginger.

Comments

  1. Karen HJune 14, 2010 at 7:35 AM

    Thanks for the comparison
    I too was wondering about grammar software lately, it's not easy to find
    So yea, I tried WhiteSmoke
    I don't know which version you have, the one I got is the 2010+ which works directly with my Microsoft Outlook so I don't do anything and it just corrects my emails when I hit the send button. Also, regarding the char limit, don't have that problem - it checks a paragraph, corrects it and moves on to the next on it's own - again, maybe you've got an old version?
    You got me with the 80%! I got excited for a minute :) It's not there :(
    Haven't tried ginger but I doubt it's better that what I've got now. Also, you CAN talk about grammar checking because the technology is different and very high-end, their algorithms (Whitesmoke's) are based on artificial intelligence so the software learns you and gets better every day, which is why it has to be online - the updates are automatic and daily. Besides, they've got style check (which is what got me in the end) and I'm a writer so I think that's wonderful! It actually tells me if I use a word too many times in a paragraph :) its cool

    Um... and that's my 2 cents (more like a buck but who's counting?)

    ReplyDelete

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