Apple II Bits

I was working on a particularly complex Juiced.GS article recently, so I did something I hadn’t done in awhile: I loaded it into AppleWorks Classic and ran it through TimeOut Grammar. It’s a tool that has served me well for decades.

For much of my academic career starting in fourth grade and continuing at least through undergraduate, AppleWorks was my primary word processor. It wasn’t just habit or nostalgia: its plain-text nature let me focus on the words and their meaning, and its spellcheck function’s interface was more efficient than any I’ve seen to this day.

But just as important was TimeOut Grammar (copyright 1992 by Dan Verkade; published by Beagle Bros Inc. and Quality Computers). This add-on module was, like most grammar checkers even today, simply a dictionary of search/replace patterns: phrases that are often used incorrectly or which can be more succinctly replaced with other phrases. TimeOut Grammar rarely understood context: gender-specific pronouns could be decried as "sexist", even when I was writing about religions or eras that have very gender-specific roles. But more often than not, it helpfully taught me to be concise and accurate, avoiding language that was wordy ("in order to"), vague ("nice"), cliché ("the fact is"), and redundant ("very").

I learned to write so that TimeOut Grammar’s first pass would find as few errors as possible. When I mentioned this habit to a fellow teacher, he laughed, "That’s scary!" Perhaps a computer teaching someone to write didn’t sit well with him — especially when the computer, as mentioned, lacked the nuance and frame of reference that a human writer or editor does.

But not only did TimeOut Grammar never force a rewrite; it also occasionally reminded me just how smart it wasn’t. My favorite idiosyncrasy is one I previously related on Syndicomm Online, as captured in the March 2005 issue of The Lamp!:

Appleworks SPEAKS SPANISH?
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””
One of my favorite AppleWorks quirks: try grammar checking “not likely to”, and accept all suggested corrections. The result will be “unliprobablyo”.

I didn’t know AppleWorks knew Spanish! :-)

-Ken

(KGAGNE, Cat 9, Top 20, Msg 18)

TimeOut Grammar must’ve stored a copy of the original document in its memory — a copy that wasn’t aware of the module’s own substitutions. So when "not likely" got replaced by "unlikely", it didn’t stop Grammar from continuing to see the original "likely" and wanting to replace it with "probably".

Writing is quirky and creative — something you don’t necessarily want your computer programs to be. But when used in moderation and with discretion, TimeOut Grammar was a wonderful tool that helped me along my way.