English is a difficult language for anyone to master, so if you’re dyslexic it can cause real headaches, particularly when you’re at university and you have to write essay upon essay! With approximately 5-15% of the population suffering from severe reading and writing difficulties, it really is a serious issue that needs addressing. Fortunately, there are academic proofreaders and copy-editors (like us!) who can help you improve your writing, and there are also some great software packages out there which can help you too. Ghotit is one such program.
Ghotit is a highly innovate spelling and grammar checker for people with dyslexia, dysgraphia and various other writing difficulties. One of Ghotit’s founders, Ofer Chermesh, is dyslexic himself, and he found that conventional spell checkers are only effective at correcting spelling errors that are very similar to the correct spelling. This does not help dyslexic people, so he and his co-founders decided to develop software that worked differently.
Ghotit ingeniously detects an incorrectly spelled word by analysing the sentence’s context as a whole. Its unique algorithms enable it to highlight and rectify incorrectly spelled words, misused words and also words that are spelled correctly but used in the wrong context. Ghotit boasts a 95% success rate when correcting poorly spelled text.
The software has many features including a context and phonetic spell checker, text-to-speech, and an integrated word dictionary. And when we say English, we don’t just mean British English, either – US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dictionaries are also available. The developers have even released a plug-in for Microsoft Word, allowing you to fully integrate the software into your daily writing process.
Ghotit is available to buy from the developer’s website here. If you visit their homepage, you can even try their online spelling and grammar checking service for free.
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At Full Proof, we get a lot of work from students. Every week we proofread academic documents of various types – essays, dissertations, theses, journal articles – and the majority of that work is from foreign students. Needless to say, we highly value foreign students and not just because they’re our ‘bread and butter’ – the vast majority are also extremely friendly, courteous and so very grateful for the service we provide. It really is a pleasure to work with them.
I noticed recently that some of our competitors charge higher rates to non-native students. To some extent, I can understand their thinking – a foreign student’s English is likely to be worse than that of the average native student – but to me it seems unfair to discriminate against such a large group of potential customers with such a rigid pricing structure when the reality is that foreign students’ written English can vary greatly in quality depending on the individual. Indeed, I have proofread work by some foreign students whose standard of English would put most native students to shame!
At Full Proof, we’re proud to say that we’ve never charged a student more because of where they come from. We always ask to see your work before we give an accurate quote, and we price proofreading jobs based on the standard of writing and how much work will be involved in the proofreading/copy-editing process.
So whether you’re native or foreign, we’d love to help you! Send your work to us via this page and we’ll provide you with a competitive price.
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Stephanie Hitch is a professional proofreader. She is a former solicitor and EFL teacher. She specialises in legal proofreading at www.legalproofreader.co.uk.
Lawyers are supposed to be good with words. Words are the tools of their trade, after all. I practised as a solicitor for over ten years but it wasn’t until I trained as a proofreader that I finally realised why certain legal words were spelt as they were. And it wasn’t until then that I realised that I, and my fellow solicitors, had been getting things wrong! Proofreading legal texts can be a difficult task as it is assumed that you will, as a proofreader, know all about Latin legal phrases, how to set out case law and when to capitalize words. So here are a few of the things that even the lawyers were getting wrong…
To capitalize or not to capitalize…
This was always a difficult one. Even if I knew I shouldn’t capitalize, I always felt that not to do so was somehow disrespectful or was not lending the person/thing its true gravitas. In the case of ‘judge’, the rule of thumb is that you should always capitalize when referring to a specific person’s title, e.g. Judge Marshall, and when the judge is a single judge sitting in the capacity of the full court. In all other instances, the word ‘judge’ should begin with a lower-case letter.
In the case of ‘court’, the c should be lower case when referring to a court in general and should be capitalized when referring to an international court, e.g. European Court of Justice, or when a court is talking about itself, e.g. “this Court”.
As for ‘Act’, it is always capitalized, whereas ‘bill’ is only capitalized when referring to a specific named bill.
Judgment/judgement
Lawyers know this one but it always seems to get misspelt in documents. In the legal sense of the word (as in a ruling of the court), the spelling is ‘judgment’, on the basis that a judge carrying out his/her public function cannot express a personal ‘judgement’. Be careful, though, if you are working with US documents – it’s ‘judgment’ in both situations.
Latin
Some Latin phrases are so well-established that they are set in roman, and not italic type, e.g. ‘inter alia’, ‘bona fide’, ‘de facto’, ‘ultra vires’ and ‘prima facie’. Other less-known ones should be set in italics.
Case names
The parties’ names are usually in italics. The ‘v.’ (versus) may be roman or italic and may be with or without the point. For example:
Straw v Berry or Straw v Berry
Straw v. Berry or Straw v. Berry
In criminal cases, ‘R’ is used for the state (e.g. R v Berry).
Anonymity is a feature in family law cases, for example Re B (A Minor).
There are some in-depth rules about case citations which are beyond the remit of this article. You can always save those to make those long winter evenings fly by…
Stephanie Hitch is a professional proofreader. A former solicitor and EFL teacher, she specialises in legal proofreading at www.legalproofreader.co.uk.
As native speakers, we don’t often think about our own language. We instinctively know what sounds right and when to use one word rather than another, even though we can’t always explain why. However, for people for whom English is a second (or even third) language, they can’t rely on such instinct and so they need rules.
I obtained the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults in 2000 and spent two years teaching English as a foreign language both in the UK and abroad. One grammar point that I frequently had to teach was the use of the word ‘get’. We use this word so frequently in English, particularly in spoken English, and many students became confused as to when it could be used. Before I started teaching English, I certainly could not have explained its most common uses. So here’s the lesson I used to do with my students…
Firstly, I would get (ha ha!) the students to brainstorm all the ‘get’ phrases they knew. ‘Get lost’ and ‘get a life’ were some of the more polite ones but they always enjoyed this five minutes of making me write rude phrases up on the whiteboard. I sometimes got one of the students to do this job and this always made for an even noisier lesson. I would then ask the students to try to group them according to their use or meaning to see if they could find any patterns. With much discussion and a little tweaking, the resulting list/groupings would look something like this:
arrive become catch
get to work get better/worse get a bus/plane/train
get home get married/divorced
obtain phrasal verb receive
get a new job get up get an answer
get a new car get over (something) get a letter
get on (with someone) get a present
Taking the first letter of each group would give the students a useful mnemonic to remember the list by: ABCOPR. The final task was to rearrange these letters into a mnemonic which they might more easily remember, or which might be more relevant to them in their own language. ‘COP BAR’, ‘COBRA P’ and ‘BRA COP’ were all offered up.
Teaching your own language really makes you think about the words you use, and why you use them. So the next time you use the word ‘get’, see if it falls into one of the six categories above.
Ben Dynamou of Bristol! Thanks to all customers who wrote a review of our services over the past few months. Ben’s name was selected at random and £50 of HMV vouchers will be winging their way to him shortly. Congratulations Ben, and merry Christmas to everyone!
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