How Do I Know When to “Skip”?
Ginger, a tool described in “EdTech Writing Tools You Need to Try” by the Learning Agency as “an award-winning productivity-focused company” that includes “ grammar checker, punctuation, and spell checker — tools which automatically detect and correct misused words and grammar mistakes.” They also claim it will help you “write unique text and enrich existing sentences with the help of Ginger’s sentence rephraser” and “to replace boring words with script that’s much more exciting” with the synonym detector. The latter seemed like pretty ambitious claims, so I decided to try this one out.
How it Works
Ginger can be installed as an app for Chrome, Gmail, or Facebook. You can also download it to your computer to use it in Microsoft Office. I tried Chrome first, thinking it would work with Google Docs, but I got a response that it is not yet compatible with Google Docs. That’s a bummer for sure. So I decided to download it to my computer and try it with Microsoft Word. It is pretty easy to access the tools when you have a Word document open. When you are working in the app, sentence-level revision suggestions appear at the top of your page and you click through either “accept” or “skip”(see image above).
What Happened
I decided to try it with an article a colleague and I recently submitted to The Rural Educator. I selected this piece of writing for two reasons:
- We have revised this piece extensively, including a revision after we submitted and got revision suggestions from peer reviewers.
- We paid a professional editor to edit the piece.
I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of suggestions Ginger would make with a piece that had been thoroughly revised and edited. Surely it wouldn’t have very many suggestions for revision.
It had a lot: 90 total suggestions, 35 spelling, 27 grammar, 12 “conciseness,” and 16 “formality.” We did knock it out of the park on “clarity” though, with ZERO suggestions. Nice.
What I Noticed
As far as suggestions on grammar and spelling, it was what I would have expected. Some of the suggestions were just incorrect. For example, the suggestion for this sentence: “Some districts had a teacher turnover rate of 75%; others had staff that had been there for years.” The suggestion was to replace staff with stuff, which doesn’t even make sense and clearly changes the meaning of the whole sentence.
A number of the grammar and spelling suggestions, however, were helpful. Not that they necessarily corrected something that was incorrect, but rather suggested a more correct approach for something that was already correct.
However, the suggestions for “refinements” were a bit more troubling. For example, there was a suggestion to revise “pressures that differentially affect rural districts” to read “pressures that differently affect rural districts.” Obviously what was likely the synonym detector thought that differently was a better word, but it clearly doesn’t convey the same meaning. And I think that is always my biggest worry with these types of tools. That they will make suggestions for revisions that actually change the meaning. And that students won’t know how or when to skip those suggestions.
Still, some of the refinements weren’t so bad. Like the one that suggested replacing “the majority of” with “much of,” but it’s not quite helping me“write unique text and enrich existing sentences or replacing “boring words with script that’s much more exciting.”
Ultimately the problem I see with this tool, and likely most others that exist is that the suggestions are inconsistent. Some are okay, some are pretty good, but others are not helpful or even just wrong. The big question it really raises for me is how we can have a tool that supports students in knowing when and why to click “skip” rather than “accept.”
