Xopher is wrong to say that "no on(e) at Microsoft knows Jack about English grammar". In fact, Microsoft Research has a very strong group in this natural language processing (see http://research.microsoft.com/nlp), and they have a large scale natural language processing system, based on an earlier system called PLNLP (see http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J93/J93-4006.pdf for a review of a book on the subject).
My recollection is that Microsoft's version of PLNLP is what powers their English grammar checker. I don't claim the grammar checker works all that well, and in fact I've only rarely used it. There are three very hard problems you have to deal with. One is the natural language analysis itself; as we like to say in NLP, "all grammars leak", by which it is meant that it is hard to come up with an (analysis) grammar that covers a broad range of language use without introducing massive ambiguity in the results. I've used PLNLP, or MSNLP as it is called now, and it actually does a fairly good job in getting a good syntactic analysis. I don't know that it would get the right results for the "put up with" examples, as the first one relies on making a good guess at some world knowledge, but I would expect it to do OK on the "to do with" examples.
A second problem is how to you translate that analysis into rules of usage which provide a simple critique of the text. If you want to understand what I mean, try taking a look at one of the comprehensive reference grammars of English such as Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (over a thousand pages long) or the recent one by Huddlestone and Pullum.
The third problem is getting people to decide on what counts as right. Sadly, all too many people get hung up on essentially arbitrary rules, leading them to get diverted into what a text should be rather than whether they understood it. (Usually such people are editors or have taken Strunk and White's pox-ridden little pocketbook of pointless pontifications too much to heart).
This, to return to what Theresa originally said, is the one reason why I think grammar checkers might just be useful: they provide a normative way of checking the language so as to avoid distracting a certain kind of reader.
I flew through Logan last weekend (er, September 11th, on an AA flight from Boston to LA...), and managed to upset the security machine by leaving a roll of quarters in my bag. I always carry this, as it's useful for buses, tolls, etc. The person operating the scanner put my bag to one side and made a point of not opening it, but instead called one of his colleagues. Who looked at the monitor, laughed at him, and said "it's a roll of quarters, sonny".
One data source widely used in my field (natural language processing and information retrieval) is the CIA world factbook, which has most of the characteristics of an almanac. Another source, used when you want to build something like an address recognizer is the FIPS55 data, which the US government distrbutes for free through the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I wonder if they will start tracking people who download them in future; or perhaps they already are.
Yes, I usually do get pictures, to the extent that I often become completely unaware of the physical text. On the occasions when I don't find myself reading in this way, reading often becomes a rather dull and mundane experience which I don't enjoy much. I think this is also why I find it hard to get much from reading textbooks and other non-fiction, though that has got easier in the last 10-15 years, and I can find a middle-ground where I get some content from the text while still being aware of it.
I believe the technical term for this is immersive reading, and it seems to be influenced by both the psychological characteristics of the reader, and also by factors such as typography. The person at Microsoft who originated their Reader software with its anti-aliased font rendering wrote a good article on the subject (which I'm now not able to find, unfortunately).
This is more related in spirit than in detail, but if you ever go to Seattle, pay a visit to the underground streets. There is a part of the city where they decided to even out the street levels, which (as a result of fire, prostitution and bubonic plague) had become somewhat disordered; for example, crossing from the sidewalk on one side of some streets to the other required climbing up a ladder to reach the level of the intervening. In fixing this, the cavities below the raised street levels were not filled in, and the old streets still exist, complete with some of the storefronts. You can tour them (with rather dire "comic" guides); see for example http://www.seattletravel.com/seattleundergroundtour.html.
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