iWork '09: The Missing Manual

The Proofreader

Along with the spell checker, Pages gives you another eagle-eyed assistant to help you spot typos. The Proofreader combs through your text looking for errors in capitalization, punctuation, and writing style. Although prone to making occasional errors of its own, the Proofreader provides a valuable service by taking you through a careful review of your text, drawing attention to potential trouble spots.

First things first: The Proofreader is not a grammar checker. Other word processors like Microsoft Word include tools called grammar checkers which try to identify a variety of grammatical mistakes, like subject-verb disagreement (“I is grammatically challenged”), sentence fragments, and so on. Grammar checkers examine the structure of your sentence, try to understand what you’re attempting to write, and then offer suggestions or corrections. As you might guess, however, programming a computer to offer advice on something as slippery as human language is a tough task, with unreliable results. Few grammar checkers do their job well, and it seems that Apple decided not to bother. The Proofreader doesn’t really tackle the problem at all.

Instead, the Proofreader focuses on flagging simple typos and nudging you to reconsider jargon words or clichéd phrases. It’s at its most useful spotting duplicated words (“I frequently have this this problem”), capitalization errors, and extra spaces around punctuation—all typical typing errors that can’t be caught by the spell checker. ...