Is there a tool for automatically checking English grammar?

Question

I need to run through a document and check that it contains proper English grammar. My toolset for spell-checking for words include ispell and OpenOffice, but they seem only to do spell-checking.

Even though OpenOffice was talking about grammar I didn't manage to get it to find grammar faults, only spelling errors.

I'd like to check some basic rules such as "a/an articles" etc.

Answer 1

You can use LanguageTool. From the site:

An Open Source language checker for English, German, Polish, Dutch, and other languages. This is a rule-based language checker that will find errors for which a rule is defined in its XML configuration files. Rules for more complicated errors can be written in Java. You can think of LanguageTool as a tool to detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect, e.g. mixing up there/their, no/now etc. It can also detect some grammar mistakes. It does not include spell checking