Review on Virtual Writing Tutor

Virtual writing tutor is free online grammar checker. One can check English spelling, punctuation and grammar using this free online grammar checker. It is founded by Nicholas Walker, an ESL teacher. The goal of the virtual writing tutor is to enhance the ESL pedagogy, to increase its frequency, to improve its timelines, to improve its quantity. As this it detects the errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar so I would like to explore and evaluate critically one by one.

First of all if we go to the spelling checker option we will find that it detects wrongly spelled words and give the suggestion of probable corrections. But VWT has a limited word stock. If anyone puts a wrongly spelled word and if that word doesn’t exist in VWT’s store it will unable to detect that wrong spelling. Another important issue regarding spelling checker is that VWT ignores the British version of a word. It only detects the American version of a word. So if anyone put any British version material VWT will be unable to find out the word and it’s wrong spelling. It has made all the possible suggestion in American version and avoid British version which would make it weaker. So the vocabulary stock should be increased and British version should be applied in VWT. So that learners can get actual feedback of their mistakes.

VWT claims to correct the punctuation mark. But in some cases it fails to find out. It can detect the capitalization, but it cannot find out the wrong use of apostrophe and at the same time it cannot also find out the uses of comma. So it is a big weakness of this site.

In grammar section VWT should have improved a lot but unfortunately while exploring I found that it only correct the basic subject verb agreement mistakes. It cannot detect any other grammatical mistakes. So VWT needs to go a long to give the correct feedback to the learners of their errors.