Singular “their” is OK - or at least it was OK for Jane Austen and Shakespeare.

This assumes that Austen and Shakespeare are infallible, and that the rules governing their usage govern today. Spell “choose” as “chuse” and you will get marked off.

As for “Everybody wanted to keep on dancing. They said …”, the problem doesn’t arise, because it’s not just one person speaking.

As for the KJV, one has to allow for scribal errors, no? And in any event, Nietzsche already hit this one: “It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he decided to become an author—and not to learn it better.”

I think the main problem is that while it may bring up the standard of the really bad papers, it will also tend to mediocritise the decently-written stuff; and what’s more, because it’s so misleading and so often incorrect, it won’t teach the bad students anything much at all, while confusing those who do have some idea.

FWIW, speaking as someone with a fair bit of editing experience, Word’s grammar checker, and even its spell checker often, are the first things any copyeditor I know turns off when installing the program — along with most of its irritating auto-correct and auto-formatting features. The grammar checker is far too inaccurate and misleading to let loose on first-year uni students! Please don’t ;)

We all know that passives can be misused. We just don’t think that every single one should be flagged, as MS Word does.

“Defenses of writing in the passive”—why, isn’t that moral equivalence and relativism? Lord save us.

It was also good enough for God.

“Singular they”: God said it, I believe it, that settles it. [Language Log]

“I also believed, with Aldous Huxley, that it takes just as much work to write a bad book as a good one, and that whoever made the effort deserved, at least, a kind word—even if the kindest words one could muster were ‘please learn to spell, punctuate, construct a sentence, think coherently, find some other way of making a living.’”
Rayanna Simons, “Slush,” in Editors on Editing 117, 117

It’s an interesting idea because while the prescriptivist rules are all the Language Log guys complain they are, applying them to freshman papers will usually make the papers more readable. Everything in moderation. So, yeah, try it and remember to tell us how it goes.

Thinking about it more in the light of these comments, I think that the stylechecker is much more useful to people who already know how to write than to those who don’t. I take my prose seriously, and I have little time for prescriptive rules of grammar, yet I do find the stylechecker useful. I find it even more helpful when writing in French: it recently correctly pointed me to about half a dozen errors in a one-page document, all of which I was then able to fix.