Automattic Acquires Spellcheck Plugin – After The Deadline
Spelling and grammar can give us serious problems – in terms of reputation and the writing quality for our WordPress blog.
Although there are thousands (maybe) of spell-check software are out there, almost most of the software will give us difference result which means a bad news for us who try to create a grammar and spelling perfect articles for our WordPress blog.
Even for someone who claims has read through and read out loud his article few times; it is almost possible for him to miss obvious mistakes. And this is when the role of editor comes in 
However, Automattic, the owner of WordPress has acquired After The Deadline, a spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications through a software service – which right now, for WordPress. For your information, Automattic had acquired PollDaddy, an Ireland based company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets last October. This latest news has been announced by WordPress and the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg himself.
Matt, when he first used the plugin, he claimed that he is really impressed by the plugin’s capability and flexibility to be upgraded to be smarter.
When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used, and it was by one guy building this thing that solves a problem other folks have teams of PhDs trying to solve.
I reached out to Raphael (the one guy) to see how we could get this technology in front of WordPress users and ended up doing a deal for Automattic to buy his entire company.
The other cool thing about this new technology is that it’s getting better every day — Raphael is constantly adding new rules and heuristics, and the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter.
This can be one of the reasons why Automattic has acquired After The Deadline .
Through this newly acquired spell-check plugin, you can enable and customize the way After the Deadline analyzes your posts by adjusting the new Proofreading settings in your profile, and then use the new feature by clicking on the icon in the Visual Editor toolbar that has ABC and a green checkmark on it.
Here is a summary of the options:
- Bias language may offend or alienate different groups of readers.
- Clichés are overused phrases with little reader impact.
- Complex phrases are words or phrases with simpler every-day alternatives.
- A double negative is one negative phrase followed by another. The negatives cancel each other out, making the meaning hard to understand.
- A hidden verb is a verb made into a noun. These often need extra verbs to make sense.
- Jargon phrases are foreign words and phrases that only make sense to certain people.
- Passive voice obscures or omits the sentence subject. Frequent use of passive voice makes your writing hard to understand.
- Phrases to avoid are wishy-washy or indecisive phrases.
- Redundant phrases can be shortened by removing an unneeded word.
These settings follow the user so each user on your blog can have different settings.
After the Deadline will analyze your post as you write it and highlight potential errors with an underline (red for spelling, green for grammar, blue for style), similar to grammar and spell checkers in word processing software. Clicking on a highlighted word or phrase will reveal the suggested correction, tell you why it’s suspected to be an error, and allow you to accept or ignore it.
Cannot After The deadline for any longer? You can download the latest plugin by Automattic through below download button.
Interested on knowing more about After The Deadline? Hit Play button on below video.
You can also know more about this latest acquisition by Automattic on the official AtD blog.
What do you think about this latest news? Share your opinions on this acquisition and how will it helps WordPress communities and WordPress, itself.
I love to know what your say is. Cheers!
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Interesting but I dont think I need this though
I agree it doesn’t seem absolutely necessary. If I really need to I’ll type my posts in microsoft word and copy and paste it in wordpress.
This will help me as i don’t look too often at what I type.
Have you ever tried using the microsoft word option as I have mentioned? It has a pretty strong spell and grammar checker.
Microsoft word check grammar too?
But why people like you use all that? English is your language, why you still need stuff like this?
Actually english isn’t my first language
@Mike But I don’t think you can put html tags and stuff like that.
you are right you cant use HTML. I see the dilemma now. @Ariff I speak english fluently but I am not a writer so the written word is not my strongest point when it comes to proper punctuation and use of active/passive voice.
I see. That’s an interesting fact.