AROUND HOME : Notes on Laundry Space, Dipped Candles, Tiffany Glass and Movado Watches : Grammar Checks

WHEN STYLE AND grammar checkers for home computers first came out several years ago, they were a good idea whose time had not yet come. They were maddeningly simple-minded, opinionated, dictatorial--and usually wrong.

Times have changed. Artificial intelligence techniques are finally beginning to have an impact. Grammatik III, now in its third iteration, has become a rather handy proofreading tool. It catches all those little writing errors that in the heat of composition you overlooked--mispunctuation, doubled words (“the the”), misspellings, cliches, exaggerations and outright illiteracies.

Like most nit-pickers, Grammatik III is not a barrel of laughs. Instead, one has the sense of a stern grammarian looking down his nose at your slipshod prose. Beginning sentences with And or But , the screen sniffs at you, are hackneyed or trite. It frowns on awful , horrible and wonderful as unnecessary exaggerations. It regards using too for also as borderline usage.

If you use continuous or continual in a sentence, it reminds you--in case the distinction has gotten a bit fuzzy in your mind--that continuous means “without stopping,” and continual means “at short intervals.” Should you happen to write that there is an “infinite number” of anything, it will offer you the dull but usually accurate advice that you undoubtedly mean “very many” instead.

Grammatik III’s advice is not all equally sound. If you don’t stop it, it will flag every occurrence of words such as he , she , man or woman and suggest you re-cast your sentence in gender-free language. Their , it suggests, is now a “permissible” substitute for his , as in: “The truck driver blew their horn.” Thankfully, Grammatik III contains an internal switch to turn such gender advice off.

Grammatik III’s spell checker, on the other hand, is actually rather endearing. Because it doesn’t recognize proper names, when it sees the woman’s name Darlene in a manuscript, it asks if you really don’t mean to say darling . In similar fashion, it suggests substituting trash for Trish.

But these are minor foibles. Grammatik III is simple to run and useful. And even if you tend to the Mrs. Grundy personality yourself, don’t automatically overlook Grammatik III. No matter how carefully you proof your manuscript, Grammatik III will invariably find some mistake.

For IBM and IBM clones. Grammatik III costs $99 plus tax, through Reference Software, 330 Townsend St . , Suite 123, San Francisco 94107; telephone (800) 872-9933.