[schoen]

I think this is still risky if used in a context where the student might think that the computer is somehow always right. Great English writers often deliberately use sentence fragments or puns, or use a word with a nonstandard part-of-speech interpretation (especially using a noun as a verb). They may also sometimes use a sentence that's difficult for readers to parse and then explain the ambiguity after the fact.

If a teacher gave students a grammar-checking tool to check their writing, they might assume that the tool knew better than they did, which is only sometimes true.

[wmeredith]

Those great writers that break all the rules still know them.

"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

-Picaso

[erikpukinskis]

This is often repeated, but there's no evidence it's true. Many great writers had no formal training.

"And that quote is almost certainly made up."

- Willem Shakespere

[DougMerritt]

Knowing the rules is not the same thing as having formal training.

With then-innovated art like Cubism, which in some sense broke earlier rules, the point is that those artists, like Picasso, were able to do representative art in correct proportions -- they were just going beyond that.

This is a nontrivial issue, because there are always students who think they can skip learning boring mundane old fashioned art and go straight to something like cubism, but in 99% of cases that doesn't work well at all compared with learning "the rules" first.

With writing, many great writers have broken "the rules" with punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. But the important thing is that they do so on purpose.

Whereas if one doesn't know the rules in the first place, one doesn't have the choice of whether to follow them or break them.

Such a person will always break those rules they don't know (subconscious knowledge counts btw) -- but not for aesthetic reasons, only out of ignorance.

[vidarh]

My perhaps favourite example of knowing when and how to break the rules is Franz Schuberts "Erlkönig" [1] because it is so stark.

If you listen to it without paying attention to the text (based on a poem by Goethe by the same name; both the German text and an English translation is found at [1]), parts of it sounds like horrible jammering and poor harmonies and it's easy to write it off as not sounding very nice.

Here's [2] a much clearer rendition (two singers, with much stronger delineation of the three different characters) than the one linked from Britannica.

If you do pay attention to the text, it is very clear that the unpleasant parts are very deliberate:

The singer(s) switches between the role of a father, his sick dying child, and the Erl-king that occurs in the hallucinations of the child while the father is riding to bring the child to a doctor.

The big difference between the unpleasant-sounding parts of this song and a bad composer is the clear intent and delineation - Schubert made things sound bad intentionally explicitly at the points he wanted to illustrate pain and fear, rather than because he didn't know how to make things sound pleasant when he wanted to.

The song clearly proves this by setting the childs jammering and the fathers fearful attempts to soothe him up against much more pleasant segments where the Erl-king speaks and tries to seduce the child to come with him.

You only get that clear separation if you know how to evoke each effect precisely. Arguably a bad particularly composer wouldn't even know how to make things sound bad the "right way" - there's a big difference between random bad sounds and making things evoke a child in pain.

[1] http://www.britannica.com/topic/Erlkonig

[2] https://soundcloud.com/sean_contretenor_lee/erlkonig

[erikpukinskis]

Your logic is flawed. "Artist A did X before doing Y, therefore X is necessary to do Y". It doesn't compute.

I've heard great painters say that the only thing that matters is that you paint. Plenty of wonderful painters did not study their predecessors in depth.

I'm assuming that your 99% number is fabricated? Incidentally 99% of statistics are made up.

[escap]

Previous discussion on “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively” quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754905

[nashashmi]

I am also afraid of the misuse of such software. It is also possible that the teacher does not know that much and will look at the software as correct.

And come to think of it, isn't there a saying: Did stupidity require smart computers or did smart computers allow for stupidity?

An intelligent software (or one that pretends to be intelligent) might allow for any unqualified bloke to be in a position where they can teach.

[fpgaminer]

Sorry for not being clear. This is intended for use in teaching English. What you describe falls under the purview of Creative Writing. Specifically it'd target English in grade school up until the early college college classes (the ones most people skip out of based on tests). After that, yes you'd be right and this tool wouldn't be appropriate.