When I was a boy, I couldn't go out like my other friends.

My mom always used to tell me "you should't be outside with those kids, you could be doing something more productive instead". I used to think "If you just would let me live my life..." but i never said a word. When I was 15, my mom died and I know I shouldn't take that as a pretext of what I did with my life. I remember that I started smoking and drinking (like my other friends) and when I was 17 i became addicted to heroin. Then my friends started telling me "You ought to stop partying all day, you look like crap" But I never listened to them, I knew I could die but I didn't really care. One day, I went to a party with my girlfriend, she loved me although I didn't deserve that, and I remember I got really drunk there. She told me I couldn't even stay still, so she would drive me back home. I told her "I'm ok, I can drive, you need to relax" and she looked really nervious but she didn't say a word. When I was driving, something inside my head told me "You shouldn't be driving... You could have an accident and you're with your girlfriend... You ought to stop at the side of the freeway and let her drive" But once again, I didn't listen. I'm not sure of what happened next. I just remember I got knocked out and my head was bleeding so bad... But I didn't worry about myself, I started to call my girlfriend, I didn't know where she was... She whispered "I'm here... I'm ok" and when I could stand up, I followed her voice and found her. She looked really bad, that's when I realised I had to change... I started to pray for her, She just told me "You need to change, You can't live like this anymore... I might die, I think I will, but you'll be fine... Just take care and would you do me a favor?" I didn't say a word... She whispered once again "Things could have been better, you know? I should have know that you would never change" And she closed her eyes. I was speechless, i couldn't believe she was dead. Then the ambulance arrived and I wish i would have died as well. When I got home, I thought "man, look what you've done... she's dead because of you, you must change, you have to do better with your life, you can't live like this, you'll end up worse than your mom or her" And this time, I did listen to that voice. I started college and I'll become a lawyer soon. I miss my girlfriend so much, but i know if she could say something now, she probably would say "I'm proud of you, you dared to change and your mom would be proud of you as well, we might be together some day, but for now, do the best you can" Fuente(s): Espero que te sirva y que me des 10 puntitos, todo lo redact yo, estoy cansada y sin imaginacin por ayudarte. Good night!!!

Janet was employed as a graphic designer at a very successful advertising company. She had worked there for two years, when she was offered a promotion to become head of the graphic solutions department. She was obviously very happy when she heard of her promotion. However, she was also rather concerned as she had also recently found out that she was pregnant. In the past, other women who had had children had found it difficult to continue working full time. Later that day, she asked her husband what he thought she should do. He felt that she should first accept the promotion and then, a few months later, tell her employers about her pregnancy. In this way, her husband felt, she would not jeopardize her promotion. Janet wasn't so sure this was a good suggestion, as she felt that it might be dishonest of her to not let her employers know about the change in her condition. She telephoned her best friend, who had also had the same problem previously, and asked for her advice. Cheryl, her best friend, asked her if she felt that she would be able to continue working as hard after the birth of her child as she had been working up to that point in time. Janet assured her that this was the case and so her friend told her to trust her husband's judgment. A few months later, Janet told her employers about her pregnancy. At first, they congratulated her on her pregnancy and wished her all the best. Over the next few weeks, she felt that her workload

was slowly increasing to the point that she could not handle the amount of work required of her. She scheduled an appointment with her boss, and presented her dilemma to him. He said that he felt for her, but that, because of a recent increase in sales accounts, he could do nothing about the increased workload. Disappointed, Janet went back to work and did her absolute best to keep up with the work. Unfortunately, the workload just continued to grow. Later that month, she received a call from the personnel department and was told to come speak to the personnel director. The personnel director told her that, due to her inability to keep up with the demands of her job, they were going to have to let her go. Janet couldn't believe what she was hearing. She asked him why, if a few months earlier they had promoted her for her excellence, they had now decided to let her go. It seemed ridiculous. He said that he was truly sorry, but that they had no other choice and asked her to gather her things and leave.

Grammar checker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A grammar checker, in computing terms, is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, but are also available as stand-alone application that can be activated from within programs that work with editable text. The implementation of a grammar checker makes use of natural language processing.
Contents
[hide]

1 History 2 Technical issues 3 Criticism 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

History[edit]
The earliest grammar checkers were basically programs that checked for punctuation and style inconsistencies, rather than finding many actual grammatical errors. The first system was called Writer's Workbench, and was a set of writing tools included with Unix systems as far back as the 1970s.[1][2] The whole Writers Workbench package included several separate tools to check for various writing problems. The diction tool checked for wordy, trite, clichd or misused phrases in a text. The tool would output a list of suspect phrases, and provide suggestions for improving the writing. The style tool

analyzed the writing style of a given text. It performed a number of readability tests on the text and output their results, and it gave some statistical information about the sentences of the text. Aspen Software of Albuquerque, NM, released the earliest version of a diction and style checker for personal computers, Grammatik, in 1981. Grammatik was first available for a Radio Shack -TRS-80, and soon had versions for CP/M and the IBM PC. Reference Software of San Francisco, CA, acquired Grammatik in 1985. Development of Grammatik continued, and it became an actual grammar checker that could detect writing errors beyond simple style checking. Other early diction and style checking programs included Punctuation & Style, Correct Grammar, and RightWriter. While all the earliest programs started out as simple diction and style checkers, all eventually added various levels of language processing, and developed some level of true grammar checking capability. Until 1992, grammar checkers were sold as add-on programs. There were still a large number of different word processing programs available at that time, with WordPerfect and Microsoft Wordthe top two in market share. In 1992, Microsoft decided to add grammar checking as a feature of Word and licensed CorrecText, a grammar checker from Houghton Mifflin that had not yet been marketed as a standalone product. WordPerfect answered Microsofts move by acquiring Reference Software, and the direct descendant of Grammatik is still included with WordPerfect.

Technical issues[edit]
The earliest writing style programs checked for wordy, trite, clichd, or misused phrases in a text. This process was based on simple pattern matching. The heart of the program was a list of many hundreds or thousands of phrases that are considered poor writing by many experts. The list of suspect phrases included alternative wording for each phrase. The checking program would simply break text into sentences, check for any matches in the phrase dictionary, and flag suspect phrases and show an alternative. These programs could also perform some mechanical checks. For example, they would typically flag doubled words, doubled punctuation, some capitalization errors, and other simple mechanical mistakes. True grammar checking is more complex. While a computer programming language has a very specific syntax and grammar, this is not so for natural languages. Though it is possible to write a somewhat complete formal grammar for a natural language, there are usually so many exceptions in real usage that a formal grammar is of minimal help in writing a grammar checker. One of the most important parts of a natural language grammar checker is a dictionary of all words in the language, along with the part of speech of each word. The fact that natural words can take many different parts of speech greatly increases the complexity of any grammar checker. A grammar checker will find each sentence in a text,

look up each word in the dictionary, and then attempt toparse the sentence into a form that matches a grammar. Using various rules, the program can then detect various errors, such as agreement in tense, number, word order, and so on. It is also possible to detect some stylistic problems with the text. For example, use of the passive voice is criticized by popular style guides such as The Elements of Style. Grammar checkers may attempt to identify passive sentences and suggest an active-voice alternative. The software elements required for grammar checking are closely related to some of the development issues that need to be addressed for voice recognition software. In voice recognition, parsing can be used to help predict which word is most likely correct based on part of speech and position in the sentence. In grammar checking, the parsing is used to detect words that fail to follow proper grammar usage. Recently, research has focused on developing algorithms which are capable of recognizing grammar errors based on the context of the surrounding words. Contextbased grammar checkers appear in Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Office 2007,[3] Google Wave,[4] Ghotit Dyslexia Software,[5] Grammarly, SpellCheckPlus.com, GrammarCheck.net, Ginger Software, and WhiteSmoke .

Criticism[edit]
Grammar checkers are considered as a type of foreign language writing aid which non-native speakers can use to proofread their writings as such programs endeavor to identify syntactical errors. [6] However, as with other computerized writing aids such as spell checkers, popular grammar checkers are often criticized when they fail to spot errors and incorrectly flag correct text as erroneous. The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has argued that they are generally so inaccurate as to do more harm than good: "for the most part, accepting the advice of a computer grammar checker on your prose will make it much worse, sometimes hilariously incoherent."[7]