Dear Mr. G:
You wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Do your products use correct English or American? As an example, will this
> suggest the incorrect term, “gotten” as being a current correct English (as
> does Microsoft Word grammar check?
>
In virtually all cases English and American grammar are the same. This is true for all but a small number of spelling instances. We do have a page on the differences and try to summarize most of them. A sample of this page can be seen at https://englishplus.com/grammar/00000186.htm. Our Grammar Slammer Deluxe with Checkers has both British and American dictionaries for the spelling checker and settings in the grammar checker for that you can change for the few items that do differ.
I also recommend taking a look at our page https://englishplus.com/news/news0299.htm for an article on what you can and cannot expect from grammar and spelling checkers.
Thanks for your input. I was trying to minimize the differences.
>
> I will beg to differ; English is far more different than most might realise.
> Indeed, there are a lot of Americans and British who converse with each
> other without realizing that that their communications are being taken in a
> very different way than intended. I have lived in the USA for many years
> and still I find new differences, and things that I have been
> misunderstanding through the years.
>
> American vs. British Grammar (oxymoron) URL,
> https://englishplus.com/grammar/00000186.htm I think that Sir Winston
> Churchill’s quote was English humour, misunderstood in the translation to
> American (bearing in mind his mother was American). I do not see the BBC
> ending sentence with a preposition.
I understand that, but the “rule” was an artificial one nevertheless.
>
> Maths (not math) was my strong suit; typical of an engineer, Shamefully, I
> had little interest in English other than report writing, until moving to
> the US. It was trying to understand why Americans had bastardised the
> language more than others and how it reached this point that really got me
> interested in my own language. Hearing American television presenters
> crucifying the language that they describe as English made me cringe.
> Announcing the weeks “Winingest team” is not correct English.
I’m not crazy about “winningest” either. That term and ones like it often are first coined by advertisers.
A lot of the differences can actually be traced back to England. More early settlers of the US northeast were settled by people from East Anglia. The US southeast had many Scotch-Irish. But languages change over time and
distance. Considering we have gone our own ways for two hundred years, we are a lot closer than, say, the English of London in 1350 and 1600.
>
> I have learned that the greatest problem is the misapprehension that the
> English (and broader the British) and Americans speak use the same language.
> If grammatical rules are to be quoted in the name of being English, then
> there is one that is correct. That is English! But this is not saying that
> “knowing where it is at” is bad American, just bad English.
>
“Where it’s at” was originally coined deliberately knowing it was redundant.As a youngster, I recall viewing it as a grammatical joke. However popular songs (from both sides of the Atlantic, if I recall correctly) seemed to have made it easier to tolerate. Where replaces the prepositional phrase, so even Americans would consider this nonstandard, or at best colloquial. See our https://englishplus.com/grammar/00000179.htm .
My experience has been that most actual British-American misunderstanding comes from vocabulary (bonnet vs. hood, torch vs. flashlight, pants vs. underwear, that sort of thing).
> This site may be of interest and if I understand correctly, does much for
> English, as it seems your product does for American.
>
> http://www.the-times.co.uk/styleguide/ The Times Style Guide aims to provide
> a quick reference to contentious points of grammar and spelling and to guide
> through specialised areas where confusions have arisen in the past. The
> alphabetical list covers the main points from previous style guides as well
> as recurring problems experienced by editorial staff
>
This is excellent. I will carry a link to this on my site. (It may take a
few days before it gets posted). Thank you for calling my attention to it.