The London Times ran an interesting article last week about new software for marking British students’ English papers.

In a test of the software’s effectiveness, it was given several of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s, William Golding’s, and Anthony Burgess’s prose, to decipher.

Some of the more humorous conclusions:

• Churchill’s call to ‘fight them on the beaches’ was too repetitive, and he used ‘upon’ and ‘our’ too frequently.  His reference to the ‘might of the German army’ lost him points because the computer assumed he meant to use ‘might’ as a verb, not a noun.
• Hemingway needed to write with more care and detail and was rated below average.
• Burgess’ opening lines in “A Clockwork Orange” were incomprehensible.

Such software, of course, is all the rage in the United States.