You can use the detex tool to strip LaTeX commands. If you do detex file.tex, it will output to stdout. Then, you can use the diction tool to analyse your text, and suggest improvements. Putting it all together:
detex file.tex | diction -bs
This will strip the LaTeX, and pipe it into diction with suggestions and "beginner mistakes" enabled.
For Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install diction texlive-extra-utils
This will install detex and diction, as well as several other useful tools.
Since you mentioned that you're using Emacs, there is also diction.el which provides diction integration with Emacs. You can do M-x diction-buffer, and it will take care of detexing/dehtmling and show the diction results in a separate buffer. You can even hit enter on the individual results to be taken to approximately where the phrase is.
(If you do use diction.el, my version of detex didn't have the -C flag. I'm not sure of what it was meant to do, but if you search for 'detex -C' in the file, you can add other command line options if you want. Also, I recommend replacing 'diction -L' with 'diction -bsL')
LanguageTool is a very nice standalone, Java-based grammar checker. However, it works on plain text. Therefore, I needed to convert my LaTeX document to as plain as possible text document - Not a simple task. I managed to do it using the following trick:
- I arranged for all floats to hold their positions using the floats package and the H option. This is required so that captions won't break the paragraphs when transforming to plain text.
- I removed line numbers using the nopageno package.
- I used a sed script to do some more fine-tuning, like adding periods to section names and description labels. I don't publish the script here, since that it is really specific to my-own style and conventions.
- After this preprocessing, I compiled to DVI and ran
catdvi -s.
- I used another simple sed script to get rid of empty lines and page breaks. The final result is a reasonable textual conversion of the LaTeX document, which LanguageTool can work on.
There are still some leftover annoyances, like inlined program listings, which the grammar checker can't understand, but all together I got a decent automated proof-checking from it :)
Best Answer
You should read everything again, several times. That said, here are two suggestions:
Have a grammatically literate friend read your thesis.
A clumsy (relatively) quick way to get some (possibly useful) help:
Most of the problems found will be spurious, but a few may be real and you can fix those.
If you compile your thesis (temporarily) without ligatures and without hyphenation then there will be fewer "errors" to ignore in the doc file.
Edit in response to OP's comment.
In my acrobat pdf viewer I can choose Word on the save-as menu, or Google https://www.google.com/#q=pdf2word+online+converter
Google https://www.google.com/#q=latex+suppress+ligatures
Google https://www.google.com/#q=latex+suppress+hyphenation