This is an entry in a series of posts I’m calling Word Fails Me, in which I highlight the strange ideas that Microsoft Word has about English grammar. Each post will be a screenshot with little or no comment. The intention of this series is to amuse you and make you wonder where Word is getting its ideas. I’m not trying to be condescending to Word’s grammar checker or the people behind it. Word is a fascinating program and the grammar checker can be a lifesaver, even if it leans prescriptivist sometimes. If I come across interesting research into MS Word’s grammar checker, I’ll share it here. You can find all of the entries under the Word Fails Me tag. Enjoy!
Welcome back to Word Fails Me! This example comes again from an article that I wrote recently. The sentence is “Perhaps the high frequency of exclamation points in this corpus can be seen as another dimension of excitability.”
Word has a problem with this verb construction, but it suggests I change it to “Perhaps the high frequency of exclamation points in this corpus be another dimension of excitability.” This is not acceptable in Standard Written English (but it may be in some varieties!).
The other suggestions are is and am. The latter is purely ungrammatical in any variety, and while using is would make the sentence more concise (Word loves conciseness), it would remove the hedging I was implying with can be seen as (academics love hedging).
Whatevs.
