Tag: grammar

Word Fails Me #7: What’s an extent student?

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

And more importantly, what are they certain of? No, I keed.

I’m obviously missing the commas around to a certain extent. Word’s grammar and spell checker is surprisingly easy to get around when you apply a few parenthetical elements. Is that word marked as being misspelled? Throw a hyphen in there!

I just wonder why Word isn’t suggesting a verb after to. And what does it mean when it says there’s a disagreement within the noun phrase? Beats me.

MSWord - to a certain extent

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 a short 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!

A tired English “rule”

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Here’s a good example of why we split infinitives in English:

You may have heard that it’s bad grammar to split an infinitive. This is a made up rule that was taken directly from Latin. Thankfully, it seems to have been buried for good as people are starting to realize it’s a ridiculous rule. The infinitive is already split in English – there’s always a space between to and the verb. And you can see here that following the rule would produce some really weird sentences:

I wonder what it feels like to be not tired.

I wonder what it feels like not to be tired.

Both of those sound unnatural and unindiomatic.

Word Fails Me #6: Look at it!

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

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!

And we’re back, ladies and gents! We’ve got a simple one this time. Let’s take a look… I mean, let’s look. No, that doesn’t sound right… Let’s give a little look-see. There, that’s better.

MSWord - take a look

Word Fails Me #5: As a way to

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

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! Here’s another example of Word recommending that I consider using concise language. Word likes to do this. I’m not sure as a way to can be replaced by just to here. I guess so? Maybe?

(The writing actually comes from William Brennan in the Atlantic. I was quoting this article.)

MSWord - As a way to

Delete your grammar advice, YUNiversity

Joe McVeigh3 Comments

There’s a website called YUNiversity. They claim to be “Grammar bosses for Gen TL;DR” and their posts are full of lots of memes and emoji. That’s not a bad thing. I use memes (probably old ones, but whatevs) in my grammar classes and linguists are all about them emoji. No, problem with the YUNiversity isn’t their dank memes. It’s their dumb grammar. Let’s take a look. Continue reading “Delete your grammar advice, YUNiversity” →

Word Fails Me #4: What Word must say

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

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! Here’s an example of Word getting a bit confused with modal verbs. I guess it’s neat that Word thinks have is a modal and can be made more precise by using must or should. Have is a plain ol’ lexical verb here. Sometimes must can replace have to, but not in this case.

MS Word - what they have to say

Word Fails Me #3: to be or not to can be seen as

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

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.

MS Word - to be or not to can be seen as

The grammar of “feeling less than (X)”

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

This tweet came across my TL and it interested me because of what it says and how it says it.

Since this is primarily a blog about language, I’ll focus on the how-it-says, rather than the what-it-says (and besides, the latter is just self-evident). Continue reading “The grammar of “feeling less than (X)”” →

Word Fails Me #2: Those which names

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

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 from an article I published recently. Ok, I’ll admit that my writing could always use some TLC. But not the kind that MS Word is trying to give me.

The sentence under question goes “… as well as those which name both a product and a customer”. And Word wants me to change it to:

  1. … as well as those which names both a product and customer
  2. … as well as that which name both a product and customer

Both of those are ungrammatical :/

MS Word - those which names

Word Fails Me #1: This document is smoking

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

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 to Word Fails Me! Let’s start with an example from Microsoft’s own web site about their grammar checker. As you can see, Word thinks the following sentences are A-OK:

  1. The document is sorting that we must review.
  2. The document is smoking that we must review.

document_is_smoking_that_we_must_review

To be fair, I think you should definitely review a document if it is smoking.