Because the end of the quarter approaches, it wouldn't hurt to remind writers of all stripes, but students in particular—especially if you happen to be one of mine—that trusting Microsoft Word's spelling- and grammar-checker is the writerly equivalent of stepping into the windowless white van of the nice man who offered you candy. To wit:
If I wanted to write "a man who explains, in iambs, why he came to her aid and why he is about murders them," I would've written that instead of "they are murdered by a man who explains, in iambs, why he came to her aid and why he is about to blow up the British Parliament." Moreover, you'd think something specifically designed to check for "Spelling and Grammar" errors would've noticed that I seem to be out words before the colon up there (what with V for Vendetta being set in "a dystopian future," not "a dystopian").
Moreover, you'd think something specifically designed to check for "Spelling and Grammar" errors would've noticed that I seem to be out words before the colon up there (what with V for Vendetta being set in "a dystopian future," not "a dystopian"
Come on, Scott, MS Word obviously thought that the book is set inside the body of a dystopian (a dystopian being, of course, a follower of the Greek religious leader Dystopos). Anyone would read it that way.
Posted by: tomemos | Friday, 05 March 2010 at 07:41 PM
Why doe Bill Gates do things like MS Word grammarcheck? Because he can.
Posted by: John Emerson | Friday, 05 March 2010 at 08:41 PM
The problem with spell-check and grammar check is that it's so bad, you quickly learn to ignore it.
I'm only a technical writer (although that means I automatically win at Jeopardy!), but I recently had multiple drafts go through multiple reviews, without anyone noticing that I'd typed "incontiguous" instead of "discontiguous." Of course, neither word is recognized by spellcheck, but one of them means something technical, and the other one sounds scatological.
Finally, a peer reviewer emailed, "Did you really mean to write "incontiguous?"
And I replied, "Depends."
Then I fixed it.
Posted by: HP | Friday, 05 March 2010 at 10:11 PM
This is another reason why I've stopped using MS Word in my writing process. Instead, I try to get by with simple text editors (like Writeroom for Mac), and only turn to MS Word when forced. I've been very disappointed by the selection of writing tools in the middle ground between Word and a simple text editor: all I really need are footnotes. The last thing I'll say here, since this is turning into a product placement comment, is that I rely heavily on TextExpander (again for Mac) for auto-correction as well as its normal role as, well, an expander.
Posted by: Luke | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 03:32 AM
I'm a copy-editor, and am always amused when I read a sentence that makes no sense/is wrong, correct it, watch the green lines pop up, check the suggestion, and find that the author had likely written the sentence correctly, but then trusted MS Word's "correction." Fortunately, I have yet to have a conversation during which the writer goes "But Word said..."
Posted by: P.T. Smith | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 09:23 AM
Blame Strunk & White!
Posted by: Caio | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 09:32 AM
Caio: Nonsense. Strunk & White were right that the active voice is generally preferable, and they also included examples of exceptions where the passive voice works better. Pullum is a hack who ceaselessly piggybacks on Strunk & White's success to bring attention to his own unconstructive carping. No one has ever made a style manual as successful or as effective as The Elements of Style.
Posted by: tomemos | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 01:50 PM
Trouble is, actual journalists use (or neglect to ignore) spellcheckers, so that the Philadelphia Inquirer referred to novelist Michael Swanwick as "Michael Swankier."
Posted by: Josh | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 03:41 AM
Like EasyBib, MS Word is no smarter than the person who uses it.
Posted by: Luther Blissett | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 11:49 AM
"Like EasyBib, MS Word is no smarter than the person who uses it."
No, and in fact it's stupider.
Posted by: tomemos | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 12:32 PM
Tomemos, I would argue that Strunk and White's advice is better than Pullum would admit, because it does provide common sense guidance that isn't immediately obvious to beginners. Leddy makes some good points about this (although I still think some of the stylistic advice is silly, and much of it more narrowly applicable than the writers seem to suggest). But that doesn't make either of them good grammarians, and on that count, I side with Pullum. Take the matter of the passive voice: Strunk and White do misidentify as passive three of the four examples given towards the end of the "Use the Active Voice" section--they are actually active instances of the word "to be." Maybe you can make the argument that they were using a non-technical sense of the word "passive," but any reader that doesn't know better would naively think that by "passive voice" they mean "passive voice", and would thus get a completely wrong idea about what the passive voice actually is.
Either way, this doesn't change the fact that the suggested revision in SEK's screencap is an obvious application of the unwarranted prejudice against the passive voice, and that this prejudice wouldn't be nearly as widespread and accepted if it weren't for the injunction contained of the most widely respected book on style.
Posted by: Caio | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 12:33 PM
The prejudice against the passive voice is not "unwarranted." The active voice is indeed generally preferable to the passive. Strunk and White were clear that the injunction against the passive voice was not absolute: "This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary" [examples follow]. Blaming Strunk and White for the pathological over-application of this rule, as Leddy says, is like blaming the White Album for Charles Manson.
(I agree with you and Pullum about the mistakes in the "Use the Active Voice" section, and think that Leddy is being too generous there.)
Posted by: tomemos | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 12:53 PM