A post at Kill Zone Blog: Can You Automate Grammar?
I’ve always considered myself pretty good at grammar, but of course, I wanted to see what Word’s Editor function had to say. These are some of the things it flagged across several of my books. What I’ve written first, then the Editor’s suggestion/correction below. Changes in bold.
She put the camera to her eye
She put the camera into her eye
And so on, many examples of stupid grammar suggestions from Word.
Every time I get a new laptop and periodically when Word updates for whatever reason, I have to go through and hit, “Don’t check for this” to turn off almost all the stupid suggestions. BUT, in the meantime, while I’m still working on shutting up Word’s grammar suggestions, I collect the funniest “corrections,” just as Terry Odell did in the linked post. And yes, I realize you can turn everything off in Options, but I actually want Word to catch SOME things. I just wish there was a button that said, “Turn off everything except the six things you always want Word to check” — in other words, something that remembered that I ALWAYS tell it to shut up about verb tenses, “concise” writing, and so on.
Here are the funniest suggestions I’ve accumulated this summer. This isn’t a complete list of stupid suggestions. It’s a selection of the best ones.
What exactly were you after → wants “where” instead of “were.”
Vokanien would fry it again → wants “try”
Barely a minute later, her communications tab blinked. → wants “had her” instead of “her.”
This was a long, rectangular room with a long, rectangular table and a long, rectangular map laid out along the table → wants “lay” instead of “laid.”
“I’ve no intention of gossiping to anyone regarding anything → wants “any” instead of “no.”
Nor did they. → Nor did them. I’m not kidding!
The reason for his lie was also entirely obvious → wants “life,” if you can believe that.
Then suddenly he was extremely interested in you, I can’t imagine why. → turn “was” to “were,” but don’t bother your head about the obvious comma splice, I’m sure that’s fine. (To be fair, I might have told it to shut up about comma splices before it suggested anything for this sentence.)
Not too hard, no. → wants “no” to be “a” for some inexplicable reason.
Chatham stopped himself from saying that. → wants “him” instead of “himself.”
I want to stall for quite a while; around fifty hours minimum. → wants “hour’s.” Seriously.
Quite so. → tells me this is a fragment, good God above.
“Oh, is that what he’s supposed to do?” → wants me to remove the comma.
He had leaned his head back against the couch. → wants “learned,” not making that up.
Slowing him down a bit → wants “downs,” not kidding.
The ones at the linked post are just as funny because they are just as stupid. I SWEAR, Word’s suggestions were not as blindingly stupid fifteen years ago. This HAS to be stupid AI crap replacing algorithms. AND EVEN NOW, nothing will catch a double period at the end of a sentence! WHY IS THAT HARD?
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I learned that grammar checkers hate you and want to make you look like a fool long ago. My solution was to do it as a final run — if it still lets you do that.
I was reading a physical newspaper the other day, and on the FRONT PAGE there were three typos – one was that they misspelled Sarah J. Maass’s name as Mass – twice – another was that they had spelled ‘dam’ as ‘damn’, and another was a stupid grammatical mistake which I don’t now recall.
Look, I get it if you make a mistake as a journalist once in a while, but these were obvious spell-check misses, easily fixed if you look over your work after Grammarly or Word has been through it. I guess the other assumption would be that you actually understand how grammar and spelling work yourself, instead of relying on the machine to do it for you, and that you double–check the spelling of proper names before sending your article in. Or that you understand how homonyms work, and which one you want.
EC, a lot of students automatically accept suggestions from Word without considering for a microsecond whether Word is acting like an idiot. Sounds to me like a plausible explanation for Maass being spelled Mass.