Grammar Checker Quirks - MS Word

I just finished grammar checking the third draft of The Ice Castle before sending it off to Scarletta, my publisher. Doing so is helpful for finding out where I skipped a period or repeated a word. As far as grammar advice, however, the program is often ludicrously awful.

For example, if the programs flags an its or it's and tells me to use the other, it's unfailingly wrong. People make careless mistakes, but for a computer program to be wrong this often suggests to me that someone has mis-programmed it. That programmer also occasionally confuses there and they're or who's and whose, and regularly confuses lay and lie (again, wrong in both directions). For example, the grammar checker recommends ...to see in which way his sympathies might lay. Nice rhyme.

Sometimes the errors are understandable but funny all the same. For example, the program suggested I change Amidst the four seated judges to Amidst the four-seated judges I imagine the judges sitting there with incredibly broad laps, each with four large colleagues seated on his knees.

The grammar checker has a virulent dislike for reflexive verbs. To She examined herself in the mirror it would prefer, She examined her in the mirror. Meaning be damned. (That last sentence would undoubtedly be condemned as a fragment.)

The program gets nervous when it thinks it sees a double negative. For example, it suggested I change She saw nothing: no mountains, no trees... to She saw nothing: no mountains, any trees...

Most distressing to me, because I suspect it's the reason I see so much random use of semi-colons in online critique groups, is the grammar checker's irrational approach to this useful piece of punctuation. The rule of thumb seems to be that when a sentence reaches a certain length, the program wants semi-colons to replace at least one comma. Here are some examples of the sentences it wants:

"And her?" He gestured at Daphne without looking at her; something Ivan knew would make her furious.

Afraid she'd knock Daphne down; Ivan intercepted her.

When she was gone, Lila poked her head out from under the bed; her eyes and mouth round with excitement.

Ivan knelt among the other workers; pressing sprouts into the earth.

Daphne sat at Lila's feet; making vicious stabs at the lower-class sewing the shop owner had given her.

None of these sentences meet the requirements for using a semicolon; not one contains either a long list whose individual elements include commas or a pair of independent clauses--each a complete sentence in its own right--attached by a semi-colon to show a relationship between them.

Principle vs. principal and may vs. might

Today I'm going to gripe about two errors in usage I've seen multiple times in the past couple of weeks. The first is failing to distinguish between principal and principle. The principal is the headmaster of the school. Your principal player is the most important member of your team.

A principle, on the other hand, is a fundamental rule, doctrine, or guide for conduct. It should never be used as an adjective. So let's not read any more LA Times stories chiding the Lakers for the way they "abandon well-worn principals," unless they mean someone is leaving graying and exhausted headmasters by the side of the road.

My other complaint is a little more subtle. Many writers don't seem to recognize that the helping verb "may" has a past tense, and that past tense is "might." For example:

He may come to the party.
He said he might come.

If you don't finish your paper, you may flunk the course.
If you hadn't finished your paper, you might have flunked the course.

James thinks Sarah may be the love of his life.
James thought Sarah might be the love of his life.

I think it's the second example where I've been seeing the most errors, both in children's books and in journalism. People write something like, "If Gore had won the election, we may not have become entangled in the Iraq war." NO! We might not have become entangled.

If I end a sentence with a preposition, how much trouble will I get in?

Is it ever all right to end a sentence with a preposition?

I tend to be a bit of a stickler about grammar, but there are some “rules” that make me crazy. The rule that you should not end a sentence with a preposition is one of them.

My daughter Rhianon’s ninth grade physics teacher assigned a group project to build and optimize a mousetrap-powered toy car. The students had to describe and quantify what was happening with acceleration, momentum, and friction. They were directed to turn in a very detailed interim report halfway through the project, and they were warned that the presentation and writing must be perfect.
They met often, worked hard, and turned in a ten-page report.

They ended a sentence with a preposition, and for that one error they received a D.

My husband Leo was livid. He wrote the physics teacher to say that he reviewed papers for the New England Journal, submitted by people from all over the world, and no paper was ever rejected for errors of grammar or usage. He said there was no better way to turn bright students off from science than this kind of nit-picking. I took a different tack. I consulted all the grammar manuals I could locate, and found that at least half of them proclaimed ending a sentence with a preposition to be fully acceptable.

Even armed with this research, Rhianon didn’t want to protest. But all through high school and college, she never took another physics course.

I think it was Winston Churchill who said, of the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, “That is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Someone else (please tell me who, if you know) wrote, “A preposition is a perfectly lovely thing to end a sentence with.”

So let’s all find some prepositions to end our sentences with. They should be easy enough to think of. A world without this ridiculous prejudice against prepositions is well worth striving for!