Reposted from my blog.

quote:

My previous post about archaeology contained this sentence.

“Hey, what about these cows on the railway tracks.”

Word underlined it in green. I thought perhaps Word wanted me to put a question mark. Possibly an exlamation mark.
Apparently not. The two suggestions offered were.

“these cows on the railway track” and
“this cow on the railway tracks”.

It seems I can have multiple cows on a single track or a single cow on multiple tracks but not multiple cows on multiple tracks.
I am constantly amazed at the oddness of Word’s grammar checker.

It didn't warn you about the hazards of leaving your cows on the tracks?

Sometimes I get those green lines and never can figure out what they want. I end up going with it my way, but I always worry I am missing something. In your case, Bob, I'd have thought the question mark was their problem.

green lines

I simply turn them off. Grammar checkers ain't, and spell checkers often only catch typos. Short of having another person edit your material, there's not much to be done.

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
green lines

I simply turn them off. Grammar checkers ain't, and spell checkers often only catch typos. Short of having another person edit your material, there's not much to be done.

Me too. Here at Harrow though half the functions of everything are disabled, including turning off the grammar and spell checkers. At home I would never have noticed because I have them turned off. (it was the constant insistance that I replace "which" with "that" that finally broke the camel's back).

Must dash. My cow is on the railway tracks.

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
It didn't warn you about the hazards of leaving your cows on the tracks?

So would I. But there was narry a sign of a question mark in their suggested corrections.

Try it. Type the sentence in as I wrote it and when you get green-lined, right click for the suggestions.

quote:

Me too. Here at Harrow though half the functions of everything are disabled, including turning off the grammar and spell checkers. At home I would never have noticed because I have them turned off. (it was the constant insistance that I replace "which" with "that" that finally broke the camel's back).

I leave the checker on as it helps with genuine typos (like your "insistance" above). However I tune them to my own needs, which is easy enough.

For example, I remove the "passive sentences" detector, as passive sentences often please me. I turn off the automatic capitalisation feature since I often like to use Roman numbers and I don't want my (i) turned into a (I). And, of course, I always make sure that I set the language to UK English as I don't want to be told that I have misspelt "colour".

One strange quirk I have found on my email checker is that, when I write the word "liaise" it tries to correct it to "liase" - to the extent that I had to add "liaise" to the custom dictionary. Has anyone here ever heard of the word "liase" in any version of English - or is this simply a Microsoft programming error?

quote:

Try it. Type the sentence in as I wrote it and when you get green-lined, right click for the suggestions.

I just did. I got no green line at all. When I went back and removed the full stop at the end and went to another line it did suggest a question mark. When I put back the full stop it continued to suggest a question mark. Go figure.

I would also mention that I've also turned off many of Word's grammar "rules".

quote:

Hey, what about these cows on the railway tracks.”

quote:

Reply

You didn't have the quotes around it. (It's quoted speech.)
If you do, it tells yo that there is a subject verb agreement error and suggest the two alternatives I mentioned.

I don't use Word often, since I have Adobe Pagemaker. When I did use it, I got the dreaded green line and spent five minutes trying to find an error. It turned out I had a double space between two words.

Is that a grammar error worth devoting time to hunting down? And why doesn't the program at least mark the offending section instead of the entire sentence?

quote:

You didn't have the quotes around it. (It's quoted speech.)

Aha! I just tried that and got the same result - subject:verb agreement error. Weird.

Ah, but in another thread I've learned that most of them aren't "grammar" errors anyway.

quote:

and spell checkers often only catch typos.

I do need those as I can miss typos. However, the grammar green line drives me to distraction! It rarely is helpful and usually just costs me time figuring out where I might have erred. I really should turn it off.

As I said, I don't use Word often. It's on my wife's old computer and I only use it when she needs proofreading. But we recently had to get a new computer which uses Vista instead of XP.

I was shocked -- and that is the word -- to find that the Help menus on my old programs don't work in the Vista environment. And since most programs didn't include manuals, I'm left bewildered about how to use some older little-used programs, like Paint Shop, and even some Microsoft programs. How can Microsoft stay in business when they treat customers with so much disdain?

You can download the necessary program from Microsoft.

hanks for the info, Arnie.
But the real issue is why doesn't Microsoft mention that the downloads are available, instead of sending a message saying, "Ha, Ha, we eliminated something vital for no good reason."
And if there is a download, why wasn't it included with Vista?

From what I can recall there was a great outcry when people discovered it was missing so M$ grudgingly made it available, provided users downloaded it at their own risk. Apparently it is riddled with security flaws which don't fit in well with Vista's alleged superior architecture. Of course, that's the story according to Microsoft ...

There's more on Wikipedia and I expect a cursory search of the Web could throw up a lot more.

I must say, I have some sympathy for Microsoft; the need for backwards compatibility made Vista much more unwieldy than it should be and delayed its launch well past the projected date.

quote:

I must say, I have some sympathy for Microsoft; the need for backwards compatibility made Vista much more unwieldy than it should be and delayed its launch well past the projected date.

I agree with everything after the semi-colon, but I don't understand why sympathy is warranted. It is a problem of their own making.

And, the delays in launch had many causes, not the least of which an unrealistic schedule.