My Punctuation Sucks…
October 14, 2008, Matthew Good …but it’s not my fault. It’s Microsoft Word’s fault. When you use the grammar and spell check it often makes corrections that you question but ultimately believe to be true given that it’s a freaking word processing program.
For instance, if you go back far enough in the archives you’ll notice that I used to type That said (,). But after I got Office 2008 it started saying that that was wrong, that is should be That said (;), so I believed that it knew what it was talking about, even though it seemed strange to me.
As it turns out, I was right to be suspicious. A reader emailed me this evening and pointed out that there is a variety of punctuation that has been improperly used on a routine basis.
That’s all I need. To look like a bigger idiot than I already am.
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You’re not the only idiot here Matthew. Out of all the readers you have only one pointed it out; they were probably one of the few to notice it. Personally, I rely on the spelling/grammer check as well (according to spellcheck right now ‘grammer’ is not a word — so i think i am going to use ‘grimmer’ from now on). Anyways, I’m glad you’ve found a solution for it.
You should promote the use of commas before ‘and’ in a list. It just doesn’t look right when there isn’t one!
Recenctly I made the stupid mistake to let that program run through my assignment for university. After that it took me hours to correct the mistakes it had left since they would extend even to the annotations and the bibliography ;)
For the future I will gladly rely on myself for that matter, I think.
The Mac corrector bothers me as much as Word.
Oh jesus, Microsoft Word is the devil’s program. It pains me to use it. I use TextEdit for writing just about anything. But, yes, absolutely, turn off that crappy, crappy grammar checker. Then buy yourself a copy of the CP Stylebook and you’re good to go.
You’re not an idiot. Buy the Lynn Truss book “Eats, Shoot and Leaves”. That’ll sort you out (and make you laugh). Besides, you should only really start to worry when you split your infinitives….
:0)
Any spell/grammar check is going to have flaws. At best, they give you the illusion that you’re doing things right. I find it’s better to turn them off altogether, so it forces me to go back and read what I’ve written.
(At which point I usually still miss a couple of obvious gaffes.)
Do You ever wonder who came up with those stupid Rules….?
Or WHY we actually feel obligated to follow them….?
I noticed that when I was using Office 2008 to write my quantum physics paper. I had to ask my mom (who is a writer) to edit it for me because most of it sounded funny.
Yah it’s got me a few times too. Worst one was when one of the managers I worked with - his last name was Nudd so of course before I send out a document for all of the managers in the facility I hit the spell and grammar cheque and then the send button to “All” inlcuding the newly named Mr. “Nude”.
“hit the spell and grammar cheque and then the send button to “All” inlcuding the newly named Mr. “Nude”.”
Ha ha! love it. Hate grammar rules but LOVE this!
Since we’re sharing spelling bloopers that cannot be detected by spell checkers- here’s one of my most embarrasing mistakes made repeatedly in Powerpoint presentations until I learned to edit myself carefully:
Instead of writing “public affairs”, I would type “pubic affairs” which generated more than a few uncomfortable giggles from the audience!
not knowing does not make one an idiot;)
The first thing I do with any word processor (and now, with each new version of Firefox), is turn off the spelling and grammar checkers. I hate the red squiggly lines and I’m usually good enough to pick up on my typing errors as I type.
Though, I won’t lie, apostrophes still kind of confuse the crap out of me.
Brian– bahahahaha, that’s beautiful. Reminds me of something I read somewhere about some uptight little publication in the States that didn’t like the word “gay” being used in its stories and always did an automatic find/replace to change it to “homosexual.” That’s how they ended up running a story on U.S. sprinter Tyson Homosexual.
Automatic spell check in Firefox is pretty much my saviour but for punctuation I try and trust myself and go it alone, I’ve found it’s safer than believing Microsoft.
Hey, we all know you are not an idiot…in fact, you are one of the most articulate people I read. Fuck a few punctuation mistakes.
The last thing I’m going to do is e-mail you about the way you write things….
I might mail you as to why you pull your most controversial posts (AKA thanksgiving) before I can read them :-)
“Use German post-reform rules”?
WELL. It’s even more difficult when you have to write in 4 different languages… Try typing everything out in Spanish and then spending over an hour on the same text because the little accents and upside down question marks need to be added, because nooooo, the program doesn’t ever feel like sticking to one language. In fact, it likes to switch languages sporadically!
But take deep breaths, at least they’re just small paragraphs…
Actually, for journalists using Canadian Press style, it says in the CP stylebook that ‘;’ can be used to replace a ‘,’. Then again it also says that you should use apostrophies instead of quotes when using a quote inside a quote… so you’d be violating CP style when you quote newspaper articles on the blog that have quotes in them if you don’t use apostrophies for those quotes.
There’s no way to win really. lol
Oh and not to be a jerk Amanda Kyffin, but for future reference, grammer isn’t a word… the correct way to spell it is grammar. I am just anal about certain things because of graduating from journalism… I am a word nerd. :(
We all are made to feel like an idiot one time or another, why not a computer’s spell check for grammar.
i ussually dont even use punctiontion when i type.. for instance right now. so dont even worry about it.
Well, you could always turn the spellcheck off…