Revising with Word

[mrissa]

I was looking at a story to do some revisions requested by a lovely happy market this morning, and I realized that MS Word had underlined the last word in the sentence, "Neither do I." Sure enough, it wanted me to write, "Neither do me." And for a minute I thought that was the answer to, "Does X do you, or does Y?" But that's, "Neither does me."

Thousands of kids -- and adults -- trust this thing to make their sentences go. Uff da. This makes my head ache when I think of it. Mostly I try not to think of it.

But hey, revisions requested, and they look like they're going to make the story better or no worse, so I'm doing them, and we'll see how it goes. (For a good market, I'll do revisions that make a story no worse, just different. But I won't make a story worse for any market I can think of.) And as I reread it, I like this story. I like the things it does, and I like the things it doesn't do, and the revisions they asked for aren't going to change either one of those things. So. Excelsior and all that.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I once had Word flag the sentence "What am I supposed to do?" and tell me that the adjective "am" does not usually modify a verb directly; I should try adding "-ly."

All hail WordPerfect (but screw the grammar-checkers of both).

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

What I really hate is when people get mad at me for using word Word dislikes or using one in a way it dislike. "Do you think you're smarter than Word?"

Um, yes. Much. And it's not a case of ego, either; I think most fluent speakers of English are, simply because the language is so flexible that a program can be useful but can't be definitive.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That is one of the most appalling things I've heard in ages. People do that? Yikes.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'd care to have a conversation with someone who isn't smarter than Word.

My favorite Word trick is when it will tell you to change the construction of a sentence from a to b. You do, and then it tells you to change the contruction from b to a. Rinse, and repeat. Wipe hands on pants.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Well, I've had it happen at two separate companies now. Not always with those words, but with the doubt that one would question the almighty Word.

A related occurrence is the use of "wordsmithing" as a bad thing, either to mean the use of creating words that are *gasp* not known to Word (though the use of such outlandish techniques as adding a suffix or prefix or chaning a word to use it as a different part of speech) or as in "well, let's just get the important parts down now, we'll wordsmith it later". Because, heaven knows, getting the wording precise couldn't possibly impair the meaning of a pararaph.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I can see the value in getting a rough draft down before deciding whether a clause should be inverted or whether there are too many long sentences in a row, stuff like that. But it sounds like you're talking about things that change meaning a good deal more, and that would frustrate me in the extreme.