Microsoft Word Now Spellchecks Writing Style
I normally run my stuff through spellcheck just to check for quick errors. The other day I had about 100, all for "readability" and "conciseness" under the pretense of grammatical errors. What?
Here are some of the examples:
"perhaps as a result of..." => "perhaps because of"
"the only thing they really have is the past" => "the only thing they have is the past"
"it's absolutely essential that..." => "it's essential that..."
"someone who says their ultimate goal is to..." => "someone who says their goal is to..."
The biggest issue here is none of those phrases are actually grammatically incorrect (MS Word just corrected what I said to "actually grammatically incorrect"). It's someone's opinion on how I should write, and it actually changes the meaning of what I'm saying. That is pretty ridiculous. Sure, I can strip out every adverb and adjective from my writing, but that would make for some pretty dry and boring - sorry, some pretty dry and boring - literature.
The sad part is people learning to write for the first time would likely trust the spellcheck to clean up all "errors" in their writing. It's not an error to say more than you have to to make a point.
Here are some of the examples:
"perhaps as a result of..." => "perhaps because of"
"the only thing they really have is the past" => "the only thing they have is the past"
"it's absolutely essential that..." => "it's essential that..."
"someone who says their ultimate goal is to..." => "someone who says their goal is to..."
The biggest issue here is none of those phrases are actually grammatically incorrect (MS Word just corrected what I said to "
The sad part is people learning to write for the first time would likely trust the spellcheck to clean up all "errors" in their writing. It's not an error to say more than you have to to make a point.
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