Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Things That Are Not God, Part I

Oh, my children, the spelling/grammar checker is not god and you do not have to follow every freaking suggestion it makes.

When you type the plural of a word already in its dictionary, it will suggest you use an apostrophe. THIS IS WRONG.

It thinks you should put a comma before every single instance of "which." THIS IS WRONG.

Unless you've added them manually, it doesn't know what phrases like "in toto" and "Dalai Lama" mean. Until I added "en route" to my personal dictionaries, it always suggested "in root." NO.

Its thesaurus is puny and horrible and wrong. What it calls "synonyms" are responsible for a lot of the terribly bad usage in amateur fiction.

Context? What's that? It doesn't know if you're making a list, or typing in an office code. It ABSOLUTELY REFUSES to put cc: at the beginning of a line in lowercase. I can't tell you how many damn reports I get with Cc: at the bottom. Which makes me scream.

Please do not slavishly follow the recommendations of the spelling/grammar check in Word or any other platform. If you're truly in doubt, do something wild and LOOK IT UP so I can stop banging my head against the keyboard like some poor pseudoautistic freak.

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