Word’s grammar check is not totally useless

Microsoft Word’s grammar check is so ridiculous that normally I don’t use it. But in preparing recent books for publication, I ran the check, and it caught a few errors.

The process was tedious and boring, because I had to consider many recommendations such as these:

1. To put a question mark at the end of what seemed like hundreds of declarative sentences.

2. To change it’s to its when the construction was used like this: It’s all right. And the other way around: Its to It’s in constructions like its prize.  Word seems totally confused about using pronouns as possessives and in contractions, but then so are a lot of people.

BUT–the grammar check was useful because it found a sentence where I’d somehow deleted the first word, two instances of word doubling, and an instance or two of double spaces. It also highlighted hyphenated words that I’d joined by a symbol that looks like but isn’t the em dash.

So it was worthwhile. Go ahead, run the grammar check. But only if you already know your English grammar. 🙂