MS rejecting -himself- sometimes

Anonymous Traveler said:

Two sentences, word rejected the highlighted one.

He snapped the cover plate shut and extracted himself from under the desk.

As his eyes refocused he found himself facing a young woman.

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Did you read the explanation? This is one area where Word's grammar check is useless.

WordPerfect is a great deal better at this, and lets it pass.

Agreed, this is one place where MS Word consistently fails. My guess is that the algorithm doesn't realize the subject is a person.

Just analyze the Word explanations of grammar rules. Not all of them seem correct. As I recall, the explanation for uses of "himself" doesn't make much sense and I usually override the suggested correction.

TheIT said:

Just analyze the Word explanations of grammar rules. Not all of them seem correct. As I recall, the explanation for uses of "himself" doesn't make much sense and I usually override the suggested correction.

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This is true. When you read the explanation, it's immediately obvious that the grammar check program got it wrong.

Don't even get get me started on Word's grammar checker. Every time I see a participial phrase set off by a semicolon, I curse Microsoft. A search and replace from semicolon to comma is now one of the first things I do on files because of that stupid program.

Grammar

absitinvidia said:

Don't even get get me started on Word's grammar checker. Every time I see a participial phrase set off by a semicolon, I curse Microsoft. A search and replace from semicolon to comma is now one of the first things I do on files because of that stupid program.

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Have you ever used WordPerfect? No grammar check program is perfect, but it's amazing how much better it is than Microsoft's.

AT, why do you even care? Turn it off and live in peace.

Unless, of course, you're finding it's actually helping you 80% of the time.

It thinks you should replace it with "him". Just ignore it.

Jamesaritchie said:

Have you ever used WordPerfect? No grammar check program is perfect, but it's amazing how much better it is than Microsoft's.

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it doesn't matter what program I use; if MS Word tells authors that semicolon needs to be there, they put it there, and no amount of explaining how to disable that "feature" of the grammar checker seems to get the point across.

Grammar

absitinvidia said:

it doesn't matter what program I use; if MS Word tells authors that semicolon needs to be there, they put it there, and no amount of explaining how to disable that "feature" of the grammar checker seems to get the point across.

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True enough. As an editor, I have seen many manuscript where it was obvious the writer had followed grammar check all the way. Not that I ever read all the way.

Now, I do use Word's grammar check. I turn off most of the options it has, then run a pass after the manuscript is finished. It will sometimes catch certain typos that spell check misses. But there is no area of grammar where grammar check can be fully trusted.

I believe that Word is confused by the "and extracted" part of the sentence and isn't realizing that it shares the subject with another verb.

I only listen to Word's grammar check sometimes. No computer program will ever have the capacity to analyze as well as a human.

latoya said:

No computer program will ever have the capacity to analyze as well as a human.

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Unfortunately, millions of humans out there seem to trust grammar check, no matter how silly it gets. I've been severely tempted to write rejections slips that read, "Grammar check it not reliable. It stinks. Do not rely on software to check your grammar for you. You have to actually learn grammar and punctuation to be a writer."

A theory

I just checked this in Word: If you take the word "shut" out of that sentence, it no longer tries to replace "himself" with "him". I think the grammar checker doesn't understand that "shut" is supposed to be an adjective here, rather than a verb, and that's causing it to give unreliable results.