Kevin's Watch

[Syl] wrote:Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

Love it. Might even buy the book if it goes on half-price. [even the kindle is 12bucks...I'm not that interested in it, he doesn't seem that funny. He might be 5 buck funny/interesting though]

[Syl] wrote:Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

Well, I sure am glad that's been settled. Future generations will look back to now and say that never were more infinitives boldly split than will start now.

Finally read the article just now. I agree with most of the stuff he's saying, but I still try to avoid passive voice. It adds extra words to your sentence, and when you're writing for a broadcasting time slot, extra words are equivalent to wasted seconds.

I'm cognizant, however, that I'm not writing broadcast copy any more....

Okay, and there's one. MS Word *insists* that "anymore" is always correct (which is hogwash) and "awhile" is never correct (also hogwash). Yet a generation of kids who have grown up relying on spellcheck (which is a dumb thing to do) will believe that's the way it's supposed to be. Arrgh.

aliantha wrote:Okay, and there's one. MS Word *insists* that "anymore" is always correct (which is hogwash) and "awhile" is never correct (also hogwash). Yet a generation of kids who have grown up relying on spellcheck (which is a dumb thing to do) will believe that's the way it's supposed to be. Arrgh.

I'm glad it's not just me that thinks that Word is useless at grammar. It's annoying to see a document with lots of red underlines, yet I know that there's nothing wrong with it grammatically.

michaelm wrote:

aliantha wrote:Okay, and there's one. MS Word *insists* that "anymore" is always correct (which is hogwash) and "awhile" is never correct (also hogwash). Yet a generation of kids who have grown up relying on spellcheck (which is a dumb thing to do) will believe that's the way it's supposed to be. Arrgh.

I'm glad it's not just me that thinks that Word is useless at grammar. It's annoying to see a document with lots of red underlines, yet I know that there's nothing wrong with it grammatically.

The first thing I do when I get a new version of Word is to go into Settings and turn those stupid red and green lines off. They've done a really good job of hiding the setting in the most recent versions, but it's there if you drill down far enough.

Thanks for nothing, Microsoft. I'll run spellcheck at the end of my work -- and you can stuff your useless grammar check.

I think it's so ingrained in my brain that split infinitives will always bug me just a little.