In the interest of full disclosure, I have some respect for Microsoft and Bill Gates. Their success is proof that they have some idea of what they're doing. I'm also certain that some of the mutual funds I buy are holding Microsoft stock. I may not approve of some of their business practices, and the attitude at the upper levels toward competition is frightening, but you cannot begrudge them their success and, if you're lucky, you own a piece of that success.
So here's the problem. I'm a professional. For almost twenty years, I was a technical writer. We lived by the Chicago Manual of Style and "Strunk & White". We reviewed one another's copy, we debated usage, punctuation, whitespace, and page breaks. Verbs, adjectives, adverbs and nouns were words we used everyday. How many professions can make that claim?
And now, the language skills I developed in school and honed turning engineering jargon into usable information are being undermined by Microsoft Word.
Word has the distinction of being the first word processing program to include a grammar checker. Adobe's FrameMaker declined (and still declines) to include one. And they have a good reason: English grammar is very complex. Word doesn't have it right. For one thing, it has no concept of transitive verbs.
For the uninitiated, a transitive verb requires an actor and a subject. My pet example is the verb "to display". Used properly in a sentence, with both an actor and a subject, you might say "The peacock displayed his beautiful tail." But one can also use a transitive verb with an "unnamed" or "assumed" actor. For example, the sentence "The program displays an error message." can also be written "An error message is displayed." Context tells you that the program is there and it's doing the displaying, but the error message is emphasized. It's a perfectly legitimate structure, but Word calls it a grammatical error -- a "passive sentence." Sometime in recent history, passive sentences became evil and a kill-on-sight order went out. I guess they aren't manly enough. Word doesn't understand either transitive verbs or unnamed actors.
Of course, an active sentence is the best way to write instructions. Simple sentences are more easily understood, especially by the growing population of non-native English speakers. However, there are times when one wants to emphasize something other than the actor. That is best done with a transitive verb with an unnamed actor. Some software engineer in Redmond, Washington, has decided he knows better than the thousands upon thousands of language specialists in the country. He is going to eliminate the passive sentence, even if he has to kill off the transitive verb to do it.
That's the problem with letting software engineers manage the language.
There's no good solution to this except to complain to Microsoft (good luck) and turn off the grammar checker.
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Comments: 2
I blame it on failing to teach English to Americans. We've lost a lot of the nuance and color from our language. We avoid things like the indefinite third person and adverb placement ("One would do well to more diligently study."). It may sound stuffy, but one can more artfully manipulate the syntax when one knows the syntax. Instead we all sound like characters from daytime dramas.