Category: The G Files

"Editorial archaeology" is my term for trying to reconstruct what a writer originally wrote before it was mangled by grammar-checking software, using my knowledge of how the software works. It's a bit like historical linguists reconstructing unattested earlier word forms from current word forms, based on their knowledge of how languages typically change. One excerpt… Continue reading The G Files Part 6: Editorial archaeology

Happy new academic year! Here's a reminder of how automatic grammar-checking software can mangle your work into nonsense, because it's just applying blind rules and heuristics without understanding the meaning. This is an example I found in the wild in a published article, so, to be fair, I don't know that this one was the… Continue reading The G Files Part 5: You Would Lose Clothes

Articles (a, an and the) are tricky. Non-native English speakers struggle with knowing when and when not to use them. Native speakers instinctively know, but most cannot consciously articulate the rules they're unconsciously following. (Why is it "plants release oxygen into the air" and not "plants release the oxygen into air"? Why is "the tiger… Continue reading The G Files Part 4: The Genuine Article

As I said in The G Files Part 1, some of the mistakes made by grammar-checking software make syntactic sense but are meaningless or nonsensical in the real world – like Chomsky's famous "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" sentence. This is because the software knows which words can be nouns, verbs, and so on; but… Continue reading The G Files Part 3: 10 Failures of Common Sense

Here are two more examples like the "rise up" and "dark night" examples in The G Files Part 1, where the grammar-checking software thinks it's spotted a phrase that its designers considered poor style, but in fact it's just the same words as would be used in that phrase, but meaning something different in context.… Continue reading The G Files Part 2: These are Not the Idioms You’re Looking For