Word

[adalger]

I wish MS Word knew grammar well enough to stop trying to correct me. Could we maybe teach it concepts like appositive phrase? Can we convince it that sentences can consist of dialogue interrupted by prose that isn't part of the dialogue without requiring capitalization in the middle of the sentence? (Can we teach Dreamwidth's dictionary that, yes, dialogue is a word, despite the American laziness that has rendered "dialog" the prevalent spelling?

/rant

Comments

[elf]

I turn the grammar-check off in Word; while it's nice to have it catch the occasional doubled word or wrong verb tense after I've changed the phrasing, it's mostly just annoying. Too limited to be useful for real writing. (Can use it at work for business letters & emails; anything that confuses Word's grammar algorithms is too complex for a corporate email. If I don't say this, the boss writes 40-word sentences with multiple internal lists & subordinate clauses.)

However. DW should cope with British spellings. Potentially, someone should round up a list of words the DW dictionary needs and make a suggestion to have them added. "Dialog" always looks abbreviated to me.

[adalger]

The hell of it is, that's not a British spelling. "Dialog" became the common American usage when Windows started calling its user-input interfaces "dialog boxes," to the best of my knowledge.

Good point about Word's aptness for corp-speak.

[niqaeli]

Dialog is not a word. Dialogue is. I've never even seen dialog as anything but a misspelling. And I'm very American (I have my spasms of British spelling but I came by them honest -- lived there for six months at a formative age). But anyway yeah. O.o

[adalger]

It's gained some currency, for which I blame Microsoft.