RE: MS will help us find the right words?

["Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com>]

MS knows a lot about linguistic incompetence. The following is from a recent company statement:

"Microsoft is reaching out to those impacted to relay that we will not seek any payment from those individuals."

I count three bad verbs in the first nine words. But when I ran Word's grammar check with full consideration of stylistic suggestions (clichés, colloquialisms, jargon, etc.), that awful sentence passed with flying colors. Well, the main thing is the active voice, right? :-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Geoff Hart
> Sent: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 07:31
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: RE: MS will help us find the right words?
> 
> ...On the plus side, I work primarily as an editor. Based on the state of
> Microsoft's grammar tools, I see Microsoft's efforts to improve how
> writers write in the future as a guaranteed source of future income.
> But I have mixed feelings about the ethics of enthusiastically
> supporting this kind of automatically generated incompetence...
> 

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