Wallace knows that too strict a concern for "proper" usage contains some ugly implications, which can land a writer in hot water (consider the lobster). David Foster Wallace reviewed the first edition for Harper's and expanded that review into one of his most entertaining and most obnoxiously footnote-laden essays for "Consider the Lobster" (2006). Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" (now in its third edition and retitled "Garner's Modern American Usage," which yields the unfortunate construction "Garner's 'Garner's Modern American Usage'"). "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here" is not a sentiment that would occur to a whale, nor is a whale likely to appreciate the irony of that sentiment's being carried by such extraordinary cadence. They do not keep records of their most gifted and profound singers. Whales might sing for the sheer pleasure of it - I suspect and hope they do - but they do not write novels or constitutions or laws or books about whalesong. But surely human language is in important ways not analogous to whalesong and monkey cries. Point taken: We're animals, and language is a biological function as well as a cultural tool. The plural noun "things" requires a plural verb: "make." "One" jumps over the prepositional phrase to connect with the verb "is"later in the sentence. If you rephrase Quammen's sentence, it's easy to see why, logically, a plural verb should follow "that": "Of the things that make influenza so problematic, its propensity to change is one." (Of course the noun doesn't have to be "things.") The "one" is throwing off Quammen (and the billion other writers I've catalogued who make this error). "One of the things that" followed by a singular verb is one of the things that drive me crazy. But I was dismayed to discover, on page 506, this sentence: "One of the things that makes influenza so problematic, Webster said, is its propensity to change." If you're unoffended by that construction, or have no idea what's wrong with it, you're probably less obsessed with usage manuals than I am. I initially had to hunt for two of the six Preference panes, which reside in a menu to the right of the other four.I recently read David Quammen's "Spillover," a scary, brilliant book about zoonotic diseases. The program’s abundance of menus-you can run it via the pencil icon, a Mac OS X input menu, or the dock icon-seems redundant, although you can hide the dock and pencil icons in Preferences. Grammarian’s interface isn’t particularly pretty, but it won’t get in your way. The program’s spell check promises to correct misused homophones like “access” and “excess.” But it breezed past sentences such as “Their canvas of the neighborhood failed to uncover the missing canvass.” Though Grammarian did catch many examples from the list of commonly confused words on Linguisoft’s website, it missed plenty of others. ![]() Impressive statistical analysis tools rank each sentence of your work for readability and coherence. ![]() As I highlighted and changed words and phrases, it would sometimes suggest alternate spellings for nonsense words I never typed, based on different pieces of the text. Grammarian also had occasional trouble tracking what I typed when running automatic spelling checks. Thankfully, the program doesn’t force any of its suggestions upon you. For example, it mistook a person’s name, “Olive,” for the fruit, and insisted I put a “the” before it. ![]() While it excelled at flagging needlessly wordy phrasings, it also highlighted alleged grammar violations that were incorrect in isolation, but correct in context. Unfortunately, my tests suggested that Grammarian needs further education.
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