Oi vey!

[pecunium]

So, matociquala has a feature, wherein she informs us of the words Word didn't know.

I have long ago given up on the grammar checker in Word being able to keep track of subject/verb relationships when an intermediate phrase intrudes, but today I got one I just had to share. I was roughing out some text, and wrote the following (clunky) sentence.

One of my film bodies is an FE2, which has no mirror lock-up, but when I activate the self-timer the first thing to happen is the mirror flips up.

It needs some work, mostly in the last half. Word agreed with that assessement, kindly offering up this version instead.

One of my film bodies is an FE2, which has no mirror lock-up, but when I activate the self-timer the first thing to happen be the mirror flips up.

Right now, I'm tending toward something like this:

One of my film bodies is an FE2, which has no mirror lock-up, but the first thing to happen when I activate the self-timer is the mirror flipping up.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

How about "...is that the mirror flips up."? After all, TechWriting is expected to be pedestrian.

But yeah, Word's Grammar Checker seems to be useless for anything much beyond simple declarative sentences. And I doubt that any others are significantly better, so that isn't just Microsoft-bashing.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Maybe.

1: it's not really tech writing, and 2: in the larger context that's less effective a phrase.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I was going to offer "...is that the". Having a dependent clause (kicked off by that) has been foreshadowed by this phrase: "the first thing to happen". The dependent clause details that thing in a grammatically familiar way. The gerund doesn't.

Actually, you don't need the that. "the first thing to happen...is the mirror flips up."

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

A "that" is almost never needful. If one is separating things, e.g., "he lives in that house," it's just the ticket, but "which" is usually better. When used with, "the" it's almost always redundant.

Excessive use of the word is part of why tech writing is so hard to read.

The problem is we use "that" as a sort of verbal padding. In spoken english it's not as apparent, and the effect isn't as tedious.