A small rant about spelling and grammar checkers

I hate to break it to you, dear readers, but you can't trust your spell-checker. I've spent today writing in Microsoft Office Word and being disgusted with the number of things it tells me are wrong that are actually correct. Here are a few examples:

Word thinks "noninventory" is misspelled. Actually, Word thinks just about any word starting with "non" that doesn't have a hyphen in there is misspelled. This is simply not the case. The Chicago Manual of Style and the American Heritage Dictionary agree: "non" words are nonhyphenated unless:

• The hyphen is arguably needed for legibility (non-native)
• The "non" comes before an already modified compound
  (non-English-speaking)
• The non is part of a Latin phrase (non sequitur)

Watch out for this sort of spell-checker confusion whenever you're using a prefix. Chicago says compounds made from all of these prefixes should be closed (no hyphen, no space) in most cases: ante, anti, bi, bio, co, counter, extra, infra, inter, intra, macro, meta, micro, mid, mini, multi, neo, non, over, post, pre, pro, proto, pseudo, re, semi, socio, sub, super, supra, trans, ultra, un, and under.

Word has as much it's and its confusion as the next guy. Word told me that "it's" in the following sentence should be "its".

The file is not ready for review, but it's close.

This is simply not the case. That "it's" would only be "its" if I were talking about the close (of business, of the letter).

"It's" is a contraction standing for "it is." The verb that is tucked in there means "it's" tends to come before adjectives ("it's hot") or gerunds ("it's going to be another hot day tomorrow"). It's active or descriptive.

"Its" is about possession and always comes before nouns (although the nouns might be modified by an adjective first, as in "I was distracted by its faulty reasoning"). It's its own thing.

Word can't handle a little creative writing. Finally, Word is forever getting lost in my sentences and telling me my subjects and verbs do not agree, when clearly they do. Of course, this one might be just the tiniest bit my fault for writing such long sentences. :-)

Anyway, the point is, don't turn off the spell-checker or grammar-checker in your head. If you think the checker in your software is mistaken about something, you just might be right! Get a second opinion!

P.S. I should clarify something. It is not that Word actually thinks "non-inventory" is preferable to "noninventory." There are simply too many possible "non" words for all of them to be in Word's dictionary. So, it doesn't recognize "noninventory" at all, but when you type "non-inventory" instead, it recognizes "non-" as a prefix that is in the dictionary, and it determines that "inventory" is spelled correctly. I don't know why it doesn't recognize "non" as a prefix without the hyphen; that was evidently too much refinement for the developers to cope with.

I should also point out (or maybe I just want to) that if you previously had blind faith in your word processor's spell-checker, you're not alone! I've had professional writers and editors tell me I was misspelling a word because Word didn't recognize it. That's one for the pet peeves file.