and’d (#1299)

Topics/tags: Writing, Rants

The other day, I was musing on some topic [1] and was editing a draft using Grammarly. It gave me some of the worst advice I’ve seen.

Here’s my sentence.

I’ve taken a quick look at it, and I’d prefer to restate it as a CSG problem.

What comments might you make about this not-very-exciting sentence? Here are some that spring to mind.

• The it reference may not be obvious; perhaps restate the corresponding referrent. E.g., I’ve taken a look at that assignment.
• taken a look is a long way to say looked. Once you’ve made that change, you might also get rid of the contracted have.
• Some readers may be put off by the contractions of I have and I would. (My musings are relatively informal; contractions are part of the deal.)
• If you haven’t recently explained CSG (Computing for Social Good), you might want to do so. (In the original, I added an endnote to explain.)

Putting it all together, you might come up with something like the following.

I looked briefly [2] at the assignment, and I would prefer to restate it as a Computing for Social Good (CSG) problem.

Still not very exciting, but perhaps a bit nicer. Ralph would probably tell me to look at other sentence patterns because I tend to stick to a few basic ones.

What does Grammarly say? Something very different.

What the fluff? [3]

What is and’d? It’s not a term I’d seen before. Perhaps I and’d these two values together in a spoken programming context [4]. But not in any other context. My quick Web searches [5] for and’d brings me to pages about Dungeons and Dragons [6].

I did the natural thing (other than ignoring the advice), and went to the Grammarly help pages. After selecting Technical Issue and macOS, I ended up with this fascinatingpage.

Yes, that’s right, I experience an issue in my browser. Wouldn’t you expect a grammar tool to have more grammatical choices? Perhaps I experienced an issue in my browser or, as Grammarly suggests, I am experiencing an issue with my browser.

More precisely, I am experiencing problems with Grammarly!

[1] Probably CSC-207.

[2] briefly looked?

[3] Thanks, Danika!

[4] And is an operation that can be applied to two integers and represents the bitwise Boolean and of the operands, with 1 representing true and 0 representing false.

[5] Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo.

[6] Perhaps AD&D [7]. Perhaps Antiquated D&D.

[7] Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the version of Dungeons and Dragons that was in vogue when I was in high school.

Version 1.0 of 2024-08-12.