{"id":432,"date":"2007-04-23T13:02:57","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T04:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-04-23\/432"},"modified":"2007-04-23T20:01:25","modified_gmt":"2007-04-23T11:01:25","slug":"doubling-up-on-grammer-checks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-04-23\/432","title":{"rendered":"Doubling Up on Grammar Checks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

When I write for public consumption (book, magazine article, blog\npost....), I try to<\/span> be a bit<\/span> careful with how I present<\/span> myself. I have the<\/span>\nmost difficult time with misspellings because they could bite me on the\nnose and I still<\/span> wouldn't sense them. I tend to<\/span> be okay with grammar, and I\npick<\/span> up most typos because usually I read<\/span> and reread many times before\npublishing. Some often sneak through anyway.<\/p>\n\n

Part of this carefulness is evident in the first example I give<\/span> in my book on regular expressions<\/a>. On the first<\/span>\npage (First edition,<\/span> Chapter 1,<\/span><\/span> Page 1<\/span>) I describe<\/span> how regular\nexpressions can be used to identify doubled words:<\/p>\n\n

\n<\/div>\n\n

I first wrote that in 1995 or 1996, and it's survived through to the third edition<\/a>, where I go<\/span>\non to present solutions in Perl<\/a>, Java<\/a>, and even emacs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Running the program has long been part of the book's build process, to\nvet the prose for doubled words, but for some reason I never<\/span> thought to\napply it to my blog posts. I thought<\/span> of it yesterday, and was\nshocked<\/i> at the dozens of doubled-word typos I found<\/span> in the 430ish\nposts I currently<\/span> have on my blog. Dozens<\/i>. I guess<\/span> it's so easy to\nread what you believe to be there than what's actually there.<\/p>\n\n

It's mildly interesting to realize that such errors would never make it\npast a first<\/span> re-reading if the text were Japanese, because my reading of\nJapanese does not “flow” like when I read<\/span> English. When I read<\/span>\nJapanese, I read individual<\/span> words (or at least try to), then put them\ntogether to understand the sentence (or at least try to). Thus, I'd immediately<\/span> notice a misplaced<\/span> word.... at least to the extent that my\nJapanese abilities allowed me to realize that it was indeed misplaced.\n\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n

Since I was in tidy-up mode, I thought<\/span> to also run a little<\/span> utility I'd\ndeveloped in 1996 but had since forgotten about. It checks<\/span> for the misuse\nof “a” and “an” (e.g. “a apple<\/span>”). This\nkind of error also crops up often in text subject to a lot<\/span> of editing.<\/p>\n\n

For example, in my post yesterday about the river in Kibune<\/a> having a\ncooling<\/span> effect, I originally<\/span> wrote that it had the effect of “an air\nconditioner,” but at one point during composition I decided<\/span> to add\n“natural” in there, and so ended up with “an natural air\nconditioner.” I didn't<\/span> notice the glaring grammar error before\nposting, nor until I ran<\/span> my little utility that pointed out about a dozen<\/span>\nsuch errors spread across my posts over the last few years. Doh!<\/p>\n\n

The two checks — a vs.<\/i> an<\/b> and doubled words<\/b>\n— are now part of my pre-post checkup. Hopefully, no more such errors\nwill creep in (leaving room for different errors, no doubt).<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I write for public consumption (book, magazine article, blog post....), I try to be a bit careful with how I present myself. I have the most difficult time with misspellings because they could bite me on the nose and I still wouldn't sense them. I tend to be okay with grammar, and I pick up most typos because usually I read and reread many times before publishing. Some often sneak through anyway.<\/p>

Part of this carefulness is evident in the first example I give in my book on regular expressions. On the first page (First edition, Chapter 1, Page [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}