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You'd think that that would be easy to detect with no false positives.
by david-given 11y ago
You'd think that that would be easy to detect with no false positives.
- branchless 11y agoThe faith that he had had, had had an affect on his life. with thanks to s/o
- pilsetnieks 11y agoIt depends upon what the meaning of the word is is
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoIt has to be an exceedingly naive filter if it won't catch "which which" as being highly likely to be an error and "had had" as being relatively common. False positives are of course possible [it's always possible that you're writing about writing errors], we're talking about an aid though - I'd imagine a company like the BBC would use an in-house spell-checker of some form to check that documents match the style guide and that finding unlikely word duplications could easily be included. How often is "the the" or "which which" actually intended, less than 1% of occurrences? Buffalo.
- branchless 11y agoI dropped my kid off at school. Bison.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoSorry, which bit are you responding to?
- burkaman 11y agoHe's pointing out that word duplication isn't always wrong.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoWrite me a sentence that you wouldn't want to flag as potentially erroneous that includes duplication of "which". '"Which which is which?" he said' ... but I'd still want a human editor to focus on that. Surely with such a massive text output a news organisation doesn't rely solely on human focus to maintain good grammar and such? Am I really expecting too much?
- laumars 11y agoWhile that is grammatically correct, I was always taught that you'd remove superfluous words or refactor the sentence when writing formal English. I'm certainly not the best writer (quite appalling actually), but the following reads better while still carrying the same intent: You'd think that would be easy to detect with no false positives. However I'd be interested to read any corrections if I'm wrong as I'm always looking to improve my English writing skills.
- hluska 11y agoWhen I've edited others, I've always gone to great pains to get rid of the extra that. You'd think that that... is equal to You'd think that... And 'you'd think that' won't risk distracting any of your readers. The problem comes when I'm actually writing. I tend to read my writing out loud to myself before I post it, and when I actually say things out loud, the double that sounds better. I have two conclusions: - My editing is all about hypocrisy. - It's hard to get out of the habit of writing how you speak.
- grkvlt 11y agoNo, the italics aren't helping... Although this probably says something about how easy it is to fail to notice word-doubling errors?
- laumars 11y agoI think you may have missed my point (or I have missed yours). I was saying that same sentence works with both a single and double instance of the word "that". The italics was only there to separate the quoted text from my comment, rather than a typeface suggestion to the former poster.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoI think the original reads OK, but the antecedent to "that" was unclear anyway and should have been spelt out. However, clearly this was written with an ear to humour so the extra "that" is essential - which is why you have your editing interface flag the double but not auto-correct it.
- __david__ 11y agoClever :-). Somewhat off topic, I said your sentence aloud to see if it sounded right (it did), and I noticed that I pronounce the two "that"s very differently. The first one is short and staccato-y and has kind of a shwah vowel sound—somewhere between "thuht" and "thit". The second is much more emphasized and has a strong A sound (like "apple").