Are grammar checkers a waste of time?

by Peter Brook

For someone who hated English at school I spent a surprising amount of time recently investigating the correct use of “have” versus “has”.  If you couldn’t care less about good grammar, stop reading now as this post will certainly annoy you.

It started because Word’s grammar checker (bless it) told me that “Microsoft has a product called Office 365” is better than “Microsoft have a product called Office 365”. It cursed me and I started noticing how inconsistently people use “have” and “has”.

I’m not talking about basic usage of have:

  • “I have…”
  • “You have…”
  • “We have…”
  • “They have…”

…or basic use of ‘has’:

  • “He has…”
  • “She has…”
  • “It has…”

Everyone gets these correct, because it sounds plain wrong to say, “We has a car”, or “She have a house”.  But when companies, or groups of people are involved it gets harder. For example, should you say, “Microsoft has a product called Office 365” or “Microsoft have a product called Office 365”?  There are clear grammatical rules on this but people tend to favour one over the other depending on whether they have a more British or more American influenced background:

  • If you are an American you probably tend to think about companies as singular entities, which is quite correct because companies are typically legal entities.
  • However, if you're more British you probably tend to think about companies as collectives – as groups of people, and there is nothing wrong with that either...in principle, but read on...

Grammatically, when using third person singular nouns (a singular thing) you should use 'has’. e.g., “Microsoft has office buildings in Silicon Valley”.  It is Microsoft, the company, that owns the buildings – similar to saying “Tom has a house in Cashmere”, because ‘Tom’ is also a singular noun, and Tom holds title to the house. However, if you are referring to a Microsoft as a collective (group of employees) you would use ‘have’. E.g., “Microsoft have a lot of fun at work” because you’re talking about Microsoft’s employees having fun.  It would be wrong to say “Microsoft has a lot of fun at work” because how can the legal entity have fun?

I'm not going to get into this any deeper because it seems quite nuanced and I’m no expert, but where does this leave us here in New Zealand?  Well, we have our own dialect called New Zealand English (NZE).  It’s one of "the newest native-speaker dialects of the English language in the world, influenced strongly by Māori, Australian English and Southern England English, with lesser influences from American English, Hiberno-English, and Scottish English. Our New Zealand dialect is neither British or American.  It's a mixture of a lot of things.

Getting back to the original question, when talking about companies ‘having things’, take a moment to consider if you’re referring to the company as the legal entity, or a collective of people.  With the former you should use ‘has’.  With the latter, use ‘have’.

So are grammar checkers a waste of time...well it certainly did seem to waste a lot of my time; however my school English teacher would be so proud!

If you’re still reading you’ve almost certainly read “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” - the title of which derives from a joke about bad punctuation.  This makes my laugh.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots & leaves."