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I am writing my project and I am stuck on this sentence:

The task is to find domain walls and draw THEM/THOSE using different colors depending on the angle between adjacent domains.

I would write THEM, but MS Word keeps correcting it to "those". Which one is correct?

Tushar Raj
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panvi
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    MS-Word isn't always right. – Tushar Raj May 09 '15 at 09:12
  • Those is the plural form of that. It could be acceptable here. But I highly doubt them is wrong. It is perfectly grammatical to use it after a verb to refer to something previously mentioned. – Tushar Raj May 09 '15 at 09:15
  • @Area51DetectiveFiction You're right about Word not always getting it right. To a native speaker's ear, them is much preferred here. Using those would sound off. – Dan Bron May 09 '15 at 09:31
  • Word is often wrong. Turn off the grammar checker. It sucks egregiously, a view that is constantly being reinforced in these pages. – Robusto May 09 '15 at 09:34
  • @DanBron: That's what I thought. I'd love to know why Bill Gates seems to approve it, though. – Tushar Raj May 09 '15 at 09:34
  • Search these pages for "grammar+checker" and you'll find over 50 responses that come to the same conclusion about these useless tools. – Robusto May 09 '15 at 09:44
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    It stops complaining when you add "by" after them; it does not require it for those - it means it sees "those using etc." as what is being drawn. –  May 09 '15 at 09:59
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    @Amphiteóth: Since when was the point of writing to make a stupid piece of software happy? The best way to stop Word's grammar checker from complaining is to shut the damn thing off. – Robusto May 09 '15 at 11:55
  • @Robusto But grammar checkers do throw up some interesting grammar points though, and provide good fodder for grammar junkies! (See my answer below) :) – Araucaria - Him May 09 '15 at 14:12
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    I wonder if MS Word would be satisfied if you put a comma after "them." – Steven Littman May 09 '15 at 15:44
  • @Amphiteóth Where'd your question to me go? Anyhow, the answer to it is, no. It wouldn't be quite the same thing to use by. This would seem to indicate the method. Just the word using on it's own merely encodes simultanaeity, not method - although possible that's alo implied. :) – Araucaria - Him May 11 '15 at 12:43
  • re: whether "by" trades idiomaticity for precision in context. @Araucaria Thank you, the nuance is interesting, I thought "by" was implied in cases like these when it is not used. So the grammar checker leverages "method" as a distinguising feature. I curate my comments to a high degree; I don't like loose ends and verbosity (in the comments). Thanks! –  May 11 '15 at 14:07

1 Answers1

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I believe the reason that MS Word is having a problem here is that it is interpreting the string:

  • them using different colors

... as an antecedent noun phrase, them, modified by a so-called reduced relative clause, using different colors, where the whole phrase would mean:

  • them [who are] using different colours.

Because we cannot usually have an accusative case antecedent for a relative clause, this would be ungrammatical. The word those, however, is not accusative case and is therefore a grammatical choice for such a construction:

  • those [who are] using different colours.

As a noun phrase with a post-head modifier the example above is perfectly well-formed.

However, in the Original Posters example, using different colours is not modifying the pronoun them. Rather it is a gerund-participle phrase functioning as Adjunct. It is giving us more information about how the drawing was done.

In the example, them is functioning as the Direct Object of the verb draw. It is perfectly acceptable and grammatical. Many would argue that it is actually preferable to those here. The reason for this is that it is obvious that them refers to the domain walls. The reader needs no extra help identifying what is being picked out as the referent of the pronoun. Sometimes we might use those to express some attitudinal 'distance' from the thing being referred to. This is not the case here, so them might be the better choice of word.

Araucaria - Him
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