Dear Mr. H___:

You wrote:

>>Just bought your Grammar Slammer Deluxe with Checkers software. Please tell me I did something wrong setting it up. I got problems.
>>1) My Delete key doesn’t do anything.

We recommend that you do most of your editing on the program that you got the text from simply because our edit box does not have many features for serious editing or word processing. Having said that, if you highlight text first, then the delete key works. It will not work if nothing is highlighted. The backspace key will delete without highlighting.

>>2) If I paste the revised text back into the program it came from, all formatting is lost.

This is a Windows issue, but you can work around it. We recommend keeping the text that you copied highlighted on your original document. When you paste back to the highlighted area, it should keep the formatting–pretty closely anyhow.

>>3) My very first sentence was “Neither the Senators nor the President . . . . IT’S TELLING ME THAT “SENATORS” IS NOT A WORD!!!!

We tried the same thing on Windows XP update 2 and had no problem. We tried capitalizing Senators and then putting it inlower case, but the checkers did not say there was anything wrong with either the grammar or the spelling. Senators is in the program dictionary, so it should not have flagged the word in the spell checker.

This is what probably happened. Sometimes the grammar checker may flag a word in a compound subject. If your sentence read “Neither the senators nor the president have done anything about it,” for example, the checker may have taken a look at “president have” and said “president conflicts with auxiliary verb have” because president is singular and have plural. Of course, the sentence is really OK because you also have the word senators making the subject plural. In that case, you can simply ignore the suggestion.

If you want to check this out, note what the error message was. If you reverse the order of the figures in the subject so it reads “president and senators,” I suspect you would get no error message, just as I got no error message with most verbs unless they were present tense or past to be (was/were). I suspect the problem was with the subject-verb agreement and not with the word Senators. If there is no problem, then click the “ignore” button.