Sunday, January 28, 2007

...that that...

Whenever I do a grammar check in word processing programs, I am told that sentences containing two thats in a row are incorrect. For instance, "I thought that that was a grammatically correct sentence." It is wrong to use "that that" or is the computer wrong? Is this considered to be a missing antecedent?

2 comments:

R Delara said...

The computer might be thinking that you typed two words twice so it wants to correct you. (That's just my take on it.)

The computer always wants me to put a comma before "which," when I don't even think there should be a comma there.

Hope this helps, maybe?

Pat said...

As Ritchie said, the computer program is flagging what it considers an error; using two "thats" in a row is not necessarily an error.