While writing a review of a webcomic today, I noticed something strange concerning the grammar in a sentence I wrote. I had written this sentence as I would have said it to someone I was talking to:
North uses images of three dinosaurs: a Tyrannosaurus, a Dromeciomimus, and a Utahraptor…
And MSWord immediately highlighted the “a” I put right before Utahraptor as a grammatical error. Now, I realize that to maintain the flow of speech, we use “an” as the article before a word which begins with a vowel, but in the case of “Utahraptor” (YOU-TAH-raptor), it seems to make more sense to use “a” instead of “an”. For example, we would say and write “a yodeler”, not “an yodeler”, right?
Am I wrong? This is going to keep me up at night.
I think Word doesn’t know how we humans pronounce ‘Utahraptor’. It sees a ‘U’, and prescribes the article ‘an’, just as it would (correctly) do if “Utahraptor” was replaced with “Ugly Baby”.
(I like DC too, is your review online?)
It will be, eventually. Either next week, or some time after Christmas. It’s for the university paper, and they’re not going to be updating the website much after next week soooo… we’ll see
Will it be read aloud or in text form? If it’s going to be spoken, you can use whichever one you want. If it’s text, I think MS Word is right about this one..