There are basically two reasons to correct someone else’s construction, including grammar and spelling. Either you are trying to resolve a possible barrier to understanding, or you are trying to demonstrate your own superiority. The first is an important use of knowledge of language, in the service of understanding people. The second is an annoying personality trait. Both will affect the number and nature of your partners in communication.
Tris
The spoken word persists, preserving the good or ill it bears.
I’ve always described my intelligence as concept based. I was always a good test taker because I could understand the big concept and then tease out the details. The problem is that the details aren’t memorized, my brain basically recreates them when I need them. I once tried to refer to a popular Beach Boys album and called it “Animal Noises” (Pet Sounds). When my brain can make that shit up on the fly the difference between their, there, and they’re is just not that important. I realize that this will be a lifelong thing for me and I work on it. This message board had been good for me, it really makes me think about my writing and spelling. I also wouldn’t want to trade, I fixed my furnace in two hours with a YouTube video and a trip to the HVAC supply place and later that day taught myself how to change the seals on Bobcat hydraulic cylinder. Those are the kind of things I enjoy.
So you prefer ‘the things’ because it primes the reader to expect plurals, while with what, the reader must wait to get to the verb before they can correctly parse the sentence? I can see your point, though “I find that what the Word grammar checker underlines are pretty much always my weakest constructions” seems just as readable to me.
I’ve avoided responding to the hijack about my grammar example, since it seems tangential to this thread. But that response and ones like it show just how much the idea of “good grammar” is personal in a way that spelling isn’t.
If I spell “Myssyssyppy” with “y” in place of “i,” I’m just wrong. If I leave out an oxford comma, I’ve just made a stylistic choice (although clearly a bad one for which I should be thrown eternally into a lake of fire). There are many–perhaps infinitely many–“correct” grammatical constructions, and grammar checkers are at their worst when they try to impose preference. But they’re pretty good these days at finding the issues that are not just preference (or at least where the powers-that-be have decided that the preference is wrong).