MS Word and text selection

Is there any way to get Word (and Outlook) to stop over-selecting for me?  E.g., in the value

This 'is' a test.

I try to just select "is" to bold it and it decides to auto-grab the final ' as well.  I *really* don't want that.  It does it for final punctuation and the space after a string, and sometimes it will over-grab an entire word when I only want part of it done.  I'm very precise about what I want selected, and this nanny-crap is damned annoying.

NYTimes states the blindingly obvious, as if it was a problem?

Editorial - Their Future Is Ours - NYTimes.com:

Whereas native-born children’s language skills follow a bell curve, immigrants’ children were crowded in the lower ranks: More than three-quarters of the sample scored below the 85th percentile in English proficiency.

Mark @ Good Math Bad Math takes that down (after he gets past the shock of such profound stupidity in evidence).  Whether it is a typo, a misunderstanding of what "percentile"  means in a teaching/testing environment (like "theory", it is a word with a *very* specific meaning in the professional context independent of any common vernacular uses), or downright ignorance of statistics in general, it really doesn't look good for the Times.

As someone said in the comments, for kids not intending to reach the Calculus level before college (or ever), it would be better to side-track them through an understanding statistics course than to force-feed them heavy maths past analytic geometry.