Question

Hi, On problem 5 in pset 4. My function outputs this as a result:
'An Ingenious Man who had built a flying machine invited a great concourse of people to see it go up. at the appointed moment, everything being ready, he boarded the car and turned on the power. the machine immediately broke through the massive substructure upon which it was builded, and sank out of sight into the earth, the aeronaut springing out a rely in time to save himself. "well," said he, "i have done enough to demonstrate the correctness of my details. the defects," he added, with a add hat the ruined brick work, "are merely a sic and fundamental." upon this assurance the people came ox ward with subscriptions to build a second machine'
As you can see, there are some places in the text that are real words but are not the correct ones. such as "the people cam ox ward (instead of forward) or 'are merely a sic and fundamental (instead of basic and fundamental)".
Why is this happening?
Here is my code
for shift in range(27):
#print text
startpoint = start
switch = False
newtext= text[0:start] + apply_shift(text[start: ], shift)
checkpart = newtext[start:]
words = checkpart.split()
realwords = 0
for word in words:
if is_word(wordlist, word) == True:
startpoint = startpoint + len(word)
realwords += 1
switch = True
else:
break
if switch == True:
startpoint = startpoint + (realwords - 1) #this accounts for the spaces
recall = find_best_shifts_rec(wordlist, newtext, startpoint+1)
if startpoint == len(text):
return [(start, shift)]
elif recall != None:
return [(start, shift)]+ recall