Category Archives: Writing and Editing

Writing and Editing

A Short Guide to Handling Speeches in Fiction

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Whether they take the form of lectures or diatribes, speeches are rarely enjoyable to listen to–unless they happen to combine the talents of a gifted orator and a skilled speechwriter. But this combination is rare. The average speech is, well . . . average. This is generally true in real life and especially true in fiction.

Yet many aspiring novelists think it’s a good idea to include speeches. They appear either as formal addresses to a captive audience or, more commonly, informal monologue. Here’s an example of the latter.  During a coffee break at the lab, Dr. Saurus, a mad scientist who’s secretly recreating extinct creatures in test tubes, lectures his colleagues about the natural history of the Triassic, Cretaceous, and Jurassic periods. But more about the good doctor later.

The problem with speeches is that your plot typically goes on vacation during them, so everything grinds to a halt. The grave danger is that the reader will get bored, impatient, or exhausted and will consign your book to the trash can. Obviously, you don’t want that to happen, so what should you do about speeches?

First, consider the purpose of each speech. What does the speaker want to achieve? Cut out anything that’s irrelevant to that purpose. If, for example, Dr. Saurus wants to reveal the nature of his experiments to his colleagues, he should confine his words to those experiments. He shouldn’t ramble on about the Triassic, Cretaceous, and Jurassic periods; the scientists know about them already, and he comes off looking pedantic. He’s also committing the terrible sin of information dumping, which brings me to my second point.

Include only information that’s vital for the reader’s understanding of what’s happening. Anything beyond that is extraneous. If readers want an in-depth discussion about the Jurassic period, they’ll google it or pick up a book on the subject. Don’t pummel them with paragraph after paragraph of facts and figures. When you do, they forget they’re even reading a novel and imagine they’ve mistakenly wandered into a textbook. Remember that few things destroy the fictive dream like a big information dump in a speech. A far better approach is to eliminate such speeches altogether and weave their content bit by bit into the narrative instead of depositing it all in one place.

But if you’re still committed to keeping a speech in and have done your best to rid it of irrelevant material, it may still be too long. If so, there’s a lot more you should be doing. Try interrupting the speech. Consider for a moment that many authors write speeches without properly supporting them with narrative. Reading this is much like listening to the radio; you hear a voice, but you can’t see where the speaker is or what he’s doing. This results in an incomplete sensory experience for the reader. Interrupt monologue with lots of supporting details about characters’ actions, gestures, and expressions. In the Dr. Saurus example, one of the scientists might jump up and down excitedly after hearing about the experiments and spill coffee on a colleague. Remember that the speaker isn’t talking to zombies (well, not usually) but to actual human beings who react to what’s being said, so interrupt using questions or comments from listeners as well. Another of Dr. Saurus’s colleagues might ask him why he wants to recreate extinct creatures and accuse him of playing God. Dialogue and interaction are inherently more dramatic than monologue, which is essentially static, so don’t hesitate to turn speeches into conversations.

As well, you can briefly summarize many points of a speech in narrative form while giving your character choice lines highlighting the most important or dramatic points. For example, you could summarize Dr. Saurus’s experimental procedures in a paragraph but allow him to talk about the exciting results of his work: a baby stegosaurus hatching in his lab right before his very eyes!

Much like Dr. Saurus, you as an author get to play God. You’re in control of everything that happens in your book, so unruly characters needn’t get away from you and run the show. You probably wouldn’t let someone drone on and on in real life uninterrupted, so why let it happen in your fiction? Use the above techniques to more effectively handle speeches. They may take work, but the payoff is prose that will keep readers thoroughly engaged in your work.

 

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Virginia's Ghost, Writing and Editing

Lumbering to the Editing Phase: Draft Four of Virginia’s Ghost Begins

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I recently finished my third draft of Virginia’s Ghost, the novel I’ve been working on for longer than I can believe. Without a doubt, I’m a putter-inner, not a taker-outer, as my first draft was a bare-bones one and came in at a very slim 30,000 words, while this most recent draft is an impressive (to me, anyway) 61,000 words. I printed it out and discovered that it’s got physical heft if nothing else.

Seeing my book all in one big pile almost made me weak at the knees, and in a reckless moment I almost passed the thing on to one of my trusted editor colleagues. But after rereading it, I realized that it’s almost where I want it to be, so I’m not ready to relinquish it just yet to editorial scrutiny. Almost isn’t nearly good enough for me, nor should it be for any author. I refuse to embarrass myself.

So what’s my next step? Instead of diving directly into Draft 4, I decided to write a summary of each chapter. It’s my way of stepping back into a more objective mode of thinking and ferreting out all the things that need to be fixed: the little timeline glitches, the things that are missing, the events that don’t quite add up or that feel contrived, and the stupid things that sometimes come out of characters’ mouths when you least expect it of them. I’ve written suggestions as to how I’m going to fix these things at the bottom of each chapter summary. The blue writing identifies my main storyline, while the red is a second storyline. I’ve also done some hard-copy edits right on my draft.

Chapter summaries for Virginia's Ghost

But aren’t you supposed to do all the outlining and summarizing stuff at the beginning? Certainly a lot of writing books suggest drawing up an outline well before you write the book, and I often suggest it to clients who seem to be struggling with an unruly plot. But I began writing the book well before I knew very much about outlines, but more importantly, I think that my initial outline probably would have been nearly as skeletal as my first draft. In other words, my writing process doesn’t seem to lend itself to the outline-before-you-write approach. I find myself layering new stories into each successive draft, adding richness and complexity (I hope) to the storylines. There are things going on in the third draft that would have seemed inconceivable to me when I was writing the first or even second draft.

All this reminds me that there are probably as many ways of going about writing a book as there are writers. We each find our own way of getting from that first blank page to the end of that final draft. Our path may be straight, swift, and sure as an arrow heading toward a bull’s eye, or it may be more like that of a meandering, lumbering bear apparently not heading anywhere in particular. The choice is ours, and there is really no right way. The only thing that matters in the end is that the book itself is everything we want it to be.

 

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Writing and Editing

The Name Game: Character Names in Fiction

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The other day, my friend and colleague Arlene Prunkl and I were comparing notes about how authors sometimes treat character names, and our discussion sparked this post (a good thing, since I’ve been short on inspiration lately). I’d wanted to write about the do’s and don’ts of names but realized that what not to do was my chief concern. Here are some name-related pitfalls that are best avoided.

First of all, avoid duplication. Particularly in large, sprawling books, authors are prone to forget that they’ve already used a name, and they may accidentally use it again for a second character, which confuses the heck out of readers. Let’s say two characters have the same surname; readers will inevitably wonder if they’re related. If there’s no explanation of the connection between Dr. Harbinger and Dorothea Harbinger, readers will either keep scratching their heads or assume you mistakenly used the name twice. Either way, it’s a distraction that’s going to pull readers out of the flow of your narrative. Although you may know two people named Harbinger in real life (and they may even be unrelated), it’s best not to have two characters with an identical surname unless the relationship between them is made clear from the get-go.

Similarly, avoid names that sound too much alike or that rhyme. In most contexts, it just sounds silly and makes readers giggle (which is only fine if you want them to). When I was in high school, I had a friend whose parents were Victor and Victoria, which was even funnier when the film Victor Victoria came out. I’m sorry, but Denise and Dennis should probably not be wandering around in your book, let alone having a secret love affair, although certainly Denise and Bryan could be. And Miles, Giles, and Niles should not be let loose unless they are actually triplets and appear in nonsense verse for children.

There’s also the issue of overuse of names. I frequently see this sort of thing in dialogue:

“Well, Miles, how was work today?

“It was fine, Giles, but Niles is going to have to start delegating more work to junior colleagues.”

“I agree, Miles.”

I exaggerate here, but you get the point. When this is overdone, it can feel as if a pair of robots are speaking. There’s something stilted about constantly addressing other characters by name in dialogue. And after a while it just grates on your nerves. If you listen to real people talking, you won’t hear anyone doing this. Think about when you would actually use someone’s name in conversation. It might be when you’ve just been introduced or when you’re saying goodbye. Or it could be when you’re angry with someone or trying to get her attention. Limit usage of the name to these types of instances, and your dialogue will seem much more fluid and realistic.

Also avoid using a character’s name when you could simply use he or she and him or her without sacrificing the reader’s comprehension of what’s taking place in the scene. Consider the following:

Griselda looked in the mirror and admired her reflection. Griselda then carefully applied dark blue mascara and dabbed her favourite perfume, Shalimar, carefully on her wrists. It was a shame, Griselda reflected, that Hank would not be at the banquet to see how she had transformed herself from an ugly duckling to a graceful swan. “It’s his loss!” Griselda said to no one in particular.

Of course this snippet would be better with only one Griselda; the others add nothing except unnecessary repetition. By all means use the name when it’s needed to clarify who’s doing what. If there were two women in the room, for example, you would need to use names more often to help readers distinguish the action of one from the other.

If you avoid these name-related pitfalls, you’ll avoid confusing and annoying readers– and your prose will be seem livelier and more natural too!

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Writing and Editing

No First Drafts, No Fancy Formatting: Tips for Keeping Editing Costs Down

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Last month, I gave a workshop aimed at self-publishing authors about hiring editors, and naturally we covered pricing. I told the workshop attendees that many editors charge by the hour. In estimating costs, they’ll first determine how many pages per hour they can edit by reviewing a sample of the author’s manuscript. (By “page,” I mean a standard double-spaced 250-word page.) Seven to eight pages per hour is quite brisk, whereas two to three is deathly slow. I went on to describe what makes an editor’s pages-per-hour rate plummet, thereby causing editing costs to rise.

What factors can add to editing costs? An obvious one is the quality of the writing. I’ll be honest–truly awful writing is mind-twistingly difficult to edit and time-consuming. The reasons for awful writing vary, of course. Sometimes the author’s first language is not English, which results in incorrect spelling, cumbersome syntax, and a sometimes amusing mangling of English idioms. If ESL isn’t the issue, the writer may have been daydreaming through English class, never learning the rules or thinking they’d be needed. Whatever the cause of awful writing, an experienced editor often has a knack for figuring out what these writers are trying to say and can edit their work. In extreme cases, bad writers need to go back to school to learn the basics of expressing themselves before they can even be edited.

One thing I told my workshop attendees was to always submit the best work they’re capable of, as this will save them money. Submitting your best possible work means slaving away at multiple drafts to work out structural issues before getting any line editing done. (By the way, if you’re a writer and don’t think you need to work hard, I urge you to reconsider your chosen path.) Under the category of disheartening are those clients who submit their first drafts for line editing. No first draft is ever ready for such late-stage editing. It’s a different matter if the editor is providing a manuscript evaluation, as direction for a rewrite can be based on the initial draft. Remember that no matter who writes them, first drafts are invariably lousy. But like some sort of unattractive foundation garment, they need to exist before anything else can be layered on top. Once they’ve served their purpose, though, hide them away at the back of the drawer!

Aside from submitting your most polished prose, how else can you cut costs? For one thing, keep your formatting standard. Use a standard font such as 12-point Times New Roman or Courier. As well, double space your text and indent your paragraphs. Take out any extra line spaces between your paragraphs. Keep the left margin justified and set margins all around to one inch. Start new chapters on new pages. Keep spacing between headings and body text consistent throughout the text. If you don’t do these things, your editor generally will, and it does take extra time.

Avoid the temptation to design your book in Word; a professional designer will do this after the editing phase is finished. Some authors love to play with multiple fonts in Word, resulting in a dog’s breakfast of bizarrely incompatible text styles. As well, it’s not unusual to find authors using multiple formatting tools–colour, bold, underlining, and all caps–to emphasize particular words. (Italics are all that’s needed to emphasize words, and even those need to be used judiciously.) Don’t festoon your manuscript with this sort of garish window dressing–it only distracts the editor from the content of your writing. As well, don’t do quirky things with your margins. Once, and for no good reason that I could determine, a client insisted on starting certain paragraphs about three-quarters of the way across the page, near the right margin, and I couldn’t dissuade her. Leaving such wildly unconventional stuff in your manuscript will only make it look amateurish, and your editor will need to spend a great deal of time undoing it. Simplicity of presentation is what impresses editors the most, and what makes your work appear professional.

The bottom line is this: you’ll save money on editing costs if you submit your most polished work and format your manuscript in standard, simple ways.

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Writing and Editing

Avoiding the Stuffy Voice in Fiction

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One unfortunate trap that beginning writers tend to fall into is using formal language in a context that calls for more ordinary words. I’ve made up a rather extreme example of this sort of slip-up in diction to illustrate what it looks like at its worst:

“What’ll you have?” Betsy asked. She wiped the cheap arborite table clean and glared at Mavis, who had been taking way too much time making up her mind. Why couldn’t the old bat hurry up?

“I’m not sure.” With watery blue eyes, Mavis looked up at Betsy. “Got any ideas?” She combed her thin, ratty hair into place with her fingers.

“Coffee and a blueberry danish? Ain’t that your usual?” Betsy hoped that she’d just quit her stalling and agree to it already.

Mavis perused the luncheon menu. “On the contrary, I much prefer tea. Might you endeavour to expedite my request?” she inquired politely.

The last paragraph will have readers wondering if Mavis has forgotten she’s in an ordinary diner and has suddenly developed a delusion that she’s a character in Downton Abbey and is meeting with the Crawley family in their parlour to have afternoon tea. This unwelcome intrusion of the stuffy voice into a story that is otherwise written in very plain, everyday English is jarring to say the least. Try reading the scene aloud. Did you hear the clunking noises as the words of the last paragraph hit your ears?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fancy words; no doubt the English language would be impoverished without them. But it’s vital that writers understand when it’s appropriate to use them, and when using them is overreaching. Sometimes it’s an ego issue–writers like to impress with their extensive vocabularies and often think that the bigger the word, the better. But inflating the language when it’s clearly inappropriate to do so is always an error in judgment, and readers will always think more highly of  writers who use a level of diction that suits their context. Throwing highfalutin words around where they don’t belong doesn’t make writers look smarter–in fact, quite the reverse is true. Writers need to toss the thesaurus aside and write with an ear to what sounds natural in the particular fictional world they’re trying to create.

With that in mind, I’m revising that last paragraph in the vignette about Betsy and Mavis:

Mavis looked at the menu. “Actually, I’d like some tea. Could you hurry, please?” she asked.

I hope you agree that this does the job, and in a way that suits the sort of ordinary people Mavis and Betsy are and the unpretentious world they occupy.

 

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Writing and Editing

Point of View (POV) in Fiction: First Person

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Writing in first-person POV is something many fiction writers instinctively gravitate to. It seems easy and natural to adopt this POV in writing, probably because we’re so accustomed to telling stories about ourselves in conversation, and of course we always tell them in the first person. Certainly, I’ve always favoured this perspective in my own work, and I now find myself shuffling between two alternating first-person narrators in my book, Virginia’s Ghost.

The chief advantage of first-person POV is the wonderful sense of intimacy it creates, the sense of being right inside the narrator’s head, privy to all of his or her thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. You can create an intense bond between narrator and audience when you’re writing from the first-person POV, and that intimacy is one of the chief reasons for selecting it. Of all the different POVs, it is probably the one that most easily allows readers to become emotionally invested in your story.

Remember, though, that your narrator should be someone whose head readers would actually want to be inside for the duration of an entire short story or novel. If your narrator is weird, obnoxious, or arrogant, you can be sure that few readers will be interested in your book. Draw up a detailed profile of your first-person narrator to ensure that you’ve created someone worth spending all that time with. Think about what qualities will make your narrator worth listening to. Does she have a particular attitude that makes her fascinating? Immerse yourself in the character and remember that when you’re writing in the first person, you’re writing using your character’s voice, not your own. You’re filtering your entire story through your narrator’s perceptions, so this character’s take on things had better be interesting.

Remember too that using first-person POV limits you to writing about only what the narrator knows and has experienced, so in this way, it can limit where your plot goes. Though I suppose you could have another character telling your narrator what just happened in the other room, this is far from ideal. You cheat readers by offering a second-hand account when they really wanted to be right there, front and centre, seeing the action through your narrator’s eyes. It almost goes without saying that your first-person narrator needs to be someone who is constantly at the heart of the action–in most cases, your protagonist.

Another important thing to be conscious of when using first-person POV is that your narrator is in the position of knowing the whole story right from the start. What this gives you as a writer is the flexibility to discuss, with the benefit of hindsight, what the narrator wouldn’t have perceived earlier in the narrative but now understands. To what extent you want to exploit this is up to you. My view is that when you write from a position of hindsight, you sometimes reveal too much about what’s to come and you also distance readers from events. By contrast, writing in real time, as events are actually unfolding, creates a sense of immediacy that plunges readers into your narrative.

Although writing in first-person POV doesn’t appear all that difficult, many writers nonetheless make errors when writing from this perspective. By this I mean that they make “illegal” shifts into another character’s POV. If your narrator suddenly starts telling us what another character is thinking, that’s a POV error, as there’s no way he could possibly know. As well, if the narrator starts describing a scene he hasn’t witnessed, that’s also an error. Writers also frequently make the mistake of describing the first-person narrator’s appearance as if they were looking down on him from above, which is yet another breach of the POV rules.

It may take some practice, but If you can create a compelling first-person narrator and stay consistently inside that character’s head, then you are well on your way to mastering first-person POV.

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Writing and Editing

Redundancies and Pleonasms

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Today’s blog post is by freelance editor Arlene Prunkl of PenUltimate Editorial Services. Until I read Arlene’s post, I’d never heard of the word pleonasm before, which sounds like some sort of substance you’d look at under a microscope. And who knew that there was even a word for all those little redundancies I’ve always gotten such a kick out of? I hope you enjoy Arlene’s wonderfully succinct and informative post.

Redundancy is just one of the many problems that fall under the general category of wordiness. A redundant phrase or expression is called a pleonasm. You may think you know when a redundancy occurs, but some of them can be subtle.

How often have you heard a friend say something like this: “An unexpected surprise came when a pair of baby twins was born at 12 midnight”? What is a surprise if not unexpected? What are twins if not a pair? Who can be born but a baby? When is midnight if not at 12? Your friend could just as well have said, “A surprise came when twins were born at midnight” with far less repetition.

Or what if you heard someone say, “The armed gunman gave an advance warning that he would make death threats on their lives”? Can you find the pleonasms in that sentence? The expressions we use are full of unwitting redundancy.

I’ve prepared a good long list of pleonasms; some of them are rather funny. Can you see what’s wrong with these? Can you think of any others? Once you start paying attention to each of your words, I’m sure you’ll begin to detect occasional redundancies. In fact, email me with your pet peeve redundancies and pleonasms, and I’ll add them to this list!

– Dry desert
– Free gift
– End result
– Over and over again
– Whether or not
– Former business failed/former ex-husband
– Personal friends/personal opinion/my personal anything
– Standard orthodoxy
– Genuine original
– Ancient fossil
– Basic necessities/basic fundamentals
– Major milestone
– Linger behind
– Rugged mountain range
– Quickly mushroomed
– Interconnect/intermix/interlink
– Future ahead looks bright
– Main thrust
– Small cubbyhole
– Familiar fixture
– Single most/single biggest
– Point in time/period of time
– Death threats on his life
– Close proximity
– Actual experience/past experience
– Advance planning/advance warning/advance reservations
– All meet together/join together
– Armed gunman
– 12 midnight/12 noon
– Autobiography of one’s life
– Awkward predicament
– Cease and desist
– Each and every
– First and foremost
– Cheap price/expensive price
– Commute back and forth
– Consensus of opinion
– Difficult dilemma
– Estimated roughly/guesstimated
– Filled to capacity
– Frozen ice
– General public
– Green in color
– Natural instinct
– Null and void
– Pre-recorded
– The reason is because
– Regular routine
– Suddenly exploded
– Surrounded on all sides
– Broke both his legs
– The winter months
– Postponed until later
– Mutual cooperation
– In order to…

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Virginia's Ghost, Writing and Editing

Reflecting on the Kindness of Strangers

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Unlike poor Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, I’ve never depended on the kindness of strangers. I’ve always thought that doing so was most unwise, as strangers can’t reliably be depended upon. However, when people I don’t know emerge from nowhere to be unexpectedly kind or complimentary, it usually gives me such a boost that I feel as if I’m walking on air. I’m not the sort of person who craves attention, but I love compliments as much as the next person. You can imagine how I felt a few days ago when I received a whopping big compliment on one of the pages of this website; it was the first ever compliment on my site from a complete stranger.

I’m only just learning the ropes of SEO, so I don’t suppose a lot of strangers have managed to stumble across my website yet. And even if they have, I wouldn’t expect them to comment. The only people who comment either know me in person or they’re editing clients I’ve worked with before and we at least know each other via emailing or social media. The stranger’s comment was short and sweet, but as far as I was concerned, it was a doozy: the lady said that my writing had given her goosebumps. She’d been reading an excerpt I released on this website from my novel-in-progress, Virginia’s Ghost, in which my heroine encounters an unexpected presence in the basement of the auction house where she works. The whole purpose of that scene was to give readers goosebumps, and just knowing that at least one person was affected that way really lifted my spirits, especially since I’d been feeling stuck in an uncomfortable state of limbo between my second and third drafts for days. Her words of encouragement got me started on my third draft. Who knew that just a few well-chosen words could have such a big impact?

Many writers I know, including me, work in a critical vacuum throughout much of the writing process. In the absence of positive feedback, it’s all too easy for your self-confidence as a writer to dwindle. It’s vital to receive some sort of psychic pay in the form of praise from time to time. And praise from strangers is really the best sort to receive, as it’s motivated only by the quality of the work itself. Strangers don’t feel the need to be nice to you the way your friends and family often do; they don’t tend to treat your ego as if it were a fragile piece of glass.

And knowing that your writing is having the desired effect–that it’s genuinely reaching into people’s hearts and affecting them in exactly the way that you wish to affect them–is a wonderful feeling. It just doesn’t get much better than that. Yes, I write to satisfy my creative impulses and my need to express myself, but I also write to engage readers in the story I wish to tell and to move people emotionally. My audience is vital to me, and that they are moved by my words means I’m effectively doing my job as a writer. And it also means that I have very powerful motivation indeed to continue.

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General Musing, Writing and Editing

Overcoming Tendinitis for Writers and Editors

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Occupational hazards would seem to be few and far between for writers, editors, and others who spend long, solitary hours tapping away at a keyboard. Some would say that we have it easy; as an editor, I’m not exactly out there risking my neck by fighting crime (unless you consider grammatical errors to be criminal acts). Loneliness–the deep kind that is best alleviated by face-to-face interaction, not chatting on social media–is a risk and certainly affects our emotional well-being. Another obvious threat is gaining weight. The unfortunate truth is that the refrigerator cannot be locked and is always much too close at hand. And we sit entirely too much, so we don’t burn off as many calories as we should. Apart from that, are there really that many occupational hazards that can befall us?

Starting back in July, I experienced tendinitis for the first time in my life. The inflamed tendon was near my elbow, but the pain also radiated into my wrist. The inflammation was so severe that for a number of weeks, I couldn’t twist a lid off a jar or turn a key in a lock without experiencing excruciating pain. Everyday activities that I’d taken for granted became hellishly difficult, and that included working at the computer.

I started to assess my behaviour at the keyboard, and I noticed a few things. First, I was using the mouse much more than I needed to, so instead of using it to move up and down through a document (a bad habit I’d somehow got into), I switched to the arrow keys. As well, I was moving away from the keyboard inadvertently; my chair is on casters, and because of a slight incline in the hardwood floor, I was rolling away and straining to reach both the keyboard and the mouse. I slipped a carpet under my chair, and I’m now sitting more snugly up against the keyboard. I always check that my hands are centred precisely over the keyboard before I begin typing, rather than at an awkward angle to it.

All this was helping, but the inflammation was still so severe that I needed medical help. So I visited my acupuncturist-chiropractor, Dr. Z. Worried that tendinitis might put an end to my editing activities, at least temporarily, I asked him what the chances were of recovering from my affliction. He said that for some people, especially those who don’t actively try to do anything about it, tendinitis becomes a chronic condition. I knew I wasn’t going to be one of those people; I was definitely willing to put in the work to overcome it. What choice did I have?

Because my tendinitis was a repetitive strain injury, Dr. Z. advised me to take as much time away from the keyboard as I possibly could and simply rest the tendon. Otherwise, the inflammation would never come down. I would also need to ice it three times a day for a few minutes at a time. As well, I applied Traumeel homeopathic cream a couple of times a day. Dr. Z. taught me stretching exercises that I could do daily, and I went to his office once a week for acupuncture treatments. After he removed the needles, he also did some deep muscle massage on my arm. I started taking a supplement called SierraSil Joint Formula 14. Before long, I turned the corner and the severe inflammation died away. Dr. Z. told me I could start strengthening exercises, as keeping the muscles strong would prevent a recurrence of the tendinitis.

Cumulatively, all these measures worked; it wasn’t any one thing that solved the problem. Now I can work away at the keyboard for hours pain-free, and I’ve even been able to go back to knitting (although Dr. Z. cautions against doing it daily, as I used to). I still try to take entire days away from the keyboard, if I can tear myself away from both work and the allure of the online world. If you have severe tendinitis, it’s all too easy to give in to despair; but given enough time, effort, and patience, you too can overcome it.

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Writing and Editing

Are Grammar-checking Websites Worth the Bother?

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A client mentioned recently that she has a thirty-dollar monthly subscription to a certain popular website that promises to check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, style, and word choice for you. I should say at the outset that I’m biased and tend to turn up my nose at sites like these; I don’t imagine that they have a hope of ever replacing me or my editor colleagues, so I don’t lose any sleep over the fact of their existence. Feeling a little mischievous, I thought it would be entertaining to run an experiment to see exactly how accurate my client’s grammar-checking site really is. I signed up for the free seven-day trial and wracked my brains to come up with some excruciatingly bad text. This is what I submitted to the grammar checker for assessment:

The lion tapped his crown and screamed quietly, now that Im kind of the forest, I’m kinda loosing my mine.

Your majesty, with all due respect, their is no kneed to carry on in this fashion, felicia robinson his advisor said patiently. Its not appropriate. Yew have had plenty of time to get used to our knew roll, four you have been king of the forest for quiet some time. The time for complaining has past, you must except your responsibilities more better than you have bin doing

Bee that as it may the lion inserted boldly, but I am not pre-pared. And when am I two have time to eat steak, eggs, and peanut-butter.

My text had a grand total of thirty errors, and the grammar checker found just ten of them. Yes, it knew that losing  and prepared were spelled wrong, and it realized that certain homophones were the wrong ones, like their and yew. And it picked up a comma splice and the improper comparative more better.

But on the whole, it performed dismally. Yes, it did find a number of the misused homophones, but it missed others such as past, bee, and four. So much for the “contextual spelling check.” And although it claims to be concerned with word choice, it completely missed screamed quietly in the first line, and it seemed to think that inserted was fine when asserted was what I meant. Its grasp of punctuation was abysmal, as it didn’t seem to know that my passage included dialogue and therefore needed quotation marks. Nor did it realize that the last sentence was a question and required a question mark at the end, or that Im needed an apostrophe. And sadly, it missed that peanut butter isn’t hyphenated.

Possibly worse than the things it missed was the wrong advice it gave me. It told me that in be (okay, I did write bee) that as it may the may should be maybe, dismissed my use of the pronoun you as improper in academic writing (not that the nonsense I fed it could be deemed in any way academic), and dissed my use of and at the beginning of a sentence. It called its not appropriate a sentence fragment, failing to recognize that all that was needed to make it a proper sentence was an apostrophe in the first word. It didn’t recognize that felicia robinson was a proper name that simply required capitals; instead it told me that the words were actually misspelled. I was taken to task for using kind of (which was actually a typo–from the context it should have been apparent that I meant king of), yet it somehow missed kinda in the same sentence.

Okay, I admit that the test I gave it was tricky; I threw everything I could think of at it with the intention of messing with its so-called mind. Perhaps I was unnecessarily cruel to the poor thing. But all the types of errors I threw at it are certainly common enough in manuscripts; they’re just usually not present in such mind-twisting quantities.

Should you as a writer rely on grammar-checking websites? Absolutely not. Though they may offer interesting tidbits of information about grammatical rules in their analyses, they can’t even begin to grasp subtle or even not-so-subtle contextual issues, so they will miss a good portion of the errors–two-thirds, if you go by my results–and can misinterpret that which is actually correct. If you are really concerned about accuracy, you need the judgment of an actual human being, and there is simply no substitute for a good editor.

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