Are you making this silly writing mistake?

Talemaking - Business communications and marketing

A writer s best friend might be a proofreading robot that checks your grammar too. Steven Lewis reviews (and argues with) Grammarly, an automated proofreader and grammar checker that might just be a writer s best friend.

Like it or not, people judge you for bad grammar, which is why Google punishes you for it

Listen to this episode if

• A mistake has ever jumped out at you after you sent off a piece of writing
  (you know it has)
• You need to write with credibility and looking unprofessional could cost you
• Your friends, family and colleagues are too busy to proofread (or unqualified to do so)

The fatal mistake 29 out of 100 writers don t know they re making

When Dave Cornford and I co-wrote the Taleist Self-Publishing Survey, we surveyed over 1,000 authors. Almost a third of them reported they proofread their own work. That s like saying you can see the backs of your eyeballs. No one can proofread their own work. Authors are blind to their own mistakes.

If you think you proofread your own work, you re not proofreading your work.

Spelling and grammar mistakes cost credibility and people buy what you re selling based on whether they believe you. You might not be in sales but if you re writing to persuade, you need to be credible.

Bad writing also costs you money if you re running a website.

Play this week s episode

The trouble with friends, family and colleagues as proofreaders

We bought Grammarly but you can try it for free.

Proofreading is a skill. You re not just reading; you re paying close attention on multiple levels meaning, grammar, punctuation Friends, family and colleagues don t always have the time which they might not tell you. Can you always trust they ve really looked carefully? Also, is their spelling and grammar any good? Ideally you want your proofreader and grammar checker to know more than you.

The proofreader and grammar checker that s always available

At Taleist, we use Grammarly because it s at least 10 times more accurate than the built-in spellchecker on the Mac; and it explains the suggestions it s making with grammar.

We bought it but you can try it for free. (If you end up buying it, we might get a commission but, as you ll hear loud and clear in the podcast, we re only recommending something we love and use every day.)

Look like a better writer

We don t love everything about Grammarly. An important add-in doesn t work for Mac users and it s maddeningly insistent on the Oxford comma. But we shelled out for online proofreading and grammar checking because we want our writing to look better. Listen to the review in this episode and you ll have a good idea if Grammarly might help you, too.

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Podcast transcript

Steven Lewis:

No, I said. I didn t not miss that comma. So what if it s a compound sentence? I don t care for your extra comma. It s going to slow the reader down. It s going to kill the pace.

The sentence I was arguing about was this.

He d read every self-help book on the market and he d been to every course going.

I had written it just that way:

He d read every self-help book on the market and he d been to every course going full stop

The idiot editor wanted:

He d read every self-help book on the market comma and he d been to every course going full stop

That comma was unnecessary to me. If I put a comma there, the reader was going to pause at that point. And that wasn t what I wanted. I wanted pace and urgency in my story, especially as it was going out by email. People won t linger over email. I couldn t afford the comma.

Technically, I will reluctantly acknowledge, the editor was right. The rules required a comma. But I was holding firm.

Our debate over commas in compound sentences escalated. The editor reported me an email. And I didn t care for the tone of the report. Halfway down the email:

Missing comma in compound sentence 107 mistakes

Mistakes! Once again, these were not mistakes. These were choices. C-H-O-I-C-E-S, do you hear me?

But the truth was, I enjoyed these debates. Debates over the passive voice, the Oxford comma, the compound comma and what the editor in a pursed-lip tone called unnecessary ellipsis 343 mistakes.

I liked having these arguments even if I was having them with a computer.

Welcome to Talemaking with me, Steven Lewis. This is a show about getting your business message out. The show comes from Taleist, a content marketing agency in Sydney. We have a particular focus on using the skills of journalism and the art of storytelling to get our clients messages out. It might be in articles for their websites, podcasts, videos or one of the business books we ve ghostwritten.

This week I m looking at one of my favourite pieces of writing software. It s called Grammarly and as condescending and frustrating as it can be there s no doubt it can help you punch up your writing and catch the mistakes you can t believe you didn t see for yourself.

Grammarly says it will find up to 10 times more mistakes than the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word. That programming is the brains of the operation, which runs behind the scenes. What you see on the surface will be familiar to you You show it your text and it underlines and highlights possible errors.

Where it s different from Word s spell and grammar checker is that it s better and that it will explain its reasons for each suggestion to you. Next to each highlight is what Grammarly calls a card. When you click the icon, it expands to explain the rule you re broken. Allegedly.

Grammarly is simple to use and works in one of three ways:

1. You can enable it as a browser extension. That s a bit of software that plugs into your web browser. That way when you re typing an email, Facebook status message, blog post or something else, Grammarly is watching you. Its suggestions come up as you type.
2. Grammarly also has a website you can log into a type your words or copy and paste them for review and suggestions.
3. If you use a Windows machine, you can have it as an add-in to Microsoft Office. As a Mac user, this is a major weakness of Grammarly. I know more people have Windows machines but every writer I know uses a Mac. I can t comment on how this works but I believe it means you can have Grammarly review a document as long as you like. On the web version, which we Mac users are limited to, you can t have a document longer than 20 pages. This is a major flaw from my point of view. It means I can t run a whole book through Grammarly and doing it in chunks would be a pain.

That s my only criticism of Grammarly but it s a huge one if you re a Mac user.

And it means I can only tell you what it s like using Grammarly through its web interface. And that works like this

When you agree with Grammarly s suggested fix, one click cleans it up. Your mistake is washed away and Grammarly s correction goes in it s place just as you ve seen with the built-in spellcheck on your computer.

As you can tell from the beginning of the episode my advice don t just click to correct when Grammarly tells you there s a mistake. There are areas of grammar that are disputed. There are decisions you need to make as a writer. You need to think about pace and comprehension. You need to think about tone. Maybe those unnecessary ellipsis are a wink to the reader.

Grammarly is a set of rules, not a person. You re a person, not a set of rules. You re the one better placed to understand what your reader needs. Each correction you make with Grammarly s help should be a decision you ve made.

I might not always agree with Grammarly but I show it almost everything I write.

When Dave Cornford and I wrote the Taleist Self-Publishing Survey, we surveyed over 1,000 authors These were people who were serious enough about writing that they d written at least one book. Many of them had written more than one book. Twenty-nine per cent of them reported that they d proofread their own work. When I mention that to my professional writer friends their eyebrows head for the sky. Saying you can proofread your own work is like saying you can see the back of your eyeballs. You can t. No one can.

Of the remaining 71 per cent 46 per cent said they d had proofreading help but they d not paid for it. It might be that they all knew someone with the chops to proofread a book but it seems more likely they asked friends or family.

My experience with friends, family and colleagues is that they have to be approached cautiously as proofreaders.

Many of them will be too polite to tell you they don t have the time or the interest to proofread your work so they ll take it, glance over it and hand it back to you. But they won t have looked through it closely. This is particularly true of colleagues who have their own work to do. Proper proofreading takes time.

Sometimes the person you ask to help will find they like what you wrote and they ll be too engrossed reading it to remember they weren t supposed to be reading it, they were supposed to be looking for mistakes. That s gratifying but it s not proofreading. Reading and proofreading are two different things.

Last and in no way the least important consideration your friends, family and colleagues might not have great spelling and grammar. Just because someone types at a computer all day, doesn t make them a writer. I own a hammer and I ve even used it from time to time but you would not want me doing renovations on your house.

So what Grammarly lacks in the human touch, it makes up for in diligence and expertise. When you ask it to check something, that s exactly what it s going to do. It s programmed to find more than 250 types of grammatical mistake. It s looking for subject-verb agreement, modifier placement, article use and who knows what else. I will grudgingly admit that I ve furiously disagreed with Grammarly; stormed off to research the point; and find out I was wrong. Fortunately, Grammarly will never know that because it s a robot.

Another great feature of Grammarly is that its spellcheck is contextual. That s critical. I read a self-publishing book about sport recently. It was about a team that went from the back of the pack to the front. In the first half of the story they lost all their matches. But in the book they didn t lose, they would loose. Lose, loose both words in their own right so context is critical.

Grammarly doesn t stop there. You can switch on a vocabulary enhancer, which will make suggestions about overused words.

And it has a plagiarism checker. I copied and pasted one of my blog posts. Grammarly spotted it immediately and gave me the original source. It has kinks. Grammarly says this is apparently two per cent unoriginal because of the phrase In the first half of the story they I said that when I was talking about lose and loose. Apparently the phrase is used in an entry on the website TV Tropes. Grammarly helpfully gives me preformatted references so I can properly attribute the writing. The problem is that when I insert the reference it highlights the reference itself as unoriginal text, borrowed from a Star Wars discussion forum. My unoriginality score goes up to three per cent. The price of honesty seems high. Or it would if I d borrowed the phrase in the first place.

How you feel about the final bonus feature of Grammarly will be entirely personal. I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I d received a report listing 107 commas as missing from my compound sentences. Grammarly sends a weekly email. My report that week wasn t too bad.

I had written more than 99 per cent of Grammarly users not too surprising giving that I write for a living.

I was more accurate than 95 per cent of users nice. Obviously I d be doing better if not for the reported missing commas and unnecessary ellipsis.

Most gratifying, I d used 2,391 unique words, making my vocabulary more dynamic than 98 per cent of users.

Grammarly is a robot, however. I doubt it s programmed to pull its punches when you don t have such a good week so beware.

My problems with Grammarly are quibbles, which is why I recommend it to everyone. It s the nature of writers to argue with their editors. When I started as a journalist in the 90s I had a sub-editor whose name still brings me out in a rash. It s the reality that we all write so much and so often now that we can t afford to have everything we write professionally edited. But we can afford to have an intelligent, if unsympathetic piece of software watching over our shoulder.

You can try Grammarly free. There are links in the shownotes or Google will get you there.

But if you come over to the Talemaking website you can sign up while you re there for our subscriber library. It s well-stocked with bonuses our guests have donated exclusively for subscribers. And of course it gets bigger as the podcast goes on. As a subscriber you have access not only to what s already there but also to what future guests donate. You ll also be the first to hear about new episodes of Talemaking.

Find the link to Grammarly and sign up for the library at Taleist.com. That s Tale as in telling tales. Taleist.com.

Until the next story, I m Steven Lewis and you ve been listening to Talemaking.

The post Are you making this silly writing mistake? appeared first on Taleist.