Using a Mistake

by Rain Trueax 

You have written all morning putting together a blog. It's gone along well. The words flowed from the original idea. You hit a key, and suddenly all you see is a blank page with the letters lk. You panic and think-- hit the reload current page symbol at the top of the page, hoping that will mean the one you had before the apocalypse happened. lk stares you in the face. You just made your second mistake. 

That was the fate of the originally planned Saturday's blog.

When something like that happens, I always wonder if what I had planned was a mistake. I considered that but decided it had been a good idea. Maybe though there was a better way to proceed.

I took my idea to Word, where autosave doesn't happen. Before beginning, I was curious. Might 'lk' have meaning? It turns out to be an internet shortcut for like. Was my computer having fun with me? Are they often having fun with us and sometimes maliciously? 

One of the movies we watched last week, due to our grandson being here, was inspired by a Stephen King story, where the machines turn on humans due to a comet having passed. Could it be sometimes our computer/internet does the same-- without needing help from a comet (although, a comet did pass pretty close at that time)? 

 More likely, it was just typing too fast and hitting the dreaded, short-cut keys-- two of them though??? Anyway, onward and upward as a friend of mine used to say.

Coming to Word, I decided it was a good time to get more practice with something I bought last week due to sale-- Premium Grammarly. Using it on the blog would help me become more familiar with its options.

To begin, I had two ways to proceed. I could write out what I intended and then copy/paste it into the window; or I could import it as a document (both limit the amount of words it can accept). Copy/paste warns you straight out that it will not protect formatting, which is not significant where it comes to the blog as it's easy to reformat. It's very significant with a book. 

Once the text is there, you are offered goal options-- like formal or informal; to inform, describe, convince or tell a story; etc. After that, the app goes to work scanning your text for errors in grammar, formality, confidence, clarity, variety, vocabulary, and punctuation. It highlights the mistakes it sees. You can take their suggestion or dismiss it. 

The program, in my experience, is not always right; so you have to read each suggestion. Mix-ups on tense are where I found it most often wrong-- sometimes hilariously (maybe not hilarious but at least funny). They say that the more you use it, the better it will get at helping you with your style of writing. 

The place I need it most is punctuation. I have a habit of not putting in a comma with coordinating conjunctions linking two independent clauses. I know why-- because I don't think of an and or but until the first sentence has been written. I don't know that I will join them. The missing commas are mistakes that bother some readers more than others. I know where they should be--for all the good that does. Grammarly comes along and reminds me where I can decide whether two short sentences are better. Often they are.

The formatting problem is a big deal in books. Earlier, I had taken, three chapters from one of my books (the most text it could analyze at one time) and when I pasted it back to the book, the indents were wrong on many paragraphs. Having misplaced indents is worse for the book than missing commas. 

Even when I followed instructions (rare but I do that sometimes), by using import and export, there were still some paragraph goofs-- but many less. Having to break a book into shorter sections that can be imported is a nuisance as I then have to rejoin them. 

There is another way to work with Grammarly, which is as you write. I tried it on those chapters but didn't think it caught as many errors, was more tedious to use, and can cause a lack of focus when it pops up with something it saw as wrong. 

Overall, I like Grammarly. Eventually, I am planning to use it on all my older books-- although where they were written with much earlier versions of Word, they are most problematic on the formatting issue. 

In terms of what it could do better-- I wish it would allow importing more than three chapters at a time. That makes moving back and forth tedious. 

This wasn't the initially planned blog for today. I felt it might be helpful though for other writers and hence am saving my original intent for next Saturday-- actually, the next two Saturdays as that got longer than I expected-- not sure how that happened...