Unsolicited commentary from a professional writer:
Learn to edit your own work.
The Elements of Editing is for writers, too.
Ask yourself: If I didnât have a computer, could I write confidently? Would I know whether my grammar is correct?
You need to know the rules. You need to know how to recognize if somethingâs wrong and how to fix it on your own.
When I hear writers say Grammarly makes their writing better I have to say: For the entire history of humankind until we had PCs, every single writer learned how to edit her or his own work. Every. Single. One.
Homer, Sun Tzu, Virgil, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Agatha Christie.
ALL of them self-edited their work. And then editors, who also learned to edit without computers, helped them polish their work.
Itâs not difficult. Of course it takes time to learn. Becoming very good at something always does.
Like all computer programs Grammarly is flawed. If you donât know the rules of grammar by heart then you wonât know when Grammarly is wrong. And you could submit or post work that makes people shake their heads and say, âDamn, this writerâs sloppy.â
I know editors who say they can tell when a writer has used a computer program like Grammarly and when the writer self-edits. And the self-edited work is always better.
Of course youâll make mistakes. But youâll make fewer, and when you see them you can fix them. Correctly.
For godâs sake, become a real writer. Learn how to write, not to obey a fucking algorithm.
jbbartram-illu
vaporwave
stormborns
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
