#vbabbles

[vsaintsin]

I spent all of Draft One completely ignoring the uncomfortable situation I had going with 's vs s' when it comes to singular and plural nouns and my sudden inability to comprehend how they function. I kept going "No, don't get hung up on the issues, that's what editting is for, just get through the draft and leave the treasure hunting for later".

Guys. I'm having a fucking meltdown. There is no standard. There is no standard?! You're telling me I could say Ceres's or Ceres' and both are right? You're telling me it's supposed to be boss' but we all hate that so it's boss's? You're telling me that punctuation is actually just vibes and you can actually legally make it up as you go because it's all hocus pocus and nobody knows what they're talking about?

This is liberating, actually. I will be abusing this information.

Any other fun tidbits of English that we know about that seem made up? I'd like to know just how much I'm allowed too break this bastard language before it's actually a crime.

[vsaintsin]

Writing at 5 am and running on no sleep will have you (me, one) googling dumb things like "Query - definition" because all of the sudden, it looks wrong in a sentence and you no longer trust your knowledge of the English language.

[vsaintsin]

I have been told (as if it was a fact) by two separate people (who are close to me, and should know me better than this) that because the (fictional) contents of the first book I published include the MC considering the subject of his own faith that I, a real (as in not fictional) person, am also having a crisis of faith. What followed (despite me protesting that my faith does not align with the one of the fictional character at all) was detailed instructions as to how I should correct this issue.

You know, when I considered that the periodic religious subject matter in the book might be controversial to some people, I'm not sure this is what I meant?

[vsaintsin]

I run my work through a few programs as a back-up plan. Really just to catch misspellings that I start to overlook when I become too familiar with my work. And dudes, the absolute worst of them is Grammarly.

To my knowledge, Grammarly is more of a paper editor, I'll give it that. It wants to clean up your work to be professional for employers or professors or things like that.

Outside of that, it's job is to strip the life, the self, the identity of you out of your work. It pops up frequently with ways I could shorten something for "clarity" when the way that I initially wrote it wasn't unclear, it was detailing a different mood or energy or even behavior completely. Grammarly to writing is what sad millennial beige is to old houses.

This doesn't at all address that it's terrible at distinguishing between past-present-future, plurals, etc. Notably, it does seem to be getting worse at this. So yeah, sure, it can be good as a program to check for spelling issues but that's about it.

This crosses my mind periodically because I've seen (not on this site) people defend grammarly as a perfectly reasonable editor that defeats the purpose of actual editting. Wrong. There is no spellcheck or editting program that can substitute for a human, not yet.

I have read indie books that put too much faith in these programs and you can tell rather quickly. The best thing you can do for your writing is learn, I promise you that. I don't mean college or paid courses or anything of that like. I mean by actually looking things up and digging deeper than the first link on google, parsing through other author's work to understand the difference between things like clear writing and style of writing, actually absorbing information.

Oh, and if you find yourself spelling a certain word wrong quite often, write down the misspelled version and then use find and replace to locate it. This in itself isn't a perfect system but a good safety net.