The Moment You’re Told Santa Isn’t Real

I look for things as an English teacher embarking on her 20th year. This year I’m looking for online writing assistance tools.

I have worked with a few high profile online writing tools in the past. Pulling out the card file on the subject in my mind I imagined them to all be the same. In this case, I expected Google Read & Write to provide a grandeur of suggestions for content, structure, stance, and conventions or anything that might appear on a generic high school rubric. Perhaps my expectations were higher since it had strong keywords: Google, Read, Write.

If you have used Google Read & Write, you know where this goes. I have had my exposure to let downs and disappointment in odd ways. One day my guardians of youth shared Santa was not real in a really odd way. I was already in my early teen years. At the time I cried as a direct result of believing I would no longer acquire cool toys. By this point in my life the toys were sad and sporadic. I had passed the age of imagination, but the thought of nothing was sadder. As an adult, finding out that Google Read & Write did not offer those grandeur suggestions I expected set me back to this Santa Claus moment.

I am the type of person to start dabbling on something before reading the instructions. If I do read the instructions, it is because I am an avid reader and they may have just been lying around in eyesight while I was sitting and resting. In this case, I searched the get started videos after the fact became apparent that Google Read and Write did not offer what I had hoped to find. I scoured the company’s overview dozens of times looking for that secret menu before accepting that this is like the Santa moment of my youth.

This is what Google Read & Write claims to offer from their site:

Read & Write offers a range of POWERFUL support tools to help you gain confidence with reading, writing, studying and research, including:
• Text-to-speech to hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud with easy-to-follow dual color highlighting
• Text and picture dictionaries to see the meaning of words explained
• With speech-to-text, dictate words to assist with writing, proofreading & studying
• Word prediction offers suggestions for the current or next word as you type
• Collect highlights from text in documents or the web for summarizing and research
• Create and listen to voice notes directly inside of Google Docs
• Simplify and summarize text on web pages to remove ads and other copy that can be distracting

This was the moment where “powerful” was added to my “dead” word list.

I have a few college degrees and NOBODY told me I need these tools! I am not a very reactionary person, outside my preteen theatrics. Instead of flipping my mind — my mind flipped.

This story will not end here. I am on board with Google Read & Write for the following year. I have also decided to experiment and explore Grammarly as well.

So far Grammarly has helped me to quickly edit words I misspelled in very quick types. The free version of Grammarly has saved quite an excess of typos. I have yet to jump fully into Grammarly yet. I am still recuperating after my unexpected adventure with Google Read & Write.