Don’t Allow Editing Software to Eliminate Your Unique Writing Voice
It’s a tool not a human
When I began my writing journey on Medium in 2018, I’d been writing for decades — business and personal correspondence, poetry and songs.
I assumed my command of English vocabulary, parts of speech, punctuation, etc. were all I needed to become a writer here.
Some of my first forays into publishing on this platform were cringe-worthy — I deleted them later. They were that bad.
Surprisingly, others were successful to the extent that three were curated in my first two months. (Curation was the old term for today’s boost.)
I wrote in a conversational style, sharing ideas on topics that would interest readers.
I relied on nothing and nobody but myself to read through my drafts, then read them aloud to hear how they sounded. I’d tweak and restructure sentences, eliminate fluff and detect when my ego was trying to be clever with fancy words.
MS Word’s built-in editor often missed punctuation and spacing errors — as I did.
I couldn’t afford the services of a human editor, but needed something which could do more than proofread. I wanted help in honing my writing skills.
