Writing aids? Are they any good!
It seems impossible to watch a video of your favourite band without the obligatory “paid advert” you have to sit through.
For the last year as I’ve been getting Melody Harper’s Moon ready that has been more and more for a tool called Grammarly.
The fact about writing is that we always make mistakes. In the rush to get our ideas down, little errors creep in. We say “their” instead of “there” — and yes, we know the rule, but we were busy and distracted.
We’ll try and go back and reread it, but the problem is in truth we see very little of what’s on the page. You’ve probably seen this phenomonon doing the rounds on social media somewhere,
Cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
Tahnks, Rob Reid for frowradnig tihs one… I’m ipmesrsed. Good lcuk wrtiing a comupter prorgam to do taht!
This is great news for every school teacher who’s needed to understand a piece of badly scrawled homework. But this is real issue for a writer — there might be a mistake right in front of you, but can you see it?
Obviously helping you correct your work is nothing new, Microsoft Word has been doing this for years, helping you spell check. But a spell check is not a proof read. “There” is a correctly spelled word. It doesn’t matter that you really meant “their”.
New tools like Grammarly on paper offer better analysis of what you’re writing. Grammarly offers both a free and a paid service. But is it much better than what you get out of the box?
I actually used Grammarly as a final pass on Melody Harper’s Moon after the beta reader stage.
But I wanted to go out to the writer’s community to find others experiences …
Jack A. Ori had this to say,
Dennis Bisskit talked about some of how it helped, but also the limitations they were finding,
From Izzibella Beau finds it really useful, but also suggested another application,
Lilith Ember also raved about Grammarly but suggested I check out Hemingway as well,
Here’s some of my own thoughts. For me, these tools are really helpful. I’m slightly dyslexic, which causes me a lot of difficulties with spelling, so even in my professional capacity at work, I rely on tools to help me find mistakes.
I use the free version as standard, but the paid version is more expensive than what I pay for Microsoft Word — about $30 a month!
That said, in the final pass of getting Melody Harper’s Moon ready, I paid up for the extra features.
The pros
Overall, I find Grammarly really helpful, it helped with spell checking, and made helpful suggestions about punctuation, and word use. Little nudges.
I’ve found it works really well both on Google Drive and Microsoft Word where I tend to do most of my writing.
It could also tell me when I’d written “he picked up the gun”, and informed me it was ambiguous who “he” was. It could give nudges on the use of punctuation (hey, we all struggle sometimes). Even telling me “you’re using there did you mean their?”.
Here’s an example from an early draft of Melody Harper’s Moon. As said, some punctuation, and some words it thinks are confused. You can click to get more breakdown,
The dashboard for Grammarly on Word shows the following features it can help with,
Out of the box you get help with spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and style.
I used premium on the final draft (I bought a one month license), and it can help with issues around genre, plagiarism and does vocabulary enhancement. It was this last feature I found most useful, where it could suggest other words I might use to avoid overuse of some words.
The cons
Okay one of the first ones, and it’s a bit of a biggie …
It also has and issue with “undoing” and action meaning if you accidentally select a paragraph and type a space, it’s gone FOREVER!
It’s also slow.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell it’s sending your document up to the cloud to be analysed. So there’s this little piece of text that goes “checking” as you can see below …
Melody Harper’s Moon is about 80,000 words. And it takes over an hour to finish processing it. Okay, I live in NZ and everyone makes fun of our internet speeds, but I do have reasonable speed here, and a reasonable machine as well!
The problem is though, if you take the advice of Grammarly and make changes, it then has to reprocess your changes, and that likewise can take a while — and it can get boring waiting for it to finish.
The way I’ve found helpful is to extract a chapter at a time to work on, it improves its responsiveness dramatically.
Final verdict? To me, these items are really useful, but they also have their place. Consider turning off during the first draft and just “get writing”. Turn on again during your editing, especially as they allow you to look again at your own work reasonably fresh, and find things hidden to your sight.
But you have to work out how best to work with them. I still had a final draft with over 1000 of these open. You’ll find you won’t agree with every one.
And that leads to another problem, you might ask Grammarly to ignore a problem, and it will … for that session. When you reopen the document, every problem you’ve asked to ignore will come back.
For me that means reteaching the Moonbase lingo of CompPad, BioDomes, MedBay etc and my love for the phrase y’know.
Dennis had a similar experience!
It’s useful, but like any tool has it’s quirks!
