A Review of Grammarly Software

The process of editing my next novel, Rag & Muffin, is—mercifully—nearing its completion. To facilitate this process, I decided to shell out for a subscription to Grammarly Premium. I have just finished running the novel through it.

You’ve likely heard of Grammarly; due to heavy advertising, it’s a product that’s made itself widely known, deservedly or not, as a top choice among automated grammar checkers. Its reputation for accuracy may be undeserved and appears to have been artificially boosted by fake review blogs. Its most basic functions are free and can be added to popular browsers as a plug-in. However, a premium account, which runs at an outrageous price ($29.95 per month or $139.95 per year), is necessary to unlock is allegedly more advanced features.

Since Rag & Muffin is precious to me, I decided to shell out the money for a single month, download the Microsoft Word plugin, and see what I think of it.

Continue reading “A Review of Grammarly Software”

The Last Stage of ‘Rag & Muffin’

Rag & Muffin has been accepted for publication. I just got it back from the proofreader, who wanted only minor alterations, mostly  typos consisting of extra spaces that sneaked in somehow.

Before sending it back, I’ve decided to try a Grammarly Premium account and run the book through it. So far, I’m moderately impressed, though not wowed, by its suggestions. I think it will result in one more additional layer of polish by the time I’m finished.

Probably not worth the subscription price, though. Not yet, anyway.

Anyhow, running through this is going to be time-consuming and monotonous, but once I’m finished, the book is done on my end. I’ll send it in with a draft for a back-cover blurb, and then it is out of my hands.

Also: Last word I got is that Dead to Rites is really, truly on the final stage on the publisher’s end. Stay tuned.

Comma, Part 2

I know I’m not posting nearly enough. I’m trying to get my act together over here, but it is my novel that needs to come first. I’m definitely in the I need to get this book out of the house right now oh please oh please phase of the writing process, which is also when my blog posts suffer—more than usual, I mean.

At least my taxes finally got done. Something goes weird with my taxes every year, and this year was no exception. I had the fun new experience of figuring out how to report royalties and expenses to the IRS, and then my taxes were rejected repeatedly when I tried to e-file. I never got an explanation for the rejection, just a message saying it was a system error and I should file again. I tried repeatedly to file over a few weeks, getting the same error each time.

Finally, I printed my forms off, and I’ll drop them in the mail next week. Maybe I really made a big mistake and they’ll get rejected yet again, but I figure if my mailed forms get rejected, the IRS will at least have to tell me the reason why so I can fix it.

Anyway, I’m pondering another issue of grammar, and I wanted to throw this one out to any grammar Nazis who might be with us in the peanut gallery. Here is a sentence from Dead to Rites, the soon-to-be-published next book in the Jake and the Dynamo sequence:

Remember how it was when you saw her for the first time, back when you were a bodybuilding Spanish billionaire and she was an impoverished governess with a physical disability!

My editor thinks there should be a comma after the word and, apparently supposing that she was an impoverished governess with a physical disability is an independent clause. Myself, I think the subordinating conjunction when, which begins the preceding clause, is implied but not repeated, so the sentence is correct (although informal and loose because it’s in dialogue) as written.

On the other hand, I wrote it, so maybe it just sounds better to me without the comma because my ear is used to it.

What do you think?

Comma ,

I’m spending the day on my manuscript for Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites. Looking over my manuscript, I see that my editor and I have a disagreement over that little thing called the comma.

Grammar rules are fun. Some are hard and fast. Some change over time. Some are arguable. And some can be bent, especially in fiction: Comma splices can move action along, and sentence fragments create a punchy emphasis. Of course, they must be bent carefully and judiciously or the result is merely bad prose.

Serious writers must take interest in the mechanics of writing. If anyone tells you to “just write” and not worry about grammatical rules, that person is not serious. We have also done a great disservice to students in our school system, who no longer receive more than cursory instruction in grammar. This fact came home to me when I enrolled in a philosophy program and learned how important grammar is to clear thought: When people think, they think in words, and if they cannot use words clearly, they cannot think clearly. One of my professors, who was also a Benedictine monk, was a great lover of grammar, and he made this point to me. He had a poster on the wall of his office containing a diagram of the longest sentence ever written in English. He learned to diagram sentences in early elementary school.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve heard over my years is to review comma rules on a regular basis. I’m doing so now since I’m moving into the final edits on a manuscript. Besides, I’m infatuated with commas and tend to overuse them. One of my final editing moves will be to use Microsoft Word’s search function to find a group of words before which I habitually place commas in order to decide in each case whether they actually belong there.

But here’s an interesting issue: My esteemed editor has removed my comma every time I’ve connected an independent clause to another clause with the same subject using the conjunction but. Technically, according to most grammarians, she’s correct.

However, I get my comma usage from The Elements of Style, the classic by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White,which presents comma rules in a novel way. The original is available online for free. Although this little book changes every time it’s published, the fourth edition, which I have on my shelf, has the following:

When the subject is the same for both clauses and is expressed only once, a comma is useful if the connective is but.

Most grammar books indicate that a comma should be omitted if a clause following an independent clause, connected by a conjunction, has the same subject except in cases of extreme contrast. I think the rationale for Strunk’s rule above is that but, by its very nature, introduces contrast and should therefore take the comma.

The first sentence marked by my editor is this:

She rolled her eyes, but fished in her purse and handed him a coin.

The second clause has the same subject (she) as the first. Ordinarily, it would require no comma. The question of “contrast” is a judgment call, but I would say there is contrast here since the context is that she (Chelsea) is reacting in disgust to something Jake has said, but is acquiescing to it anyway. (And notice I just did it again in that last sentence.)

GrammarBook muddles the issue further with this rule:

If the subject does not appear in front of the second verb, a comma is generally unnecessary … But sometimes a comma in this situation is necessary to avoid confusion.

Gee, thanks.

It’s one of those cases where grammar gets murky. Having been several times through Strunk and White and having tried to put into practice what I’ve found there, I habitually use the comma in a case such as this, and now it looks wrong to me if the comma is omitted.

Ah, well. Decisions, decisions. At least this has me reviewing comma rules again, which is a good habit and a good thing to do while getting into the book’s final edits.

Weaponizing [sic]

That’s sic, dude.

We’ve all seen “[sic],” and most of us have probably used it. This little word in brackets is, of course, a way to show that a quotation is presented as-is and that any typos, grammatical errors, or other problems are in the original, and are not the result of defective copying.

Out of curiosity, I looked the word up and discovered, to no surprise, that it’s Latin. It means “so” or “thus.”

In the age of the internet, sic occasionally gets used in a snarky fashion. I once read an entertaining essay in which a writer vehemently criticized another, quoted him frequently, and presented sic with every quotation as a passive-aggressive way of announcing that he considered the one he was quoting to be an idiot.

Urban Dictionary specifically points out this abuse of sic, quoting from Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, “Book reviewers in particular adore to use sic. It makes them feel terrific, because what it means is that they’ve spotted this apparent mistake, thank you, so there is no point in writing in.”

In informally published internet writing, such an abuse of sic can be amusing, but in more official sources, it is obnoxious. I was aghast when I typed “What does sic mean?” into Google and got the following from Google’s built-in dictionary thingy:

used in brackets after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original, as in a story must hold a child’s interest and “enrich his [ sic ] life.”.

Whoever wrote this definition went out of his way to correct [sic] something that is not an error. “A story must hold a child’s interest and enrich his life” is a grammatically correct sentence. In English, the masculine pronoun is used when the sex of the antecedent is unknown.

This is one small example of the magical thinking that afflicts our age, the belief that one can change reality by manipulating words. Some effeminate, lisping, limp-wristed, low-T weenie actually felt the need, even when engaged in an activity as necessary, unassuming, and (usually) wholesome as writing the dictionary, to signal his virtue by screwing with the language. The wiener who wrote this went out of his way to find an example for this definition that he could politically correct instead of actually correct, and he thereby rendered the definition false.

And that’s just sic and wrong.