Writing Demystified
Find your unique voice––clear, simple tools for everyone.
No Spell Check!
Ponder This
“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”
—Ray Bradbury, Writer's Digest
“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
“Writers live twice.”
I told a small fib in my section on the First Draft. I said, “I ALWAYS turn off spell check and grammar check when I’m writing my first draft, because I find those little red and green squiggly lines horribly distracting.” The truth is I don’t ALWAYS turn it off, but I do ALWAYS find it horribly distracting. I have trained myself to either ignore it until I’m finished, or turn it off once the first colored squiggly line appears.
Why? Because if I’m being watched (and it does feel like I’m being watched) while I write, I’m much less likely to try things I’m not sure of, and much more likely to allow the word processing software to dictate the style of my language. I hold Microsoft personally responsible for why most of my students think “herself,” “himself,” “themselves,” “ourselves,” “yourself” and “itself” are written as two words instead of one. No matter where these appear in any sentence, grammar check thinks they’re wrong. They’re not! Worse—grammar check thinks it’s great to simply write them as two words instead of one…thus a tremendous confusion occurs.
This is just one of many examples of where grammar checkers fail us completely. Most especially when writing creatively, grammar check curbs any unusual expression and forces us into a box. It is unreliable and automated—therefore, it is NOT qualified to judge the quality of any writing.
Spell check is also problematic because if you’ve spelled something in way spell check doesn’t recognize, it might offer up something that doesn’t mean at all what you intended; or you may get frustrated by its obtuse offerings and decided to delete the original and use a synonym. Please don’t do this! Use the dictionary (I have four humungous dictionaries at my house), try dictionary.com, or Google it, but don’t allow Microsoft (or any other company’s software) to bully you into changing your word.
All writing is a creative process, and computers (as of yet) are not capable of creative thinking. Remember, grammar check and spell check are limited by the programmers who created them, and rely on binary code. These “tools” in your software program can’t actually read! They are powered by a series of probabilities and “if…thens,” making guesses based on no real information, and without the context of your content.
Turning spell and grammar check off isn’t against the law. Nobody is going to come to your house and take you to the rubber room because you’ve rejected your software’s efforts to tell you how to write. You don’t want to write like an automaton; you want to write like you.
Just because you turn off the “correct as you type” function, by the way, does not mean it’s not available to you. It simply means you have to hit a button to check your document when you’re finished. By the way, checking it after you type has an extra side benefit. As you check, you’ll have to read sections over again and that will jump-start you into the editing process. In addition, you must read your own work word for word anyway, as there will be errors that spell check won’t find, like writing “he” instead of “the” (I have found four errors in this piece that spell and grammar check did not).
When you’ve finished writing everything you have to say about your topic, you can use spell check to clean up the glaring misspellings, but be very cautious about the grammar check. Not every sentence fragment is bad writing. Not every unusual construction is bad. Not every use of passive voice is bad. In fact, in writing there is no “bad,” only choices which have more or less power for the reader. Just because there’s a green squiggly line under something doesn’t mean you should change it. If you’ve done it on purpose, and you have a good reason, then happily give grammar check the finger and continue on your merry way.
A final caution: spell and grammar check aren’t the ultimate fix for proofreading. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, replaces you reading your piece out loud (to yourself or others) with a pen in your hand. Spell check doesn’t know when you mean “and” instead of “an,” and grammar check doesn’t know how to use “herself.”
Be a rebel. Climb the mountain without oxygen. Live on the edge. Risk, and live as if you are not being judged.
Here are two sites that discuss the issue with spell and grammar checkers, and you can find many, many more on your own: