Rereading text I’ve written can be cringe-worthy at times.
Every now and then, I’ll stumble upon a typo in something I’d written days or weeks or years ago and wonder why I didn’t see it sooner. I’ll fix it, and then spend the next several minutes kicking myself.
Like most people, I can spot errors in other people’s writing better than in my own. I wish I had time to set everything I write aside for a day or two before I send I post it on a blog or send it off to a potential employer, etc. But life doesn’t always work out that way.
With that in mind, I installed the Grammarly extension to my work and home computers several months ago. It helped, it really did, but I got tired of it alerting me to mistakes that weren’t there.
For example, take this sentence from an earlier post:
But so many of them with a printed book in hand seem to be a decade or two younger than me.According to Grammarly, "seem" should be "seems." The subject, "many," calls for the verb "seem," but the prepositional phrases between subject and verb seem to confuse Grammarly.
Perhaps I wouldn't have run into that as often if I had opted for the paid version. After a few months of telling the software to just ignore 50 percent of what it was finding, I deleted the extension.
Today, I found an error on a Google+ post I’d written a few days ago. It began with, “Does you ever …” Odds are, I made the error because I changed my mind about what I wanted to post and left a remnant of the original. That, it seems, is how I make most of the errors I find later. Other errors are omitted words.
But anyway, I added the Grammarly extension back to my home computer after finding that recent error. I want everything I write to look as professional as I can, especially as I hunt for a job as a writer.
Hopefully, the extension will keep those kinds of errors down to a minimum.
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