Fending Off The Grammar Police

Spelling.

As a kid, I was thrilled whenever my teachers uttered the words, Spelling Bee! 

I'm a good speller, except when I type on my phone and my fat sausage fingers hit the wrong letters. Typos happen. The Twitterverse can attest to that. Thank goodness we're now able to edit tweets.

Grammar. 

I'm not good at grammar. I dangle participles, end sentences with prepositions, misplace modifiers, and my sentences have a tendency to run on. 

But now, the Grammar Police can leave me alone. I've found Grammarly.

I'm so excited about this service! I downloaded the free account and played around with it for a few weeks before deciding that I HAD to upgrade to the Premium service.

Let me tell you what Grammarly can do for you: 

Whenever you're online, composing an e-mail, updating your Facebook status, writing a blog post, or typing up a tweet, Grammarly's free service will check your writing for punctuation errors and misspelling. If they detect an error, they will notify you and give you options for correction. 

If you're like me and write your manuscripts in a program like Open Office, you can copy and paste your work on to a document and Grammarly will check your work and save it for you.

If you use Microsoft Office, the Premium service will work directly with the program! (I'm too cheap to purchase Office, though.)

Grammarly's Premium Service also checks for plagiarism, sentence structure, style mistakes, and grammar enhancement. 

I'm looking forward to uploading the draft of my second novel, THE HALCYON DREAM, to Grammarly. I can't wait to see the suggestions for improvement. It's like having a personal critique partner.

Check out Grammarly's Blog, follow on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. I highly recommend you download the free service. I'm convinced you'll WANT the Premium Service. 

What is your favorite writing service?

*****

Connect with me on Twitter--Facebook--LinkedIn--Google+--Tumblr

Plus, sign up for e-mail updates from this blog in the top right-hand corner of the page.

*****

A Reading Writer

I've always been good at spelling. When I was in grammar school, whenever my teacher uttered the words, "Spelling Bee," my classmates cringed but I clapped my hands with glee. I even came in second place in my school's Spelling Bee when I was in 6th grade.

Needless to say, bad spelling is one of my pet peeves.

Grammar, on the other hand, is one of my biggest weaknesses. I'm constantly re-learning what I apparently never absorbed in my younger years. Passive voice is my Achilles heel but I'm trying.

I realize it's so much easier to find errors in other people's work than finding it in my own. (which is why I rely so heavily on my BWFF and my critique group.) I've looked back on blog posts and manuscripts and feel utter embarrassment when I notice an error.

So, late at night, when I hunker down on my sofa to read, it kind of irks me whenever I catch errors in a published book. Don't get me wrong, I'm not perfect by any means. Nor do I have any published novels. Heck, I can't even convince an agent to read three chapters but I would have thought that somewhere along the chain of people between the author and the printer the mistakes would have been spotted.

Are any of you bothered by spelling and grammar errors? Or am I just being anal?