Today I’m sharing a wonderful blog post Sue Vincent has written on the topic of writing and using editing apps. Do you find them helpful or do they get in your way? Read on to discover Sue’s take on this.

 

Under Pressure

 

Let’s be fair, we all need a bit of help now and then. Especially writers. Whether it’s a word we seem to have forgotten how to spell… every time we use it too… the correct placing of punctuation or a point of grammar. There are, apparently, no excuses now that we all write online. Apart from that odd typo that inevitably creeps it… there is always the odd one of those, especially when fingers are racing to keep up with thoughts.

So, given all the tools at our disposal, how come so many of us still end up with errors in our work?

I don’t mean the ones our eyes and brains fail to pick up as we edit, the ones that slip through the cracks in attention as we read what is supposed to be there, rather than what actually makes it to the page. I mean the ones we think we have corrected, because the grammar police have told us we must or the various spellcheckers and editing software we have installed on our devices highlight the errors, leaving us with a multicoloured patchwork on he screen.

I have grown increasingly frustrated with both the software and the grammar police over the years. Do we really have to conform?

 

 

There are rules for punctuation. There is good reason for that… punctuation is designed to allow us to read what has been written the way the writer intended. It makes us pause when a pause is required, lets us know when a character is speaking and when they cease to speak. It separates ideas, and can radically alter the sense of a sentence.

There is a reason to conform here… at least to the basic rules that make sense of your writing.

On the other hand, and unless you are writing for publication in an arena where slavishly following the rules as set out in the style guides really matters, does it matter, as long as the true sense of your words is conveyed to the reader?

Please continue reading at Sue’s blog and find out what does matter.

 

 

Source: Under pressure… | Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo