i'd rather sleep than stay awake

The Light of World Rising - April Gornik , 2024.

American , b. 1953 -

#accurate

grammarly, ready to tell me about the 700+ mistakes i made:

A: every single person makes grammar mistakes.

I have my writing read over by others because you know what you meant, so your brain automatically fills in the right thing.  Also, copyediting is its own trained skill which is separate from writing.  (Hence the profession!)  While writers should definitely have some of those skills, given the horrors that I see from professional writers I do not expect amateur writers to be low on mistakes.

So that’s my first point - everyone makes mistakes in their own writing.  Copyeditors make them, professional writers make them, amateur writers make them.

B: take Grammarly with an entire shaker of salt.

Your writing does have mistakes, I guarantee it, but I’d say for most people about half to two thirds of what Grammarly comments on is valid.  Grammarly is like if a 3rd grade teacher with a grudge against children who just goes down the page slashing everything with red, had a baby with an old-school robot of the type that breaks down with a “does not compute” if you ask it to calculate the last digit of pi.

B1: In most situations, your writing should not be 100% grammatically “correct”.  Stylistic writing requires stretching some grammar norms and breaking others, and almost all writing is stylistic.  Some is really obviously stylistic - dril writes Like That on purpose - and some is more subtly so, but if you aren’t doing technical writing or in a 3rd grade English class, you’re stylizing.  You should be stylizing.  Otherwise Grammarly could write your thing for you.

B2: Grammarly is sometimes just flat-out wrong.  Languages are complex, sentences are complex, and computers being able to parse human language at all is a VERY recent concept.  Grammarly can’t always figure out what that pronoun was meant to refer to, or where that clause actually ended.

Unsolicited commentary from a professional writer:

Learn to edit your own work.

Buy these:

The Elements of Editing is for writers, too.

Ask yourself: If I didn’t have a computer, could I write confidently?  Would I know whether my grammar is correct?

You need to know the rules.  You need to know how to recognize if something’s wrong and how to fix it on your own.

When I hear writers say Grammarly makes their writing better I have to say: For the entire history of humankind until we had PCs, every single writer learned how to edit her or his own work.  Every. Single. One.

Homer, Sun Tzu, Virgil, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Agatha Christie.

ALL of them self-edited their work.  And then editors, who also learned to edit without computers, helped them polish their work.

It’s not difficult.  Of course it takes time to learn.  Becoming very good at something always does.

Like all computer programs Grammarly is flawed.  If you don’t know the rules of grammar by heart then you won’t know when Grammarly is wrong.  And you could submit or post work that makes people shake their heads and say,  “Damn, this writer’s sloppy.”

I know editors who say they can tell when a writer has used a computer program like Grammarly and when the writer self-edits.  And the self-edited work is always better.

Of course you’ll make mistakes.  But you’ll make fewer, and when you see them you can fix them.  Correctly.

On the other hand, I find that about 2/3 of Grammarly’s opinions (like much of Strunk and White) are about style, not about grammar. If you want to use the style that Grammarly prefers, use its suggestions. (Sometimes, also, it’s simply wrong, and its suggestions change the meaning of the sentence to something not intended. Depending on the audience, it might be desirable to rephrase to avoid ambiguity.) But Grammarly is rendering an aesthetic judgement.

The huge bulk of what English speakers call “grammar” is actually style, or indeed peer pressure from dead people to make English pretend to be Latin, German, or both. English is in many ways a bastard child of Latin and German, but it is neither of its parents.

Barring substantial cognitive deficits, you are not speaking your native language “incorrectly.” Your goal in editing is primarily to make sure that your writing unambiguously conveys your intended meaning and contains the words you wanted it to, and secondarily to make sure that it’s easy to read for your intended audience. Things like spelling, grammar, and style are in service to these two goals.

Also–a lot of the standard academic or AP style is aimed at eliminating the writer’s individual voice, so that works by different authors are distinguishable primarily by their content. That is frequently the opposite of what you want (especially if you’re writing fiction). Unless you have been assigned to use a specific style guide, don’t be afraid to let your natural voice shine through.

Grammarly can be useful if you find you often omit words when writing quickly, and if you’re a non-native English speaker trying to avoid usage that seems awkward to a native. (I have a friend who is often confused about what preposition is expected in English, and Grammarly is a great help to her in professional settings.) Don’t rely on it to make you readable or eloquent.

Moonrise - Yauanyuan Liu , 2026

Chinese-Swedish , b. 1974 -

Part two will be releasing next Friday, February 20th, at 10am Eastern.

Welcome home.