SuchNakedivity

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.

The United Nations Security Council isn’t generally the place to hear works of great oratory. Speeches delivered there are more likely to inspire a nap than global action. But on Monday night, Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the U.N., gave a barnburner about Russian threats against Ukraine that has rightly gone viral.

At the last meeting held on Ukraine in late January, Kenya and the other African nations on the council were more muted about Russia’s role in the crisis than the U.S. and European members would have liked. But during the council’s rare late-night emergency session Monday, Kimani was in no mood to downplay Russia’s aggression.

Kimani called out Russia for acting toward Ukraine in a way that’s all too familiar to countries born out of colonialism. Any security concerns in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk “cannot justify” Russia recognizing them as independent states, he said. He went on to compare the birth of his country to Ukraine’s founding and the “ending of empire” that their new nations represented.

Kimani’s sentiment was echoed by the ambassadors from Gabon and Ghana, the two other African countries currently serving on the Security Council. Given the usual comity between Moscow and the African Group at the U.N., this direct opposition from Kenya, Gabon and Ghana counts as a huge break against Russia.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union presented itself as a friend to anti-colonial movements across Africa. Moscow’s warm embrace of these former colonies represented the antithesis of the West and the capitalism it represented stripping the newly founded countries of their resources. Russian President Vladimir Putin has worked to build on that goodwill by offering monetary and military assistance to African nations with none of the human rights and anti-corruption conditions the United States and its allies demand.

But that jockeying for influence clashes with Putin’s rhetoric regarding Ukraine. He’s repeatedly called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20th century. That belief has undergirded his treatment of his country’s neighbors throughout his two decades in power. His revised version of history deems the Ukrainian people and state as a mistake created out of whole cloth — a mistake he intends to correct.

Kimani in his speech Monday night empathized with that position, before outright rejecting it as a good reason to start a war:

We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them?

However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression. We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural factors. We reject it again today.

It can be all too easy at times to frame empire and colonialism as a uniquely Western pursuit. That mindset has driven a large swath of the opposition on the American left to Washington’s attempts to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine. In truth, all five permanent members of the Security Council have subjugated others in pursuit of national glory and power. Kimani didn’t ignore that fact in his speech, calling out that “multilateralism lies on its deathbed,” having “been assaulted, as it has by other powerful states in the recent past.”