I was minding my own business, writing dialog, when suddenly my MS Word turned on me.  Up popped another window inside my Word document with Grammarly feedback. It took my breath away.

After writing for 45+ years, I find out, today, I have been using commas wrong.  Seriously?  I put them in the wrong place. Where I believe they need to go, they do not. Where I do not need them, Grammarly wants them to be.

I am not mad at the Grammarly software.  I paid for the Premier version to help me do the final edit of my novel. It sure is helping me improve my work.

I am shocked and ashamed by how much help I am needing.

The above numbers encircled in red are the number of mistakes found in my draft novel.  This means 1,860 items to take care of added to the embellishments and re-writes I knew about.  Holy Moly.

This disturbing revelation has certainly flattened my ego.  I know that I can’t spell and I’m the queen of passive voice.  I thought my punctuation was correct.  I also believed I knew how to match verbs with my nouns. I never heard of some of the grammatical terms the software claims I am in violation of.  Terms like “unclear antecedent”, and “Tautological phrase” were the reasons I got dinged.  The great thing about Grammarly is they at least will inform you of what the term means and give you examples to correct it.  No condescending attitude of an English teacher either!

BTW, after 30 minutes I whittled the error count to 1769 issues.   It’s a start.

If you like your writing examined under a microscope, check out the Grammarly website.

♥  TTFN  ♥