Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-33077235-20181121055529/@comment-35711173-20181201195711

Simon Slaughters wrote:

Some words they said to fix would make the wording akward and when i did fix them it only made my story gramicaly wore than before. I would have to go back and forth changing the same word I didn't want to play that game so I skipped over some words. I will deal with the run on sentences though.

Simon Slaughters,

When you have dueling error detection programs, start off with reading the story out loud to yourself. When you hit an awkward spot, fix it. Keep on doing this until there are no awkward spots.

Then go through the story again, sentence by sentence and phrase by phrase. Ask yourself with each word and action if it really is necessary. If it isn't, delete it. Be merciless in editing. You will have a leaner core.

When you do use the on line tools to check the resulting story, look at each flagged section to see if it is actually necessary. So often, it isn't. Problem solved, and the resulting story is much tighter.

As for which tool to use, I really do use them all. I know they do conflict. That's why I trust some more than others. If Grammarly free mode shows an error, I listen. More than 98% of the time, it is right. If Scribens says the sentence is too long, it always is too long.

Do you ever deliberately break the rules? Occasionally, but it is rare. I use deliberately breaking the rules of grammar OCCASIONALLY, like omitting "is/am/are" in a sentence that a Slavic person who speaks broken English might say. I used it one time in one story.