Many mornings, somebody will say to me, "Oh! You have a cold!" That's the first time that I realize that I do - either that, or my allergies are acting up. Until then, I haven't noticed that my nose is stuffed up, that I have been  sniffling and that I sound nasal. Once it is pointed out, it is so obvious. Pass me the tissues!

Writing is not much different: One of the most difficult tasks is to see your writing as others see it. And you definitely want this to occur before you send your book out to reviewers.

Writers whose works are published by traditional publishers do not have to sweat small grammar and punctuation errors, as the publishing houses is prepared to deal with that. We indie writers, however, have to ensure their writing is well-edited before it is published and sent out for reviews.

I developed software that teaches editing to ESL and remedial writing students, and given how many students of mine assumed they could just rely on word processing correction functions, I decided to do a casual study with the help of a statistician.  We went to each chapter of the accompanying student workbook and took sentences that had a cross-section of errors in them; we then looked to see how many times Microsoft Word identified the presence of an error.  We were quite surprised, and would like to share those results with you. 

I'll begin with the Verbs chapter, where we took 100 sentences with verb errors (this included subject-verb agreement, verb form, modals, etc.).  Of these, only 36 errors were identified and edited correctly by the word processing software!   The computer was not able to identify as incorrect any sentences in which the writer used the wrong verb tense for the context.

From the Adjectives and Adverbs chapter, of the first 40 errors with adjectives and adverbs that we subjected to the grammar editor (and these included adjective and adverb form, noun/adjective word order, etc.), only eight errors were identified and given correct alternatives.  One sentence was even given an incorrect alternative.

The Punctuation and the Sentence Structure chapters were even less encouraging!  Of the 62 punctuation sentences we chose (including “run-ons”, sentence fragments, sentences with faulty use of commas), the computer picked up five as certain errors and three as possible errors but offered no solutions.  Of the 47 sentences from the Sentence Structure chapter that we entered, none were correctly identified as having an error, and one sentence was identified as having an error but was given an incorrect solution!

The computer is letting most (anywhere from 60% – 100%, depending on the type of error) of your grammar, punctuation and sentence structure errors slip through undetected.  This also means that if you thought that you could rely on grammar editing software, you may be putting the success of your great indie book at risk.

I haven't checked out Grammarly, but I suspect that the numbers will be similar. Word processing correction can help but the word processing companies aren't going to tell you how often the software misses an error or signals something that is correct as incorrect, or how often the software provides an incorrect solution.

So much of proper grammar and punctuation depends on context and on making the most effective choices, which the computer simply cannot know. These facts leave me constantly in awe of the human brain and its capacity for language - the very language that we writers are putting down on paper.

What does this mean for us indie writers? 

We writers can hire editors (expensive!), or give our writing to others to edit - not just once but multiple times. Not every writer has a friend who is a writer or who has taught English and knows the fine points of grammar and editing and who is willing to go cover to cover. Nobody is going to find all the errors in one reading, or two, or even three.

I sent my book out to Hornbook and a few other editorial companies, only to later discover multiple errors that made my book look far from finished. Of course I only discovered this later, after another poet friend of mine read the book and pointed out the multiple errors.

We are so anxious to get our book out there, but a little attention now can spare us a lot of embarrassment, and lost opportunities, later.