Spellcheck has been around for decades and I’ve been grumbling about people failing to use it for at least that long. To my limited knowledge, it’s been around since long before AI was being talked about anywhere but science fiction. These days, though, I think that AI is fairly heavily involved, but you still sometimes need a human to check for the tricky there, their, they’re type typos.
I sort of believe in Spellcheck. I feel that it’s important to treat a reader with respect, and that includes giving them a fighting chance of understanding what you’ve written. Spellcheck can help with that, but it’s far from perfect. For example, while I was in the throes of writing ten thousand words in twenty-four hours (would not recommend) my typing was sloppy and I kept typing ‘no’ instead of ‘on.’ This was not helpful to either the writing or my state of mind and it would not have been picked up by spellcheck. You may mean to write something erudite and elegant, but you could easily end up with something like, The inventor of autocorrect has died. The funnel will take place tomato if you’re not careful. It does, however, have its place, particularly when I was writing Digging up the Past and kept spelling archaeological wrong.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I’m trying to get the stories from the White Hart together in a complete edition, all two hundred and sixty thousand words of it. I opened the document and I swear that the word processer creaked. As some of it was published over ten years ago, I’ve gone over parts of this plenty of times and I don’t expect to find many issues, but there are chapters that haven’t been properly checked and some dates from before I learned how to punctuate speech correctly and some could really do with a long look in the cold light of day, so I clicked on the editor in Word, which I’m sure is AI, and sat back.
It took some time to think about the document, which was perfectly reasonable. There was a hint of a nervous breakdown as the programme went through some of the names, but it wasn’t too much of a problem. Then I clicked on the Grammar check.
I have issues with grammar. On the whole, I’d say that I was okayish. I’m not afraid to look things up and I’ve spent some time learning the rules but I’m not confident. I had an appalling education. I was unlucky to go to primary school when they were trying out new ways of teaching young kids, and the way it worked at my primary school, well, it didn’t work very well at all. I had a great time. There were loads of colouring books and fun toys and then, when I got home, I got to spend fun one-on-one time with my parents who carefully taught me the basics of reading, writing and numbers. Until I was around fourteen, my sources of education were my parents, who thought I was being taught at school, tv documentaries, and the Readers Digest. Grammar trailed far behind more colourful information, as I read about dinosaurs, plant identification, and history, and ruthlessly raided my grandfather’s collection of encyclopaedias from around 1912.
When I clicked on the Grammar check, I winced at over a thousand notifications, but I wasn’t surprised and I settled down to work through them. I accepted a lot of the suggestions at first. After all, I thought, this was an official programme and I had spent most of my life getting speech marks wrong. As I went on, however, I became less sure. I started arguing with the dratted programme about commas. This Grammar checker seemed to want to strew commas over my work with a generous hand and I wasn’t sure it was right. Some of the commas made no sense at all. I should have made notes on what I found, because some of what the computer wanted was hilarious. In the end, I reluctantly decided that I would have to revisit the grammar by meticulously checking through the document myself, including all of the commas.
Did you know that there’s a handy function on Word where you can click on ‘Find,’ put in a word or symbol and it will flag all instances. I opened up ‘Find,’ inserted comma in the search box and the computer whirred, grumbled and then told me that there were six thousand, six hundred and change of them in this darned document. I said some very rude words.
I like to think of this as a learning moment. I learned that I couldn’t trust the Grammar checker. It was forcing edits that would have either made no sense, changed the meaning of the sentence or made me look like an idiot. I know now that I need to go back over the document with a fine-toothed comb, with particular attention to commas. Most importantly, I’ve learned never to start such a damn fool project again.
I may or may not be digging out my copy of English Grammar for Dummies for a refresher.
It may be a while before I get Tales from the White Hart, the Complete Edition but it will happen. I’m not letting a Grammar programme beat me. And for now, I’ll keep trundling along and doing my best. If you spot any spelling or grammar mistakes, please let me know. I’d rather get things right. Though there is a risk of me arguing about commas.
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