I’m a sloppy writer. I simply transcribe the voice in my head, paying minimal attention to the words I’m typing. Being a lifelong touch typist, I can clip along, stopping only to correct all those red underlined misspellings. Moreover, I tend to read what I expect to read, so between these two characteristics, I can read my manuscript three to six times and still miss many double words, many missing little words, and never see the difference between where and were, or its and it’s. I need a copy editor. I need my wife. And my beta readers. And Google Docs and now, Grammarly.
I write in LibreOffice, which has a rudimentary grammar checking function – one that begins and ends at telling me when to use “a” and “an.” Several years ago, I discovered that Google Docs has a much better one, so I uploaded and ran all my books through Google Docs to clean them up a bit. For my newest novel, I decided to add the free version of Grammarly to my proofreading arsenal. So how does this system work? Can you rely on Google Docs or Grammarly, or both to do your proofreading for you?
Google Docs does a good job of finding double words, some wrong words, and most missing words. But not all, as I discovered when I uploaded the Google corrected copy to Grammarly. It is good for detecting the proper tense, but it doesn’t pay much attention to punctuation or spacing.
For Grammarly, I used the free web version to proofread my latest book after running it through Google Docs. I uploaded it chapter by chapter to be edited. Before Grammarly edits your work, you’re given several options to choose from to set the level and aim of Grammarly’s editing process. I chose “Expert” “Informal” and “Tell a story” as my guidelines. So how did Grammarly do?
First off, Grammarly loves compound words. Google Doc never mentioned them. Before, I never knew when to compound adjectives, so that I almost never did. But after Grammarly, I’m going to compound every damn pair, as it seems that anything and everything goes. I’m exaggerating, but it was a lesson in the use of compound words. Besides telling me to use all those hyphens, I’d say 75% of the suggested edits involved adding or subtracting commas. I made the lazy editorial decision just to go along with Grammarly on commas, it should know, right? Before, I put them in places that I knew they belonged and when the voice in my head paused, and where I think the auto-narrator of my books should pause as well. However, Grammarly not only put in more of them, but I think it eliminated commas that my wife thinks should’ve been there. Though to be fair, while I believe that I would’ve also put in the missing ones – they were places that I would’ve put them – I can’t swear that I did actually have them there before Grammarly removed them. Grammarly also found more missing words, and corrected the wrong words, i.e. where instead of were, et al that Google Doc missed. So it was a plus, overall.
Grammarly also offered several suggestions for phases that it thought were too wordy. I ignored those suggestions. Given free reign, I’ve a feeling that Grammarly would strip creative writers of their authorial voice. Thus, my readers will read a few extra words, like it or lump it. It also would occasionally tease its premium service, telling me of two hundred ways it could make my chapter less wordy and confusing, if I paid them. The whole experience, however, was easy. You just click a button to make the suggested changes you approve of, so that it didn’t take me more than two hours to go through a 105K novel. However, you can, and should be fussier than I was. Lesson learned.
I was confident that when I handed this Google Doc & Grammarly proofread ms over to my wife, it would be a clean copy. It wasn’t. There was that question of missing commas, which can easily be addressed in the future, but both services also didn’t catch a few missing word – those little “to”s and “the”s – and neither made any objections to the semicolons I used, which my wife, a stickler for semicolons, objected to.
Note; for example, I’m editing this in Google Docs, and it underlined in red “semi-colon” just now, and suggested “semicolon,” but it didn’t object to the “semi-colon” when it appeared in the line above. These are the inconsistencies that make the Google Doc less than perfect for proofreading.)
Anyway, the semicolon issue can be fixed by going back to always using em-dashes for everything, like I have in the past.
So, looking at the big picture, when I started writing, my wife would find half a dozen or more typos and errors on every page. I’ve gotten more mindful over the last decade, so that now, together with Doc and Grammarly, there can be two, three, four pages without a single error, and most of those errors involve commas this time around. Which is to say, I’ve seen a significant improvement in the process. And knowing all the errors I corrected in Google Docs and Grammarly, I have to give a lot of that credit to Docs and Grammarly.
So, is it worthwhile to upload your ms to Google Docs, or upload it to Grammarly, or use both, seeing that neither are perfect?
The first thing to remember is that both services are free. You can’t beat the price, especially if you’re considering hiring a proofreader or editor. You have no way of knowing if that professional editor is simply using Grammarly Pro to do their work for them. I don’t think human proofreaders guaranteed their work to be error free or your money back. Given this, it would seem to me to be time well spent doing your own proofreading with the help of these two free programs. And if you want more of an editor than a simple proofreader, it might be well worth spending a little money on a month of Grammarly premium to see all those hundreds of suggestions it has to improve your writing instead of big bucks on a professional editor. All in all, I think that the free version is good enough for most of us, especially if you’re better at proofreading than I. It could simply serve as a quick quality check, and perhaps a tutorial on the use of commas and compound words.
Bottom line; you get more than what you pay for. They’re not quite good enough to produce a perfectly clean copy all by themselves, but they certainly can save a lot of time in the proofreading process.
Writers Supporting Writers 