UK Amazon Kindle Forum discussion

There was a Grammarly advert at the top of this page, for their plagiarism detector

So I put in a paragraph of early Tallis Steelyard
Yes, significant plagiarism, (because it'll have found the original on the Tallis Steelyard blog)

BUT
Grammar and punctuation was fine (well it's only one paragraph, there's a limit to how much I can screw up in one paragraph)
For spelling I got 'Mixed dialects of English' which probably just means I write English
For enhancement (whatever that means) it queried my word choice)
For sentence structure I got 'misplaced words or phrases'

The paragraph in question was
Somehow this feels wrong. One does not wrestle with one’s muse merely to hawk her around the streets like some common panderer. No, in a civilised world a patron approaches you. They are courteous, diffident even, and suggest gently that they would be delighted if you could find time to pen them a short ode.

I confess I'm not tempted by grammarly

Nor am I. It's too mechanical. It can't take context into account.

I tried Grammarly. The paid for version is far too expensive for what it is.

I do use ProWritingAid now, which is far better than Gammarly for a fraction of the price, but like all these tools its offerings best seen as suggestions to consider and not a panacea.

Grammarly is a stupid word, for a start. Which puts me off right away.

There's no substitute for the external scrutiny of a thinking human being.

Kath wrote: "There's no substitute for the external scrutiny of a thinking human being."

we must treasure our pedants, bohemian free-thinkers do not make good proof readers :-)

Kath wrote: "There's no substitute for the external scrutiny of a thinking human being."

Of course, but also in addition those of who weren't never taught how to write proper need all the help we can get.

They never learned 'em right!

Kath wrote: "They never learned 'em right!"

Or if they did I was too busy looking through the window at the world outside the classroom.

Jim wrote: "Kath wrote: "There's no substitute for the external scrutiny of a thinking human being."

we must treasure our pedants, bohemian free-thinkers do not make good proof readers :-)"

Couldn't agree more. I'm sure it would get very upset with some of my characters' 'mixed dialects'.

Drove me crazy.

I let AutoCrit, my preferred program, count for me. Adverbs. Double (or more) use of the same noun or sentence fragment. Unusual words.

But I don't engage any of the 'criticizing' aspects of a piece of software! That's what my brain and my beta reader is there for.

I just use it to do the drudgery.

unusual words are good :-)

Not if you use the same one more than once because that's the way brains work.

Alicia wrote: "... Adverbs..."

I would get rather pissed off very quickly if software, any software, had the temerity to highlight my carefully considered adverbial choices!

Adverbs have their place but their place isn't to support a weak verb choice. I consider them very carefully as it's easy to get lazy by over-using them. A few don't bother me. Several per page make me shudder.

I just had to google what an adverb was, I don't think I even notice them when I'm reading and I would try to fit them in more often because I thought it made sentences more descriptive and therefore better. I'm sure that school taught us that.

Kath wrote: "... very carefully ..."

I feel adverbs characterise British rather than American English. Very this, rather that, quite the other ... if you ask yourself why not this, that or the other, it may be difficult to discern a semantic difference, but sentences stripped of their adverbial bloomers can feel bald, naked, immodest even.

But immediate, she said angrily. Why not she stormed? Or something else which indicates her anger. I'm all for adjectives. Adverbs seem to be condoning laziness - when overdone, that is.

Oh! Not only do I get you now but I also agree!

She raged
She stormed
She seethed

Yep. It modifies the verb and it encourages the writer to choose the easiest verb and modify it. Sometimes they're good and strengthen the writing but too often they prop up weak writing.

Of course adverbs modify adjectives as well as verbs, but I feel it's all about context. Consider the sequence.
He said
She said
He said
She said angrily
He quickly apologised.

"Said" carries about as much information as "the" or "a" in dialogue, it can be left out entirely a lot of the time, and one of my pet peeves is its wholesale replacement with "muttered", "intoned", "articulated", "interjected" et al. They can distract from the direct speech.

"Entirely" in the above sentence can be left out without changing the meaning, but I think its presence shifts the emphasis.

In the case of 'She ran very quickly,' I feel it tells me more if 'She dashed' or 'She sprinted'. Style, maybe, and we go with what we like. I like the immediacy of the non-adverbial version. I'm feeling it rather than being told.
Edit to add, you could just say she ran out of the room, stripping the adverbs. I agree that's bald and stark. What I mean is if you feel you need adverbs, first look at your verb.

Kath said: What I mean is if you feel you need adverbs, first look at your verb

That's what I try to remember! Usually, if the flow is spilling onto the screen, it's only when I do my 50th edit that I catch unnecessary adverbs. And I often allow them to roam freely - oops!

Adverbs and adjectives for that matter can be the literary equivalent of the vocal 'Ummm' and 'Errrr', they trip off the fingers as I reach towards the end of the sentence. However, I have felt that when I have been through systematically pruning them, my prose loses its 'me-ness'. Shorn of my idiosyncracies it may converge on a generic notion of good style, but when I've compared the 'before' and 'after', I've often preferred the 'before', or at least wondered why I bothered.

There's an element of what each of us is aiming for - Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse, Mills and Boon or Enid Blyton, or not aiming at being anything but ourselves in print. I think, particularly in dialogue, it's essential to reflect the way people really speak and not, as I am tempted, to shove them into the grammatically correct straitjacket that I keep for unruly characters.

So (it seems to be the fashion to start sentences with this little word whenever possible or even impossible) when it comes to using a programme to pick out our errors, that programme does not take account of the reason for the choice of words by our drunken tramp who is the star of our book!

As has been mentioned, some of these programmes can be put to good use to look for repetition and so on. They serve some purpose but there's nothing like an educated brain to pick out what to keep and what to throw. Oh dear... repetition - but I like it.

Anna Faversham wrote: "As has been mentioned, some of these programmes can be put to good use to look for repetition and so on. They serve some purpose but there's nothing like an educated brain to pick out what to keep and what to throw."

I think that is the nub of it.

As I said I use ProWritingAid (despite its idiotic name and capitalisation), but only as a tool.

I tend to reject more of its *suggestions* that I accept, but it does quite often pick up things I've overlooked.

But after it has gone through the text, it still needs human readers to find all the other things it - and I - have missed.

If I took out all the adverbs in my books they would only be 3 pages long.

Darren wrote: "If I took out all the adverbs in my books they would only be 3 pages long."

perhaps sell them at the same price but provide a salt and shake bag of adverbs free with each new three page book?

DIY books then?

He could sell them through IKEA rather than Amazon

I'm seeing a niche market emerge before my very eyes.

I used Grammarly, but only the free version. I do tend to ignore some of the suggestions. Word has spell-checkers, and passive voice alerts etc. but mostly it's for my dodgy typing.

Work with whatever suits you:)

@32 "Word has... passive voice alerts".

Ooh... does it? I can't find how to do that, can anyone enlighten me, please.

Have a look at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-im.... Older versions of Word can do it as well.

Because I seem to get grammarly adverts every time I try to use youtube, I'm so hacked off with them I cannot imagine ever using their product!

It really doesn't work well for fiction.

Unless your needs are so basic that standard business English is helpful, their suggestions are not likely to be what you need.

And if you're that poorly educated, maybe a program isn't enough.

Plus it drove me crazy to use it.

Some people swear by it. I only swore at it. People are different.

David wrote: "Have a look at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-im.... Older versions of Word can do it as well."

Thank you! All those years at school and Microsoft comes along and does it all for us.

Well... sort of...

Anna Faversham wrote: "... Microsoft comes along and does it all for us.

Well... sort of... "

You didn't ask me what I thought of it! If I'm using Word I switch it off. I can tell when it's active from all the green underlining defacing my purple prose.

It reminds me of a story about a couple of people in a small plane that suffers instrument failure in bad weather. Suddenly a sky-scraper looms, and they circle round it. The pilot presses his face to the window and mouths "Where are we?" A face in the sky-scraper mouths back "You're in a plane!". Whereupon the pilot banks sharply right, dives, sees a runway emerging through the clouds and makes a perfect landing.

Safely on the tarmac, his passenger asks "How the hell did you manage that?"

"When I asked where I was, the face in the sky-scraper mouthed I was in a plane. Factually correct, and completely useless. So I knew it must be the building where Microsoft write their help systems, and the airfield is right there!"

First laugh of today, thank you!

So true, of course, I have to overrule all the time. I have this wonderful, big, Oxford Dictionary and dear ol' Microsoft really should have read it before setting up its UK English spellchecker.

Tragically, most English people have almost lost the use of the 'z' because of the spellchecker. For instance, 'realize' is not the American spelling, it was how we spelled it before Microsoft changed it to the alternative spelling (as shown in the Oxford) of 'realise'.

Must get off this hobby horse, it needs feeding :)