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Our near-inability to observe
our own creative product objectively is a daunting barrier to using words to our best advantage. Can you avoid the inconsistencies,
redundancies and jargon that are the bane of every writer's first draft? And even if you realize you have problems with,
say, affect and effect or semicolon usage, what about the pitfalls you might not be watching out for?
A word processing program's built-in tools are of limited value. |
Spell-check is an essential
step, but it won't help at all with notorious stumbling blocks like homonyms or capitalization. And if you've used
a grammar checker, you already know that the suggestions it provides are often ambiguous. It can even introduce errors into
your text where there were none.
Grammar-check doesn't recognize paragraphs, so it can't deal with cohesion, clarity or continuity.
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Grammar checkers verify the
accuracy of self-contained sentences, but can't detect whether the structure of your paragraphs—or, by extension,
the entire piece—is weak. By examining discrete phrases and sentences without understanding content or context, software
reveals its inherent and very significant limitations: The basic building block of good writing is the paragraph, and the key to continuity is the effective use of the kinds of transitional elements that software
can't offer you at all.
Software tools don't understand graphic elements or grasp the nuances of design, so they can't see the "big
picture" as a human does.
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Software won't notice if
words within a semantic group have been broken up over a line ending in a title or caption. It won't tell you if there
are so many lines of text in a paragraph that the reader reflexively skips over them. But when an unsightly or uninviting
layout causes the reader's eyes to glaze or stumble, the intelligibility of your message is compromised; if it's "easy
on the eyes," on the other hand, your message gets across without impediment.
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