Lots and Lots of Tools and Bad Habits

I was finishing up a new manuscript for my eStore when I noticed something about my habits and tools that might be worth sharing.

Like most writers, I have a few bad habits, but I have discovered I also have tools that can be used to counteract those bad habits.

Grammar Checker

My word processor (Pages, for the Mac) has a built-in grammar checker. I've tried grammar checkers in the past and found them less than useless, but I had high hopes for this one, since Mac products are all terrific (right?). I found about one out of 8 suggestions from this one to be useful, especially for detecting a few cliches that I tend to overuse. For instance, I use lots of "lots of" or "a lot of," and the grammar checker caught a lot of them (actually, all of them).

And some of the catches were useful, but not when I had a lot of dialogue involving a character of mine who used a lot of "lots of." I think it might be an improvement for a grammar checker to use a different set of rules for text within quotes, because most people don't speak the way you write a formal narrative.

Other catches were quite annoying. One chapter described a poker game, and every King and Queen was caught with the suggestion that these were sexist words. Another annoyance: most of my characters are nerds, and the novel is science fiction, but every time I used a word like "system" or "interface," the checker said they were technical jargon. Yes, they were, because that's what I was writing, technical jargon.

Overall, the grammar checker was worth a pass over the almost-finished manuscript. (I would never turn it on while drafting a piece. The interruptions would be devastating.) What I'd really like, though, is a checker I could customize. (Perhaps that's possible with the Pages checker, but I haven't figured it out yet.) When I have characters who go to South America and disguise themselves as witches, I don't want to be told that "witch" is sexist language. Besides, a male witch is called a "witch" by other witches.

Spell Checker

Okay, enough on grammar checkers. Perhaps some reader will tell us where I can find a customizable one.

I also have a prejudice about spell checkers, but over the years, I have found a number of ways they can be useful. I do not, again, use one while I'm drafting. Much too disruptive.

Nor do I believe that my spell checker will find all spelling errors in a ms. That's a mistake that causes trouble for many writers.

I do use my checker to catch misspellings of names and places in my novels—with each novel having it's own dictionary of special terms. When you're writing science fiction, with bizarre names, that's a big help.

I used to employ my spell checker to auto-correct some common typos, like "hte" into "the." After a short time, though (perhaps 100,000 words), the spell checker taught me not to make these typos, so I no longer use it that way. The spell checker also taught me to stop misspelling the few words I typed wrong, not because of a typing error, but because I didn't know how to spell them. I now know, for example, that "accommodate" has two c's and two m's.

Nowadays, though, as my fingers grow less functional, I find the checker quite useful at picking up less common typos. For a more accurate typist than I, this function might have little value.

Some writers use the spell checker to fill out abbreviations, thus shortening their typing of long words. I've tried this, but perhaps because I'm a fast typist, it slows me down. It takes me longer to remember the abbreviation than to type the word straight out.

Find/Replace

The tool I use most frequently is the simple and universal find/replace built into virtually every text processor. Here are some examples:

- When I studied typing in high school (on a manual typewriter!), I was taught to use two spaces between sentences. Some time in the sixty-plus years since then, the standard for manuscripts has changed. Now it's one space. Little by little, I've unlearned the old rule, but I still revert a few times per novel (Seven instances in the most recent 512 pages). So, when the ms. is finished, I search for double-space and replace it with single-space. One simple operation and I can forget about the problem.

- Searching for "is" and "was" helped me break the passive voice habit, but I still need to check my drafts. For instance, a search on "was" turned up a sentence starting, "He was mildly dissatisfied with the name ..." When the search stopped on the "was," I looked and realized the sentence would be stronger if it started, "He disliked the name ..." Shorter, strong, and closer to what I wanted to express. "Is" and "Was" have their uses, but often signal places that may be strengthened.

- Like most writers, I often fall into weak language where strong language could make a finer reading experience. Take the example of verbs using "get" with another word or two. "He tried to get the shackles off" could be replaced by "He tried to remove the shackles." Or, "He struggled to get his jeans nice and soft" could be strengthened as "He struggled to soften his jeans fashionably." In a recent ms., I used "get" 35 times, and "got" 7 additional times. After a bit of solid substitution, I got rid of all but three. (Actually, I eliminated all but three.) You probably fall into your own weak language. Another common source is "go," as in "go back" for "return," or "go higher" for "climb." You can use your search/replace tool to spot them for you.

- I also search for habitual patterns that aren't wrong, but overused. I mentioned "lots" above, but I didn't confess that my character wasn't the only person with this speech habit. My search/replace tool found lots and lots of "lots" that were mine, not my character's. If you're using your spell checker continuously as you type, you can achieve the same effect in real time by eliminating the word "lots" from the dictionary. Then, every time you type "lots," you'll get a "spelling error," which you can repair on the spot. I prefer to repair them all at the same time, in the entire ms., so I'm in the mood for that sort of correction.

Other Tools

The tools mentioned above do not constitute my entire toolkit, but I'll save some of the others for another post. These include my thesaurus and dictionary, which I use in conventional and idiosyncratic ways; readability measures, like the Fog Index and Cloudiness Count; various statistical analyses, such as a histogram showing overuse of certain words or phrases; and structural analysis tools, such as outliners and mind maps.

Before I write that next post, I'd love to hear from readers with other tools in their repertoire, so we can all share.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to go nuts going to my eStore lots and lots of times.