BJ’s This or That | Writer Probs | Autocorrect

Should You Get Grammarly? Creativity v. Free Editing

No Grammarly, I Do Not Mean “Box Wagon”

I’m just trying to be me over here. Wordplaying, bountiful, fantasmic me and all I see are red lines. I blame Grammarly. Most of us have it, all of us need it. It saves me from self-editing into oblivion, but it’s not all roses. Grammarly is seriously harshing my word use.

There are many hacks to writing well on Medium and I don’t know most of them. I do know one, though.

Get Grammarly. You need it. Especially if you think you don’t. (It’s free.)

I came across this little tidbit early on and I’d never turn back. Not now or in a million years would I go back to reading and re-reading and re-re-reading only to find that I missed an “at” or an “of” where one should have been.

I’m pretty well alright at editing as I type the words that fall onto my pages, but before Grammarly, I’d know I missed something. Like the worst kind of writer’s FOMO I read my articles over and over for mistakes that I’d find weeks later.

My errors weren’t heinous. They were small peas: missteps and misspellings. As the perfectionist that I am, these missteps drew me to address weeks-old articles to find the mistakes I knew I had missed.

When I got Grammarly, this all changed.

I can read, write, and spell. My grammar is better than most. In the beginning, I didn’t think Grammarly made sense because why would I have an app do something I can obviously do myself?

I got Grammarly because other great writers had it and swore by it. I love Grammarly because I worry less about missing errors, but I needed Grammarly for one reason. Why do I need an app to do something I can do myself?

Because scanning.

It’s difficult to write something and immediately edit it because as I read my fresh story, I read what I meant to say and not what is actually written on the page.

When I edit, I scan the words quickly, passing by small words for large and not noticing that I misspelled an easy word because my “r” key stuck forr just a second too long.

Grammarly catches those errors gladly. And I love that I don’t have to worry about them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have Grammarly regrets.

Grammarly doesn’t like my style. It hates that I like to create words that don’t exist. It is the worst kind of judging judger about my bouncy, sing-song, word-making efforts.

I reintroduced the Oxford comma for you, Grammarly.

I grew up using it but quit when I came to Texas. Evidently, the Oxford comma outed me as not being Texan. I was looking for my best life; I couldn’t have that. I wanted to fit in at my big-time-oil-and-gas office seated high in the Dallas skyline, so I kicked my Oxford commas to the curb.

When I started using Grammarly, it highlighted my lack of Oxford commas. This life change and time of relearning has been tough, again. But that’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll reincorporate extra commas to keep the red lines at bay.

But I draw a red line at Grammarly’s pointing out my creativity as error.

I was writing an article yesterday where I described a small, rectangular box that held a pharmaceutical ointment and typed the word “boxagon” to save explanation. When I hear “boxagon” I get an image that’s similar to the glossy, plastic-over-cardstock box that held my health-inducing items.

But Grammarly had to red line it. I hovered over my red-lined yet apt descriptor and read:

We don’t know this word. “Did you mean ‘box wagon’?”

Box wagon? And I thought I was the creative one.

I’m Brett Jenae Tomlin, The Anxious Enthusiast.

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