I generally don’t put a lot of stock in grammar or style checkers. In my experience, they’ve tended to be a bit too wedded to strict rules. These kinds of checkers don’t take into account personal writing quirks and attempts at trying to make your writing a bit more original and fresh. Two aspects of writing that I think set you apart, and make your writing more interesting and readable, if done properly.
That said, I know more than a couple of people who do rely on grammar and style checkers. A few of them are, in fact, professional writers. Lately, I’ve been recommending After the Deadline to some people.
Kurz Nachgedacht
If writers were like magicians, I’d probably be blackballed from whatever organization I’d belonged to for what I’m about to write.
After speaking at a conference last year, I was talking to one of the people who attended my session about creating minimalist documentation. Although he wasn’t a writer, he had to create documentation. During our chat, he mentioned that writing was difficult and that he always had a hard time getting what he wanted to say, in the way he wanted to say it, on paper.
I told him that writing is hard, even for people who do it professionally. But the secret of good writing isn’t simply being good with stringing words together. The secret is editing.
Kurz Nachgedacht
Failure. It’s not a word many of us like to hear. Failure isn’t a four-letter word, but it’s treated like one. It supposedly has a stench. If nothing else, failure has a number of negative connotations — both perceptually and psychologically.
Failure is more than a word or an idea, though. It’s a force that can mold you. A force that can drive you to strive to succeed. Or a force that can cause you to pull back from a trying something and not try it again.
And, as you can probably tell, failure has been on my mind for the last while. No particular reason for that, so don’t get worried. But a comment by fellow tech comm blogger Ivan Walsh on a post in this space got me thinking. Ivan wrote:
Kurz NachgedachtThe problem is that we don’t fail enough.
If you want to be a chess grandmaster, then you need to play (and get beat 100s) of times to build up the critical mass of knowledge that’s required.
It’s when you don’t learn from failure, then you’ve got a problem.
