Any software to check word usage and grammar that really work in editing documents, for those of us with really sucky grammar
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Editing software
You don't say what operating system you are using but I used gedit under linux, Wordpad under Windows would achieve the same as both offer spellcheck and stats including word count. You should not use grammar checkers if at all possible, most of the time the grammar software does not understand natural language and would, most likely, correct this very sentence. The best way to grammar check is to read the text, out loud if necesary, to yourself and see if it makes sense, are there pauses (commas) where they're needed and are there too many short sentences (consider joining them). The one other main issue is apostrophes.
Shiraz
Different programs for different purposes
I use Scrivener for writing stories with parts and for comic scripts. Google docs for collaborations. Word for preparing many things that need to be printed and various word clones when I get fed up with Word. I use BBEdit to write code. TextWrangler for straightening out the quirks of Word documents for posting on the web. TextEdit for very short quick things. Calibre and Sigil for special purposes related to ebooks. I have a complete Adobe publishing suite which I break out when I am preparing a book to actually send to a printer.
I do use a grammar checker but I ignore most of what it tells me, it's just handy for catching certain kinds of typos that aren't easy to see except that they make a sentence ungrammatical.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Erin, an easy fix
TextWrangler for straightening out the quirks of Word documents for posting on the web.
Go into Word's settings and turn off the "smart quotes" feature.
that cleans up the majority of the issues with putting word content online.
Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.
Not really
That is one major problem but if you want HTML formatting from your Word document, you have a lot more to do than turn off smart quotes.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I know ;)
I did say most problems. :p
no word processor does good html code.
Though for best results you could try emacs or vi, but programming / text processing apps aren't really word prodessors are they.
Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.
Text post-processing
I'm using LibreOffice now, or whatever they call it these days. I save my files as .html, which makes a good start.
Once I have the text down pat I open it in Leafpad - a lite version of gedit*, or so I'm told. In there I get the whole horrible HTML thing which I can clean up where required. Actually, LibreOffice these days is pretty good, I usually only have to sort out the teaser section.
Once I do that I never open it in LibreOffice again - it undoes all the fixes I made to the file and puts more of its own in.
Penny
* I run LXDE. I decided Gnome 3 was not for me so I looked for something reasonably familiar but lighter.
Shiraz has it exactly right...
and to quote, "The best way to grammar check is to read the text, out loud if necesary, to yourself and see if it makes sense, are there pauses (commas) where they're needed and are there too many short sentences (consider joining them)."
This really works. Read your work out loud. If you stumble reading it out loud, then there's probably an issue with that sentence or clause. Also keep in mind that no spellchecker can fix problems with homophones (words that are pronounced the same, but are spelled differently). To, Too and Two. They're and Their. It's and Its. Compliment and Complement. Peak, Peek and Pique. Bare and Bear. Affect and Effect. Those are by no means an exhaustive list, but ones I commonly see.
There are a ton of resources online to help the aspiring writer. With practice, you'll find you will need spellcheck and grammarcheck less and less.
~And so it goes...
When it comes to grammar and word usage
the people recommending you simply read your writing out loud are right, at least for a start to your work. However, depending on how you meter your speech (or if you simply do poorly at reading out loud) this could do little to help you, and as far as "word usage" is concerned is unlikely to help you identify homophones used incorrectly or even wrong words that you just happen to think are correct.
If you're looking for the best help you can get when it comes to those kinds of things, nothing can beat a real-life editor taking a look over your work. BC has a number of resident editors willing to offer their services for free, especially if all you are looking for is grammatical help rather than content editing. They'll catch all the they're/their/there and its/it's and other little mistakes, and sometimes even the more embarrassing ones too. For those who are bad with punctuation they can even help you straighten out the over- or under-use of commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, and all the other little fiddly bits that people tend to mess up.
In fact, there SHOULD be a list somewhere here in the Writer's Forum filled with offers to do just such editing....
Melanie E.
Content checker
I've used "Intelligent Edit" several times to work through long blocks of text to make sure things are correct. WhiteSmoke is another product I've used, but it has the distinct disadvantage of requiring an active internet connection to work.
The current version of Windows 2013 which I use for most of my writing has a good spell checker, a decent grammar checker (for US English, no experience with any of the other languages it support), and good HTML coding when saved that way.
And please, let's keep this peaceful. I don't want a jihad started because I mentioned the infidel Microsoft. I use it, you don't have to, let it stop there.
No yelling at me.
I actually just use what MS Word has, though it all has to be turned on and configured. Then if you use word, your final copy before you post it to BCTS will have lots of extra line spaces as Drupal does not like Word. No problem really. After a while the constant nagging by Word gets old and then you shut it off.
Other than that, practice, practice, practice. :)
Good luck
Gwen
MS-Word
Since I haven't posted any stories here, I'm not sure if BCTS will accept RTF format. Has anyone tried posting their story as RTF as that usually gets rid of the extra line feed when saving as text.
BC supports WYSIWYG and plaintext
with HTML-ish coding, the same way it is represented in the commenting box. If you paste over text from an .RTF document you will lose most of your formatting: italics, bolds, changes in typeface or font size, most of the time even tabs and indentions.
On the other side of that, once you know how to do some basic HTML BC's formatting tools are quite powerful, offering text colors through the hex code system, most of the major universal fonts, and full support for the entire run of extended ASCII characters. It ain't as simple as Word or OpenOffice, but it definitely gets the job done.
Melanie E.
RTF is what I use. Sort of.
If you've read any of my posts on writing software, then you know I'm a Scrivener girl. How I code my stories for posting is TextEdit. Scrivener's text is WYSIWYG (now there's a term from the past), so when I post it into another application it does so as RTF. So once pasted into a new TextEdit document, I just save that document in HTML format. I grab the source from Body to /Body and paste it into the post window. So far, my posts have looked okay.
~And so it goes...
Trust no editor implicitly
I use MSWord from the Microsoft Office Suite, Home and Student 2010. The grammar checker does a pretty good job of catching homophones. But I don't trust it implicitly, because it just doesn't get it right all the time.
Three examples from "Gramma's Gift" a piece I'm slowly, intermittently working on.
Grammar checker want to change, "You can’t go around with no underwear." to "You can’t go around with any underwear" ... "I mean how bad is it really?" to "I mean how bad it is really?" and “What?” she asked, looking all innocent." to “What?” she asked, looking all innocent?
As you can see, that changes the entire meaning of the sentence. And those are tame examples.
Trick I've heard of is simply looking at it another format. I use Calibre to convert it to an eBook, and then read it with the eBook viewer with the word doc in the background. As I find things that I had let slip by in word, I change to the word doc and make the correction.
Best of all would be to find someone whom you trust to read it for you and offer corrections, still don't trust your editor implicitly. You after all are the author and must bear the ultimate responsibility for the content of your work.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
One of the problems is that
One of the problems is that people seldom talk in grammatically correct sentences. So what sounds natural is often flagged as wrong, while sentences with correct grammar sound stilted.
Example at hand: correct would be "You can't go around without (any) underwear."
yWriter, FreePlane and OpenOffice
Having completed the first part of what will be a three part trilogy, I found that, at over a 100,000 words, my first story, (Luna Drafted,) was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. As a result I did quite a bit if research on this subject. Among other things, I talked to a friend who is a professional SF author with a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, he told me that, when he first started writing, he used OpenOffice.
If you set up a format for chapter headers and a non printing format for scene headers, you can use the navigator to find your way about a novel. In addition, you can use the Bookmarks and Comments to navigate and edit fine grain detail, notes and back-plot.
See this Blog post, [not my friend's,] for a detailed explanation:
http://blog.rlcopple.com/?p=54
My friend went on to tell me that he now uses a very expensive 'authoring software' to quickly draft a novel which he then imports into OpenOffice for final polishing and editing. Checking around on the internet, I found two pieces of free software that seem to be roughly equivalent.
yWriter
http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html
I was so impressed with this authoring tool, I have just spent a very boring two weeks importing Luna drafted along with all my notes. (I could have done this quicker, but it was extremely boring.)
The software uses 'The Scene' as the basic building block of a novel and has a number of keyword categories, (eg character, location and item,) which automatically link from the scene to my extensive notes and back-plot.
Other features include:
Organise your novel using a project.
- Add chapters to the project.
- Add scenes, characters, items and locations.
- Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total.
- Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress)
- Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals.
- Allows multiple scenes within chapters
- Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene.
- Multiple characters per scene.
- Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work.
- Re-order scenes within chapters.
- Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations.
- Automatic chapter renumbering.
- ... And many more
Furthermore, if you understand regular expressions, (a skill well worth mastering,) OpenOffice has a powerful search and replace function that lets you combine Reg-Ex with Formatting and Styles. As a result, an imported draft with meaningful scene headers, can be quickly converted to the above outlined Navigator format where the scene headers become non-printing.
See here for a brief introduction to the idea of combining Reg-Ex with styles:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14...
and here for a useful table of regular expression classes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Character_cl...
Mind-Mapping
I initially tried FeeMind, but found it far too annoying, so, after some more research, I found a fork called FreePlane:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeplane/
http://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
One of the big, (though not the only,) advantages of FreePlane is: It allows the use of free floating nodes. Anyone who has previously struggled to arrange FreeMind's nodes in a coherent manner will immediately appreciate the significance of this.
Plot—Luna-2--freemind-blurred.jpg
Above is the basic Mind-Map of the plot outline for my second installment of the Luna trilogy. At a glance, you can see how all the different strands fit together. While not immediately apparent in the static export, each node has extensive notes along with links to photos and web-pages which are revealed on mouse-over.
The Mind-Map can also be exported as either: Text, a variety of HTML formats or even as .odt documentation. This means, once completed, the plot can be easily imported directly into yWriter to flesh out as a draft novel.
I hope this helps other people asking this question
Irvine
Edit
Whoops, I just realised I missed the fact that the question was about grammar checkers, I thought it was about authoring software. (Blush)
Still, the process of going through a succession of edits is the best way of catching stupid and annoying mistakes, and I think these free tools are well worth bringing to the attention of the BC community.
Irvine