Editing Apps- yes or no?

Editing is a pain in the butt. When using an online editor, we have to have some grasp of grammar because a program is only as good as the programmer. Human error gets us more times than not.

The pros and cons:

Commas are the bane of my existence. I hate them because I never seem to put them in the right place. I’ll run something through Grammarly just to see, and it wants one before every and, not before the word but, and will often want to remove a comma before a name when it’s needed.

What does it catch? Well, if I’m editing, I have a tendency to scrutinize over a paragraph and when I begin to type, I don’t necessarily delete all the words I’m replacing. Sometimes, I’ll type ‘in’ and the word is already there. It catches double punctuation, and a few misspelled words. If I’ve changed the name of a character and done a ‘blanket’ format in my writing program- it will change every instance of the letters in the name- even if those letters in that order belong to another word. An editing app will catch that, too. Then you can laugh at yourself before showing it to someone else.

It will try to rewrite sentences without knowing the meaning of the sentence. A human works much better for that in all honesty. Even then, something is missed.

The writer has to know certain things all ready. The writer has to check every suggestion- which is not a bad thing. you have to do that with a human editor, too.

So, is using an online editor a bad thing? Not necessarily, no. At the end of the day, the writer has to make sure each suggestion is viable. If it’s not, discard it. If you don’t know, look it up. I learn something new every day.

(No, I did not use an editing app on this post)