GrammarPhile Blog

If you haven’t heard the news that AI is positioned to kick all human writers to the curb after scoffing at their turtle-like slowness, then you may be living under a rock (and for that, we salute you).

Every Tom, Mick, and Sherry is writing an opinion piece, post, or pop song about the recently released ChatGPT, a chatbot with the tagline “Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue.” It claims to be able to “answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

It’s certainly not the first AI-writing generator, and it won’t be the last. So what’s different? Why the hoopla and apocalyptic predictions?

In a sentence: Because compared to many of its predecessors and peers, ChatGPT produces intelligible, lightning-fast writing, even based on loose prompts. Poor human writing (the kind content mills produce) doesn’t stand a chance.

That’s exactly why we’re not concerned about AI-writing or writers’ jobs (or ours). We deal in quality—the intuitive, agile, creative kind that machines will never be able to fully emulate.

When it comes down to it, we can’t even agree with the delivery promise of AI-writing: quick, adaptable, readable writing. It’s like giving a candle as a housewarming gift to an intimate old friend. It checks the box, but there’s no rapport, no true depth, and no personalization. (This analogy doesn’t even tackle the moral ambiguity of how AI-generated copy sources material without accreditation.)

If you search for “why is grammar important,” Google returns 854,000,000 results.

In other words, people aren’t convinced grammar matters. Sometimes that’s because grammar was taught to them in a tedious, soul-sucking way (endless sentence diagrams, anyone?). Sometimes they feel overwhelmed by all the “rules,” so they give up. Sometimes they just don’t see the point. Does good grammar really matter?

We think so. We’ve been grammar experts for more than 20 years, and our team’s collective experience totals in the hundreds of years. But we’ll try to lay aside our huge bias and give you a fair analysis.

We’ve compiled a list of the most helpful, entertaining, and dependable grammar books, according to our fantastic proofreading team at ProofreadNOW.com, Inc. These titles run the gamut for audiences: from newbies to advanced-degreed writers, from native speakers to ESL learners, from people who write for a living to people who speak for a living, from people who hate grammar to grammarians who would have tea with a single semicolon for company.

10 Cringeworthy Grammar Fails

I used to work for Amazon’s print and disc on demand company. The only relevance that has to today’s post is a nightmarish mistake I made while there.

There are names for the different versions of books as they progress through production. Galleys, for example, are near-finalized advanced copies sent to readers for the sake of reviews, (hopefully) great press, and such. A “proof” is a prepublication version printed as a single book for the sake of checking for errors. And so on. The different versions of prepublication/pre-live-sale books were always identified by an extra page with big bold letters so there could be no confusion.

The system to print different versions of said books was clunky and about 400 years old in software age. I write that to soften my stupidity and guilt.

I was asked to print 300 regular-old “can be sold” versions of a book for a publisher. I submitted the order to production. Approximately eight minutes later, I nearly swallowed my tongue and flipped backward out of my chair when I realized I’d selected “galley” copies. I grabbed my supervisor, and we ran out to the production floor. We explained the issue to the head of production, probably while waving our arms like jellyfish. He stared at me but was kind enough to keep his judgment to himself. The production crew stopped the print run, but they’d already printed off a sizeable number. A honking-big clump viewable from the parking lot: beautiful perfect books ready to be bought, except they had a glaring first page that read “NOT FOR SALE. GALLEY COPY.”

I wasn’t fired, if you were wondering.

Maybe the people who made the following mistakes felt just as teeny-weeny and sad as I did that day. Maybe they were lucky, and they still don’t know what folly they introduced to the world.

Either way, their mistakes (and mine) are your fodder for laughter. Enjoy!

Writer’s block is named for how similar it feels to trying to drive through a dump truckload of cinderblocks. On three hours of sleep. With no coffee. In a toy car. Without wheels. Flintstone style.

In other words: terrible and impossible and made into a video for everyone to laugh at.

Write for any amount of time and you’ll experience the dreaded signs.

Symptoms of Writer’s Block

• A strong desire to toss your computer out the window
• Repeated sighing and moaning
• Flopping around in your chair like a dying fish
• Distractedness
• The impulse to run into the forest and live on acorns
• A blank page
• A page filled with gibberish

Some writers say it’s just an issue of ego or fear or performance anxiety. Other writers claim writer’s block is all made up. Some say they struggle with it constantly. Others have found ways to plow through. These four pieces of advice are a compassionate combination of all those viewpoints, including my own.

The Cost of Professional B2B Proofreading

Using or Dropping the “Year Old” Hyphen

First of all, you’re not silly or dumb for being confused over this. The problem is that ages are used as different parts of speech and in different orders in a sentence.

 That makes all the difference as to whether you need a hyphen for clarity.

Here are the simple rules you need to know to hyphenate ages correctly:

Hyphenate an Age Being Used as a Noun

Nouns are words for people, places, things, or ideas. Ages are being used as nouns in the following:

• I think six-year-olds are the cutest because they haven’t lost their baby cheeks.
• An eighty-year-old is bound to be wiser than a twenty-year-old.
• A recipe for silliness: fifteen-year-olds and helium balloons.

Essentially, you’re using hyphens to group the related words together as a single noun.

How to correct grammar mistakes

“What do you do when you find a mistake in your writing?” I asked ProofreadNOW.com President Phil Jamieson.

“Well, the first thing I do is feel a great sense of shame,” he answered with his characteristic gravity.

I laughed.

He smiled. “It’s not a soul-crushing shame,” he added. “I’m not, you know, suicidal. But I hate making mistakes.”

I laughed more. Then sighed inwardly. I know that cringey feeling. I’ve yelled, “Oh, come on!” more than a few times after sending an email I proofed 17.43 times, only to notice “farter” instead of “father” in the text. Or some other silliness that my brain (and spell-check) refused to acknowledge.

Assuming you’re human, you understand. And if you’re reading this post because you just sent a mass email with the subject line “We apologize for the incontinence during renovations,” you have our compassion.

We can’t give you a time machine or a memory-altering device, but as people who specialize in correcting other people’s grammar (and our own), here are some action steps to take after you commit a grammatical faux pas.

Tips for Self-Editing and Proofreading

Maybe you can’t pay for professional proofreading. Maybe it would be wrong for you to pay for a proofreading service (say, for a college essay, which would give you an unfair advantage over your peers). Maybe you just want to better your self-proofing skills to gain more confidence as a writer.

Whatever the reason, you can proofread your own work. To prove it and to ensure you leave this page armed with everything you need to proofread your writing with ease, we interviewed ProofreadNOW.com President Phil Jamieson for his top self-proofing tips.

Use Spell-check But Don’t Trust It

Make the most of spell-check, but don’t assume for a skinny minute it’s a foolproof way to prevent errors. Take it from proofreaders who see thousands of documents a week: Spell-check gives you a false sense of security because it doesn’t have a brain capable of critical thinking.

For example: “Pubic” is a correctly spelled word. Spell-check doesn’t know you meant “public.” Spell-check doesn’t care that you meant “public.” Spell check will let you prance all the way to your presentation with C-suite until you click to the slide with that word in 72-point font on a 10-foot-wide screen and accidentally read it as written.

There’s no graceful recovery for that moment. Bless your heart. (And don’t even get us started on “prostrate” versus “prostate.”)

And as for checking grammar, well, just type “The boy the girls loves is here.” into a Word doc with the so-called grammar checker on and see what it thinks: NOTHING.

The internet is amazing and messy. It gives nearly everyone the chance to have a voice, to create, and to showcase their skills, especially writers. For work or for fun, whether you consider yourself a writer or not, if you’ve ever published or shared anything online that you’ve written, you’ve probably wondered whether you should copyright it. Which brings us to the downside: Worldwide access to virtually everything that’s published online is often paired with a shocking amount of plagiarism/virtual theft.

• We’ve seen it:
  • A LinkedIn post with three words changed from the original writer’s.
  • A homepage or logo or tagline that is almost identical to a competitor’s.
  • A family’s fake GoFundMe page with a story copied directly from a new site.

• We’ve committed it:
  • Reshared a story we didn’t realize was under copyright.
  • Used a source without citing it correctly.
  • Reposted a funny image that had a user license.
    
    
• We’ve been the victim:
  • Your work appears on somebody else’s site without attribution.
  • The greeting card you submitted for publishing is rejected, but you see it, word for word, by the same company, in a grocery store a couple of years later.
  • A client refuses to pay for a white paper you wrote but broadcasts it to their email list anyway.