So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you’re not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I’d sent over. (<3)
The conversation can be surmised as, “This feels like something you would write, but it’s juuuust off enough I’m phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm.”
They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird… And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the “he would not fucking say that” meme?
Yeah. That’s what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.
Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the “suggestions” are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my “decline” every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don’t know.)
It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I’m over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:
ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, “Look how they massacred my boy.”
Fearing that it wasn’t just this one manuscript, I’ve spent the whole night going through everything I’ve worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I’ve not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It’s fine; it’s all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter’s wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.
This is a sentence from a Batman fic I’ve been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:
“It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas.”
This is what the AI changed it to:
“It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug.”
Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words “Batman Muppet threesome?”
Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit’s side piece too much???? What have I wrought?
Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.
(Sorry for the formatting on this; I’m on mobile.)
Why use grammar software? Because I’m a human who makes errors, and it can be helpful to have tools that I, as a writer and editor, can fall back on to catch very basic things that sometimes get missed.
I don’t rely on it because sometimes (quite often, as of late) it can be wrong, but it can be helpful when checking your work. I use them to scan quickly for excess commas or the occasional homonym before I fire my files off to another human to give them the final pass. Or I used to.
I’ve talked a lot about how the integration of AI is making a lot of grammar software dumber. This is because they are not being trained exclusively on grammar rules anymore but on user-suggested data.
It’s why, for a long time, when you tried to type “quirked” into Google Docs, GD would suggest “querched” instead because that is how a lot of people misspell the word “quirked.”
It is a flawed, lousy system that is getting exponentially worse. Especially now, so many of them have “Let AI rewrite your sentence for clarity and engagement” options.
It’s not really an issue for me because I have the knowledge and the support to turn things like this into an annoying issue that makes for an amusing post on social media.
But if I were a less experienced author and didn’t have an editor who knew my writing style well enough to know something was wrong, that manuscript could have gone to print as is, and that’s also why I suspect a lot of books right now read like carbon copy clones.
People aren’t being taught these skills, but they are being trained to appease the software, which is, in turn, trying to please an algorithm.
Pro-Writing-Aid has become very bad for this, offering a “grade” at the top of your file. And yeah, it looks just like getting your term paper back. The last time I accidentally turned on the grading system, it gave me 50% out of 100 for grammar and style, based on what the algorithm thinks Romance should read like.
When I asked it to find grammar and style errors, it couldn’t find any. It just didn’t like that I was different from what it was being trained on. (Girl help, I was assigned Not Like Other Girls by the Algorithm and got a bad grade in vampire smut.)
And again, were I not me, were I a younger or inexperienced author, I might take that to heart and start altering my style to get a Good Grade based on what the machine wants.
And that’s how I know we’re in the Bad Place because there are people doing that. They think the machine is smart because someone tacked the word “intelligence” onto it, and they are writing to appease the software instead of using it like a tool that you can and should ignore.
And that’s an issue.
For me, it was worth it to pay for those tools for a long time. Now it’s not, and I’ll be saving my money for other things.
The ableism is showing in a lot of the tags, and I need you to know I’m mentally holding some of you under water until the thrashing stops.
You are not intellectually superior for never using or paying for grammar software.
Regardless of the fact that some corporate jobs now require you to use programs like Grammarly (it was required to be on my company machine when I worked with certain clients), grammar software is an accessibility feature.
The fact that it’s being made intentionally shit by the companies that own them is a major issue and is not the fault of the people who do struggle to read and write and who would benefit from easily accessible, competent writing aids.
It’s the fault of the people pushing for the enshitification of everything we know and love to please an algorithm.
Get off your fucking high horse and think with some compassion instead of your ego. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone has the same experience or opportunities. That doesn’t make them stupid or worthy of your derision or scorn.
But the way you talk about them sure makes you worthy of mine.
