Half Year, Half Million

I decided to get Grammarly a while back to see if it would help with my writing.   I'd seen advertisements for it for a while.  The things Grammarly could do was well beyond the red squiggly underlining of misspelled words and/or the autocorrection into something entirely other than what you intended on writing.   So I signed up.

I didn't mention it to anyone for a while because I wanted to find out what sorts of transformative writing suggestions I was going to receive.   I wondered if it would turn my writing into Shakespearesque prose.  Or, if not that, would I finally get a definitive answer on if punctuation went inside our outside the quotation marks?

I know a lot more now about punctuation within sentences containing quotes.   And I've learned I wasn't using commas in all the places they'ree meant to be used.  There have been many other suggestions and corrections, and over time I'm getting a lot less feedback from Grammarly because I'm getting more things correct from a punctuation and grammar perspective.   Spelling, on the other hand, I still struggle with.

I get regular updates from Grammarly.   Sort of Rah Rah kind of emails of encouragement.  The emails contained statistics on what I'd done for the week.   This past week, for example, I was more productive than 95% of Grammarly users and wrote over seventeen thousand words.   The first few weeks of emails I got surprised me.   I had no idea I was writing that much.   It's not just here on the blog but emails and other places I write on the computer.  My most significant error area is commas.   In this post alone, I will likely have five commas corrected.

This week marks a half-year I've been using Grammarly.   In twenty-six weeks, I've written over a half-million words.  The emails said 513,810 words checked with Grammarly in six months.   That's a staggeringly large amount of words.   I feel like my fingers should be falling off from the wear on them.   I hated writing when I was in high school.   I didn't like writing in college any better.   I would have never suspected later in life I would grow to love it.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and husband are home from Disney.  This story is from when he was eating ice cream beside some other people while they were at a meal one day.   He explained to the stranger, "The whole point of ice cream is to make a mess. You make a mess so your parents get all mad about it."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  How is it I didn't notice we had an ideal climbing tree in my parent's front yard?  Of course, my daughter didn't know it was there because she's blind.   So I showed it to her.   This morning when I was coming to pick her up she was high up one of the four trunks of the large Japanese Maple, singing, "Let It Go" at the top of her lungs.   She told my mother she thought that's what the tree was named.