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The First Step to Improving Your Writing

You may be wondering why we're offering writing tips to bookkeepers—your job is numbers, not letters, right? That may be true, but with the rise of electronic communication, writing in a business context—regardless of your vocationâ€

Do not put all your faith in the Grammar Checker Gods. 

Let’s try an experiment. Open up a new Word document. Copy and paste the following sentence into the document and tell me how many green squiggly lines you see:

Tomorrow I went to the beach and they’re I found two Shells in the seashore.

Ok, so I can’t really hear you, but I’m going to assume your answer was ‘none’ (or near to it). That’s because grammar checkers have very limited functionality. For example, they have trouble picking up errors with:

  • homonyms—words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings (they’rethere I found)
  • prepositions—words such as inonby and from (in on the seashore)
  • words and phrases that show tense, that is, whether an event happened in the past, present or future (Tomorrow went)
  • capitalisation—Ok, so technically that’s a spelling function, but just roll with it. (Sshells)

The above example highlights just a few things grammar checkers have trouble with. And unfortunately, not only can checkers miss errors, they can also introduce them.

The good news is that you’re now free of the Grammar Checker Gods’ tyranny—the power of prose is yours! And with your new power you must scrutinise your checker’s suggestions, accept what you agree with, and reject what you don’t.

So the next time your grammar checker scoffs ‘Fragment (consider revising)’, consider telling it to push off. Then consult your dictionary, your brain, or any other reliable source and be your own Grammar God.

 

Article written by Australian Bookkeepers Network (ABN)

Category
ABN
Published
19 Nov 2013
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