I use LanguageTool and while it helps correct my grammar and spelling, which is great in my day-to-day work, I know that it also doesn’t help me be proactive about correcting those mistakes myself. I have a lot of bad muscle memory and generally poor spelling and grammar, and often I rely on LanguageTool to correct what, I feel, are mistakes that are, elementary, at best.
The hard part is, I feel like there are not many resources or tools out there to help an adult like myself improve these aspects of my writing. This is ignorance on my part I’m sure, but also when searching in the past, the results are always geared towards children.
I would like to feel less reliant on LanguageTool and tools like it, and feel more confident about my spelling and writing generally. I’m often second guessing myself, even when I spell something correctly.
Just to illustrate the issue, behind this spoiler is an uncorrected version of this message. Which was hard for me to not use LanguageTool to correct during the writing process.
I use LanguageTool and while it helps correct my gramar and spelling which is great in my day to day work, I know that it also doesn’t help me be proactive about correcting those mistakes my self. I have a lot of bad mussle memory and generally poor spelling and gramar, and often I’m relying on LanguageTool to correct what I feel are mistakes that are, elementery, at best.
The hard part is, I feel like there are not a lot of resources or tools out there to help an adult like my self improve these aspects of my writting. This is ignorance on my part I’m sure, but also when searching in the past, the results are always geared towards children.
I would like to feel less relient on LanguageTool and tools like it, and feel more confident about my spelling and writing generally. I’m often second gussing myself even when I spell something correctly.
Just to illistrate the issue, behind this spoiler is an uncorrected version of this message. Which was hard for me to not use LanguageTool to correct during the writing process.
I’ve always been relatively good at English spelling/grammar throughout my life compared to other native speakers, so take my word with a grain of salt because I took to it very naturally.
There’s two parts to learning and grinding written language competence, off the top of my head: internalizing the rules and reading a lot.
While English is commonly derided for not being consistent, there are still | general | principles that can be applied to most non-loanwords in the language. Internalize them in the ways that can be most easily referenced as a fallback. For example: a common mnemonic for English double-vowel order I used when I was younger is “I before E except after C.” Pick a strategy that works for you—one that you can gradually habitualize.
The second part of it is you have to read. A lot. And not just posts, books. Articles. Written works that have been most-likely proofread by others. By reading consistently, you internalize words, general principles, and common turns of phrase.
Hope this helps. I’m not an expert, I caught on at a young age so I’m sort of correlating the fact that I was relatively quick and early to start reading, and I think it really helped me stand out with my comparative grammatical competence when I was a kid.
Also, another thing that helps is to proofread your own work with minimal/zero programmatic assistance. Have a spelling/grammar rules web page open on the side and make manual corrections to things that you write. Correcting your own work is an intimate and cerebral process when done by hand, and is really helpful in drilling in the principles that you are trying to internalize.
Thanks, this is good advice. I’m a native speaker, but, I struggled all through grade school with undiagnosed ADHD. I never fully completed any form of college education. ADHD made it difficult to read (and still does to some extent), and as a result, I stopped all serious forms of reading for a long time. It’s only this year that I’ve started taking reading more seriously.
I’m realizing now that there is some information provided via LanguageTool when it highlights a correction that explains the rules behind its suggested change. To give you an idea, I often misuse then and than, but they have information about that on their site: https://languagetool.org/insights/post/word-choice-than-vs-then/ which appears as a small menu icon in the interface.
I’m also starting to make a more serious effort to actually write, not just comments on the internet, but actual writing (mostly submitted letters of comment to our local municipality’s council.). Which should give me more opportunities to do my own self editing.
Thanks for your input!
Also have ADHD, though it does help that I was diagnosed and medicated after Kindergarten. Solidarity on that front
For typing, I’ll often type out the misspelled work multiple times the correct way. The repetition helps establish my finger muscle memory.
This is good advice. The computer nerd in me really wants a way to log these spelling errors into a sheet or something that I can then use as part of a typing game/program to force myself to internalize the spelling. I’m starting to suspect the reason Grammarly and LanguageTool have zero tools to improve your spelling and grammar is because it would kill their business model…
I mean, I’m definitely coming at this from my own perspective, but I think that for a language with as much historical spelling as English, that the best way to learn the spelling is literally by learning the history: to look at the etymologies and sound changes to really understand the “why” of English spelling instead of just memorizing arbitrary rules, and then memorizing the countless arbitrary exceptions to those arbitrary rules. One thing that might particularly help in a pinch is to think of pairs of related words, for instance “muscle” and “muscular”, “illustrate” and “illustrious”.
Some YouTube channels I like that talk about this sort of thing include Alliterative and Simon Roper, there’s also Dr. Geoff Lindsey and Jackson Crawford and polýMATHY among others who are sort of in that same “periphery”. I also spend a lot of time looking at Wiktionary, which is basically a dictionary of all the world’s languages, so you can end up in various rabbit holes of ancestral forms of words and related words and sound change and all that.
I also think that it’s important to sort of “kill the cop in your head”, because when you learn to “improve your spelling and grammar” what you’re really doing is just learning a different written register, as it were. Your “misspellings” reveal traits about your own pronunciation, your “bad grammar” follows an internal logic from how you acquired English as a kid. When average people of ancient times wrote their own equivalents to “I’m relying on” instead of “I rely on” or “illistrate” instead of “illustrate”, then that’s often been crucial to linguists’ understanding of history.
