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 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.