Monthly Archives: November 2012

General Musing, Writing and Editing

Overcoming Tendinitis for Writers and Editors

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Occupational hazards would seem to be few and far between for writers, editors, and others who spend long, solitary hours tapping away at a keyboard. Some would say that we have it easy; as an editor, I’m not exactly out there risking my neck by fighting crime (unless you consider grammatical errors to be criminal acts). Loneliness–the deep kind that is best alleviated by face-to-face interaction, not chatting on social media–is a risk and certainly affects our emotional well-being. Another obvious threat is gaining weight. The unfortunate truth is that the refrigerator cannot be locked and is always much too close at hand. And we sit entirely too much, so we don’t burn off as many calories as we should. Apart from that, are there really that many occupational hazards that can befall us?

Starting back in July, I experienced tendinitis for the first time in my life. The inflamed tendon was near my elbow, but the pain also radiated into my wrist. The inflammation was so severe that for a number of weeks, I couldn’t twist a lid off a jar or turn a key in a lock without experiencing excruciating pain. Everyday activities that I’d taken for granted became hellishly difficult, and that included working at the computer.

I started to assess my behaviour at the keyboard, and I noticed a few things. First, I was using the mouse much more than I needed to, so instead of using it to move up and down through a document (a bad habit I’d somehow got into), I switched to the arrow keys. As well, I was moving away from the keyboard inadvertently; my chair is on casters, and because of a slight incline in the hardwood floor, I was rolling away and straining to reach both the keyboard and the mouse. I slipped a carpet under my chair, and I’m now sitting more snugly up against the keyboard. I always check that my hands are centred precisely over the keyboard before I begin typing, rather than at an awkward angle to it.

All this was helping, but the inflammation was still so severe that I needed medical help. So I visited my acupuncturist-chiropractor, Dr. Z. Worried that tendinitis might put an end to my editing activities, at least temporarily, I asked him what the chances were of recovering from my affliction. He said that for some people, especially those who don’t actively try to do anything about it, tendinitis becomes a chronic condition. I knew I wasn’t going to be one of those people; I was definitely willing to put in the work to overcome it. What choice did I have?

Because my tendinitis was a repetitive strain injury, Dr. Z. advised me to take as much time away from the keyboard as I possibly could and simply rest the tendon. Otherwise, the inflammation would never come down. I would also need to ice it three times a day for a few minutes at a time. As well, I applied Traumeel homeopathic cream a couple of times a day. Dr. Z. taught me stretching exercises that I could do daily, and I went to his office once a week for acupuncture treatments. After he removed the needles, he also did some deep muscle massage on my arm. I started taking a supplement called SierraSil Joint Formula 14. Before long, I turned the corner and the severe inflammation died away. Dr. Z. told me I could start strengthening exercises, as keeping the muscles strong would prevent a recurrence of the tendinitis.

Cumulatively, all these measures worked; it wasn’t any one thing that solved the problem. Now I can work away at the keyboard for hours pain-free, and I’ve even been able to go back to knitting (although Dr. Z. cautions against doing it daily, as I used to). I still try to take entire days away from the keyboard, if I can tear myself away from both work and the allure of the online world. If you have severe tendinitis, it’s all too easy to give in to despair; but given enough time, effort, and patience, you too can overcome it.

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Writing and Editing

Are Grammar-checking Websites Worth the Bother?

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A client mentioned recently that she has a thirty-dollar monthly subscription to a certain popular website that promises to check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, style, and word choice for you. I should say at the outset that I’m biased and tend to turn up my nose at sites like these; I don’t imagine that they have a hope of ever replacing me or my editor colleagues, so I don’t lose any sleep over the fact of their existence. Feeling a little mischievous, I thought it would be entertaining to run an experiment to see exactly how accurate my client’s grammar-checking site really is. I signed up for the free seven-day trial and wracked my brains to come up with some excruciatingly bad text. This is what I submitted to the grammar checker for assessment:

The lion tapped his crown and screamed quietly, now that Im kind of the forest, I’m kinda loosing my mine.

Your majesty, with all due respect, their is no kneed to carry on in this fashion, felicia robinson his advisor said patiently. Its not appropriate. Yew have had plenty of time to get used to our knew roll, four you have been king of the forest for quiet some time. The time for complaining has past, you must except your responsibilities more better than you have bin doing

Bee that as it may the lion inserted boldly, but I am not pre-pared. And when am I two have time to eat steak, eggs, and peanut-butter.

My text had a grand total of thirty errors, and the grammar checker found just ten of them. Yes, it knew that losing  and prepared were spelled wrong, and it realized that certain homophones were the wrong ones, like their and yew. And it picked up a comma splice and the improper comparative more better.

But on the whole, it performed dismally. Yes, it did find a number of the misused homophones, but it missed others such as past, bee, and four. So much for the “contextual spelling check.” And although it claims to be concerned with word choice, it completely missed screamed quietly in the first line, and it seemed to think that inserted was fine when asserted was what I meant. Its grasp of punctuation was abysmal, as it didn’t seem to know that my passage included dialogue and therefore needed quotation marks. Nor did it realize that the last sentence was a question and required a question mark at the end, or that Im needed an apostrophe. And sadly, it missed that peanut butter isn’t hyphenated.

Possibly worse than the things it missed was the wrong advice it gave me. It told me that in be (okay, I did write bee) that as it may the may should be maybe, dismissed my use of the pronoun you as improper in academic writing (not that the nonsense I fed it could be deemed in any way academic), and dissed my use of and at the beginning of a sentence. It called its not appropriate a sentence fragment, failing to recognize that all that was needed to make it a proper sentence was an apostrophe in the first word. It didn’t recognize that felicia robinson was a proper name that simply required capitals; instead it told me that the words were actually misspelled. I was taken to task for using kind of (which was actually a typo–from the context it should have been apparent that I meant king of), yet it somehow missed kinda in the same sentence.

Okay, I admit that the test I gave it was tricky; I threw everything I could think of at it with the intention of messing with its so-called mind. Perhaps I was unnecessarily cruel to the poor thing. But all the types of errors I threw at it are certainly common enough in manuscripts; they’re just usually not present in such mind-twisting quantities.

Should you as a writer rely on grammar-checking websites? Absolutely not. Though they may offer interesting tidbits of information about grammatical rules in their analyses, they can’t even begin to grasp subtle or even not-so-subtle contextual issues, so they will miss a good portion of the errors–two-thirds, if you go by my results–and can misinterpret that which is actually correct. If you are really concerned about accuracy, you need the judgment of an actual human being, and there is simply no substitute for a good editor.

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