Guest Post: Coping with the Curse of Proofreading by Kim Hays

Kim Hays' Swiss detectives  Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli are back with a new mystery set in Bern. In the new book, A Fondness for Truth, a woman, Andi, is killed in a hit-and-run while riding her bicycle home on an icy winter night. Her devastated partner is convinced the death was no accident. Andi had been receiving homophobic hate mail for several years, and the letters grew uglier after the couple’s baby was born.

As both detectives dig into Andi’s life, one thing becomes clear: Andi’s friends and family may have loved her for her honesty, but her outspoken integrity threatened others, including, perhaps, her killer. 

Kim Hays is a citizen of Switzerland and the United States who has made her home in Bern for thirty-six years. Before that, she lived in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm, as well as around the US. Pesticide, the first book in her Polizei Bern series was published by Seventh Street Books in 2022 and was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award and the Falchion Award for Best Mystery. The second book in the series, Sons and Brothers, came out in last year, and A Fondness for Truth was released this month.

In today's guest blog, Kim offers a solution, or at least an aid, to one of the most trying jobs in writing...

Any fluent English speaker who lives where English isn’t spoken knows the pattern. A friend—sometimes a superficial acquaintance—approaches you at a party or phones you out of the blue and says, “I’ve written a letter/business proposal/academic article in English. It’s finished, and I’m sure it’s in great shape, but could you give it a quick look to check the commas and fix any typos? I can email it to you right away. Okay?”  “Sure,” you say with a sinking heart, resigning yourself to hard work and indecision. The writing will probably be full of mistakes, not just in spelling and punctuation but in clarity; there will be sentences so convoluted that you’ll struggle to understand what they mean. How much correcting are you obliged to do, knowing that comments in the margins like “This paragraph doesn’t make sense. What are you trying to say?” will offend the writer and probably generate a defensive conversation?

It was to help these non-native speakers whose studies or professions demand that they write complicated texts in English that “Grammarly” was invented. First released in 2009 by three Ukrainians and now used by over thirty million people, the software application edits any piece of writing on your screen that you let it read and suggests grammar, spelling, and punctuation changes. It also corrects for increased clarity and what it calls “engagement” (using more lively words and phrases) and “delivery” (removing qualifiers and making your writing more authoritative.)

Within a few years of its release, the app wasn’t only being used by the foreign speakers it was created for but also by us native English speakers. There’s a free version with a limited correction service; there’s also one for 144 euros ($155) a year that offers the whole package. Just before I hunkered down to proof the final manuscript of A Fondness for Truth, the third book in my Polizei Bern series, I bought it.

Like everyone who has taught English as a foreign language to high school students and adults, I’ve had to answer many questions about English grammar. My copies of Oxford University Press’s Practical English Usage and the Oxford Guide to English Grammar are dog-eared with use. The idea that I needed an app to correct my English began to dawn on me when I received the copyedited version of Sons and Brothers, my second manuscript, back from my publisher. I opened the file to see if I agreed with the countless corrections the press’s copyeditor had made and found—pristine pages! Some red typeface was scattered in the first few chapters; after that, the corrections and suggestions dwindled to almost nothing!

Far from rejoicing, I was horrified. The book had a schedule, and there was no time to send it back and ask for a more diligent copyeditor, so I would have to be that person. What followed were endless readings and re-readings of the copyedited manuscript and later its page proofs by me and three ever-to-be-praised friends who pitched in to help. We caught plenty of spelling, grammar, and clarity mistakes, not to mention missing and repeated words.

Did I buy Grammarly at that point to help us cope? Sadly, no. But about a week before I had to send in my most recent MS for final approval and copyediting, I remembered the panic of the previous year and had an epiphany. In case of another copywriting disaster, I’d buy Grammarly and be forearmed. As it turned out, there was a new person on the job, and she did much better work. Nevertheless, I was grateful to have used Grammarly, as well.

Screenshot showing how it works

The app’s detractors complain about its mistakes, and I’d agree that perhaps 10% of its suggested corrections are wrong—either because it doesn’t appreciate my deliberately chosen word order or misinterprets what I’ve written. When Grammarly suggests a nonsensical correction, I double-check to make sure the mistake isn’t mine and then dismiss it without incorporating it. This is no big deal—it still leaves the app with a 90% success rate of catching genuine errors.

Another criticism of Grammarly is that it “reduces writers’ freedom of expression.” I laughed when I read that. I’m the writer. If a piece of software suggests replacing my words with a phrase or a sentence to make my writing clearer or punchier, and I don’t like it, I don’t use it. If I like it, I take it up and am grateful for a helpful editing suggestion, as any writer is.

I would never dismiss authors’ fears of AI out of hand. But Grammarly reminds me that helpful suggestions from a machine can be terrific—as long as they remain only suggestions.

If any of you use this app or others like it, let me know what you think.

My Least and Most Favorite Typos

Annamaria on Monday

Some people come into this world nicely dominant in their left brains and therefore neurologically prepared to spell well and find typos at a glance.  I am not one of those.  I am right-handed and right-footed, but left-eyed: therefore stumped by spelling and blind to bumbled typing.  My blogmate Stan Trollip can attest to my--from time to time--asking for his help to prevent embarrassing myself on this score.  He is tolerant about this.

Not so my mentor and teacher, the head of the Literature Department at the my college, Sister Mary Catharine O’Connor, who taught me creative writing.  She had two PhD’s from Columbia University—one in English Literature and one in Education.  Her short stories were published in The New Yorker.  She was brilliant and uncompromising.  When we handed in a paper, she required us to write “Proofread” on the cover page and sign our names.  And if she found a fourth typo in the paper, she stopped reading, and no matter what it contained, the paper would never get an “A.”  She despaired of me.  I still have the dictionary she gave me out of that desperation.  I revere her memory.  But nothing she did could unscramble my brain and make me good at seeing my own mistakes.

Those were the days of Olivetti portables and no spell check. 

My most inconvenient mistake came, not in school, but in an article I wrote while working in the training department of a Wall Street bank.  I had devised a program to recruit women from the welfare rolls, to teach them skills that would qualify them for jobs in the bank, and to get them on their way to supporting themselves and their families.  The banking community took an interest in the work, and I was asked to write an article describing it for an industry newspaper.  As published the article contained only one wrong letter—a “w” instead of “t.”  What I meant to say was “This program is not available to the public.”   Except that it came out “now available.”  Thousands of phone calls later. . .

Writing on a computer with spell check has improved matters measurably, but perfection still escapes me, as regular readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed, to my great embarrassment.

My consolation is that I am not alone in this impairment.   Because misery really does love company, I am tickled by discoveries of typos in published books.  My absolute favorite is in the first edition of Bubbles, the autobiography of Beverly Sills.  Knowing how I loved the opera and admired Ms. Sills, my mother-in-law gave me a copy one Christmas.  The first line reads, “I was only three years old the first time I sang in pubic.”  TEEHEE!

It was easy for me to spot that one because it was not my own sentence I was reading.  I had a very close call with a highly embarrassing similar error.  I was reading page proofs of my third novel Blood Tango.  Luckily I caught the mistake before the book went to print.  In that case it was a mistake that was not in my original submission.  I have not idea how it happened.  Again, just one letter was wrong: an “r” had been substituted for an “s.”  And in the the worst possible sentence.  Near the bottom of page 15, a paragraph began, “But Tulio Puglisi knew in his boner that stopping Evita could turn out to be . . .” 

These are my least and most favorite such mistakes.  What are yours?

Upcoming Event for Annamaria:

June 26: 7:30PM

Summit Free Public Library

75 Maple St

Summit, NJ 07901