Charles Bastille
1 min readApr 11, 2024

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You've got a great editorial eye. I however, do not. So I find it useful, especially for catching really stupid things that I know better about, but that I simply miss.

By this I mean that I might write something and then see a sentence AFTER it has been published in hard copy, and shriek in alarm that I let it through. Grammarly helps me avoid that.

I never, in a million years, would have caught "cavalry," even though I am fully aware of the differences in the two words.

In fact, Grammarly didn't suggest "calvary" or "calvary." It only suggested that I should check its context. I almost let it go anyway, and then I said to myself, "Holy Christ!" lol.

I don't let Grammarly affect my *choice* of words. I don't let it make editorial decisions. That I leave to human editors, who I am happy to push back against. I push back because human editors often tend to be a bit too biased in favor of technical rules. Ray Bradbury's work, for example, would never survive some editors, who would be aghast at his use of multiple "and" placements in place of a comma, for example.

I only bring this up because I see Grammarly as the first, most rudimentary stage of editing (after me). Next comes human editors (if applicable, which often, on Medium, it is not).

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Charles Bastille
Charles Bastille

Written by Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille

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