Month: August 2013

RIP Barbara Mertz

Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Peters) has passed away after a long battle with cancer. Despite earning a PhD in Egyptology from one of the best programs in the entire world, the gender mores of the 1950s prevented her from finding work as an Egyptologist.

In a classic example of making lemonade out of lemons, she turned to writing fiction. Mertz was a prolific author who wrote over 50 books in genres ranging from popular Egyptology to romance. She’s probably best known for her Amelia Peabody series of mysteries, which she published under the pseudonym of ‘Elizabeth Peters.’ Although the Peabody books were set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the main character’s passion for Egyptology let Mertz put her academic background to good use.

 

Mertz was a first-class writer, and she will be sorely missed.

As for those learned scribes. . . it has come to pass that their names will endure forever, although they are gone, having completed their lives. . . they made heirs for themselves of the writings and books … which they made…. Their… memorial tablets (are) covered with dust, their chapels forgotten. But their names are pronounced because of these books of theirs. . . more profitable is a book than a graven tablet, than a chapel-wall well built. . . a man has perished, and his corpse has become dust. . . but writings cause him to be remembered in the mouth of the story teller.

-Papyrus Chester Beatty IV

 

Grammarly review

Recently, the good folks at Grammarly were kind enough to invite me to review their their product. In case you haven’t heard of it, Grammarly is an online “writing-enhancement platform” that offers proofreading and plagiarism-checking capabilities.

Grammarly is simple to use. You just paste or upload your text and click the review button (though you also have the option of choosing from several different standards of review, including business, technical, and casual). When it has finished its review, your writing is given a numerical score (100 is the best) and then it takes you through the piece line by line to show you where it thinks you goofed.

I spent a great deal of time playing around with Grammarly, and I used samples from many different sources. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that I can’t recommend Grammarly since it’s bedeviled by false positives and bizarre suggestions.

Grammarly’s commonly confused words checker is particularly inept. It wanted me to change ‘seat’ to ‘set’ in the following sentence: “The Green Party has given a seat to London Assembly member Jenny Jones….” It also thought that ‘culled’ should be ‘called,’ and ‘polity’ should be ‘policy.’

The spellchecker is similarly dodgy. It flagged ‘unbeliever’ and ‘China’ as misspelled words! I suspect punctuation might have had something to do with it: ‘unbeliever’ was originally in quotes, while ‘China’ originally had an apostrophe and an ‘s’ at the end. But a program that gets confused by basic punctuation doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Grammarly’s grammar checker also got tripped up on a number of occasions. It flagged the word ‘have’ in the following sentence: “A total of 30 new peers have been appointed…” Grammarly argued that the subject of the sentence was a singular or uncountable noun and therefore it did not agree with the present tense verb ‘have.’ The original sentence was correct, however. ‘Total’ can take either a plural or a singular verb depending on context: if it’s preceded by ‘the,’ it’s singular; if it’s preceded by ‘a,’ it’s plural. Here endeth the lesson.

Grammarly is not without its benefits, though. Having multiple standards of review is helpful, although I wish that I had more control over what it was looking for. The ‘creative’ standard seemed to work best for fiction, but it’s a barebones evaluation. It doesn’t flag passive voice or sentences that begin with conjunctions, and while those things are arguably less of an issue in creative writing, it would be nice if you could choose to include them in a creative-level review.

Grammarly’s plagiarism checker also seems to work reasonably well. When I used articles that I’ve published online,  each one was flagged because of its similarities with the published version. One cool thing is that Grammarly will compose a citation in each of the standard styles (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) that you can use to cite the work. It’s a rather handy feature if, like me, you hate formatting bibliographies.

Alas, these pluses don’t outweigh the minuses. Wading through a slew of false positives and erroneous suggestions gets old fast. Even when Grammarly got things right, I didn’t find it all that helpful (I don’t need to spend $29.95 a month to find conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences!). Until they fine-tune things, you’re probably better off sticking with MS Word’s spelling and grammar checkers followed by old-fashioned human proofreading.

Cyberthuggery

Polygon has posted an interesting article about the growing number of video game designers who are being harassed by players.

The article makes for sobering reading, but I can’t say I’m surprised. When I was following the development of Diablo III, I was shocked at how vitriolic the “fans” could be. Whenever Blizzard announced something remotely controversial, there would inevitably be a steady stream of bile directed toward the developers, particularly Jay Wilson. After reading some of the comments, you’d think that the design team’s decisions were going to echo for all eternity. Reading the comments on a Diablo fansite soon became a surefire way to lower my faith in humanity.

The reality, of course, is that a computer game is just an elaborate string of ones and zeroes. Even if they had totally fucked-up the game, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Sure, spending $50 on a piece of shit would have been annoying, but life would have gone on. It’s not worth being miserable over, nor is it worth trying to make someone else miserable.

The sad thing is that cyberthuggery can have a chilling effect on developer/fan interaction. There comes a point where even the thickest-skinned person will say “enough is enough” and either step away from social media entirely or retreat behind a PR stockade. Thus, the whole community ends up losing.