I am a word nerd. I love to geek out on weird and wonderful applications like Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor. These programs are innovative and can do some of the heavy-lifting for writers, especially in commercial writing, social media and journalism, catching spelling mistakes and proofing for small errors. But for novelists, poets and short story writers, editing programs are like talking to your drunken roommate from college; they don't always make a lot of sense. Allowing an editing program to decide how you should write is a critical mistake. Writing software has certain weaknesses, just check out the infamous spell check poem which proves conclusively that spellcheck is not the boss of you. Editing programs cannot detect rhythm or poetic metaphor or choose when the passive voice is more powerful than the active voice. Complex sentence structure baffles the algorithms of these applications. One day maybe, but not now. Editing and spelling software cannot replace education or instinct. Writers need to learn the rules in order to make … [Read more...] about The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”