Read Part 1 of the series: A Poet's Guide to Digital Proofreading Tools: Preface

Part 2: Using Digital Proofreading Tools in Poetry Writing

“Every day, in private conversations, letters to editors, journal articles, and advice columns, people complain about grammar. They love to hate the bad grammar of others. These are the grammar ranters, and they claim to be distressed or confused by the tiniest of mistakes…

 

Secretly, however, grammar ranters may be tickled by the opportunity to point out an error, and though claiming confusion, they are rarely confused by it. From this position of Innocent Victim of Improper English, they can attack the speaker or writer who produced the error, thereby elevating themselves as more educated, more intelligent, even more moral than the offender making the error…

[This] is not an attack on proper grammar. Nor is it a suggestion that standards in writing or speaking should be lowered.. Quite the contrary: language is a rich multifaceted tool for effective communication, and to use it well, writers and speakers must attend to conventions of genre, expectations, of audience, organization, use of evidence, and much, much more. To help students develop these skills, however, teachers cannot make traditional [prescriptivist] grammar instruction the center of their lessons.”

(Dunn & Lindblom, 2011, p. ix - x)

• Our audience? Our fellow Neopoets and other readers of poetry.
• Our genre? Poems.
• Our students, teachers, and lessons? Us and our workshops.

I am applying these linguistic concepts that are often used to describe teaching language learning and composition in schools to our sphere of learning and our chosen form of writing: the online poetry workshop.

We now understand that “breaking the rules” is normal. There are “grammar rules” for a reason, but also reasons and times to appropriately break them. We do it every day in language production. It is a normal, expected, and valid linguistic experience. Engaging in it is culturally significant.

Yet, in poetry and in other forms of written communication, we still want to polish our writing to get our message across well. This is a balancing act. These two desires – to write well/beautifully and to respect linguistic descriptivism – are not at odds with each other. They are two interconnected parts to the way we navigate language in our lives.

Questions we might ask ourselves:

• How do we balance creating well-written and polished poetry with valuing a descriptive approach to dialect?
• How do we create well-written and polished poetry that is also experimental and plays with language outside of the “rules”?

We might want to utilize a proofreading tool or spell checker as a quick, easy, and free step toward that polishing. Yet, we’ll often find that the spell checker identifies our quirks, word creation, experimentation, and vernacular/dialect as errors. Why does it do that? How do we proceed?

A spell checker or proofreading tool is a computer program, part of a computer software like MS Word, or a website that only recognizes the rules it has been given by a human programmer. It does not think or understand language. Writing is just a set of data that it is made to scour to look for instances of rule-breaking.

Just like a metal detector is a tool designed to find metal and then let out a sound to help a human user, spell checker tools detect “errors”. Notwithstanding, there are right and wrong answers about what metal is; it is an objective fact. Yet, writing is utterly subjective. These kinds of tools work really well for effectively detecting objective, definitive information. That is a matching game which machines excel at.

Then, based on its programming, a spell checker goes a step farther than the metal detector. A metal detector beeps and lets the human user go from there; that’s it. On the other hand, a spell checker pulls from a selection of possible suggestions that could be the correct fix for the rule-breaking it has identified.

Sometimes it makes a sound suggestion, one that does work with the meaning the author intended. These might be things like correcting spelling. The person wrote im instead of I’m and the spell checker detected it and gave the correct suggestion.

However, there are plenty of times where the spell checker doesn't make the right suggestion. I see it every day in my career. Students that I work with use their spell checker tool, but they quickly accept every suggestion without looking over it. Sometimes they have limited understanding of what the suggestion means, so even if they did look closely, they wouldn’t know that the suggested change wasn’t what they actually needed.

Then what happens? Their paper suddenly doesn’t say what they meant it to say. Words appeared on their page that they didn’t intend. The meaning they originally expressed has been altered and is now possibly incorrect.

Best Practices for Digital Proofreading Tools

1. If you are not already using a spell checker, please consider using one. A brief summary with pros and cons of a few prominent ones will follow in the next part of this blog series.
2. When you use a spell check with your poetry, read the suggestion carefully. Think critically about what it is telling you to do before you accept it. It may change your writing in a way you disagree with, if you are not careful.
3. If you are often getting suggestions you aren’t sure about, feel free to ask your fellow Neopets. I would especially be happy to help anyone. Feel free to comment right here on this blog post for help!
4. You may totally ignore suggestions if they are marking your dialect, word play, or experimentations as errors. They were your purposeful choices and they have a place in poetry. I hereby give you permission by the power vested in me to honor these parts of your writing. ;)
5. Follow-up with a note to your fellow Neopoets in the “Last Few Words'' section of your poem submission. Use this space to make note of these instances of dialect or other things other readers may think are “errors”. That note can save a fellow Neopoet time and energy they may try to put toward helping you correct these “errors” or encouraging you to use a spell checker when you don’t need it.
6. If folks do still mention it in their comments, engage in a dialog with them! Teach them about your dialect and your word play. Sometimes these things will go over a reader’s head or you’ll miss the mark and that’s okay. It just means you get the opportunity to chat and learn together with your reader. It’s a wonderful thing and the foundation of our community.

An Example

A poem recently submitted in our community by Alex Tanner titled “I Disremembers” is a perfect example of the use of dialect in poetry: "I Disrememebers"

In a reply to a reader, Lavender, Alex explains:

“The title comes from an expression used by the old timers of the past here on the Island. I often heard my grandfather use it. He never said 'I forget', always 'I disremembers'. I have a book dated 1854 called 'The Dialect of the Isle of Wight’”

If anyone were to put “I disremembers” into a spell checker – such as the one built into the Google Drive word processor I am using right now to type this blog post – they would encounter a blue, squiggly underline or other similar indicator that this phrase is an error. My Google Drive spell checker recommends “disremembered” as the correction to “disremembers.” Another option that I’ll discuss in the next part, languagetool.org, suggests “misremembers”. It puts a red highlighted box around what it detects as the error.

The Google Drive spell checker recognizes that in Standard English, we don’t end first person singular verbs with -s. It detects a subject-verb agreement error. Typically it’s: he/she/it remembers, but I remember, right? LanguageTool doesn’t even seem to recognize that disremember is a word; it is trying to give the word that it recognizes as existing: misremember.

Both are real words (wikidiff.com/disremember/misremember), but if Alex had changed their poem based on either of the suggested alternatives, their poem would have been changed drastically.

The entire point of highlighting a piece of dialect from the Isle of Wight would have been totally lost if Alex used the suggested “disremembered”. Using “misremember” would have the additional detriment of changing the meaning entirely because misremember and disremember do not mean the same thing; they’re antonyms!

Further Reading/References

• Grammar Rants: How a Backstage Tour of Writing Complaints Can Help Stuents Make Informed, Savvy Choices About Their Writing by Patricia Dunn and Ken Lindblom (2011)
• "Editing and Proofreading Techniques" by the University of Nevada at Reno Writing Center
• "How to Edit Poetry: 10 Tips for Editing Your Own Poems" by MasterClass (2021)

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Kelsey M. Burroughs

Feel free to access a Google Drive copy of this blog; from there you can print: A Poet's Guide to Digital Proofreading Part 2 on Google Drive