Book Giveaway: They're Watching You

To celebrate the release of "They're Watching You," and the July 4th holiday, I'm holding a book giveaway. Send me an email before Monday July 8th, and I will randomly pick one winner of a copy of the book.

And if you haven't read anything else on this blog, the book is a gay romance/thriller.

To enter, just send an email to gabrielcaldwell@gmail.com, Subject: Book Giveaway.

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Grammarly - Inconsistent punctuation fix bug

As I wrote in my previous post ( Grammarly - I think I like it ), I've been using Grammarly to proof my book. I'm still happy with it, but I did discover a problem it has with certain punctuation imported in a Word .docx file. One of Grammarly's features is a fix for 'Inconsistent punctuation.' It was upset that my files (which were .docx files exported from Adobe InDesign ) contained a mix of straight and curly apostrophe and quotation marks. I think the problem is that internally InDesign fixes these issues in your original text on the fly, but if you export the text it sends out the original formatting rather than changing the punctuation. I figured that making this change in Grammarly was a good idea, but what I discovered is that after doing this, there were instances where single apostrophes and quotation marks were moved, particularly around a 'word' or if I had a single apostrophe next to quotation marks: "And then he shouted 'Fire!&#

Grammarly - I think I like it

I’d seen the ads for Grammarly, a tool that promised to help me “ Compose bold, clear*, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant, ” but I was skeptical. Maybe I didn’t want to spend the $139.95 a year it costs (there is also a $29.95 a month option.) [* that sentence came from Grammarly’s website, and Grammarly suggested changing the word clear.] This week I finally tried the free version, just out of curiosity, and after using it I was intrigued enough to get the paid version, a nd though it’s only been a few days, I like it. I’ve been running my book through it, and while we have a lot of disagreements (primarily over Unclear Antecedents), it has found enough spelling errors I had missed, and grammar and punctuation mistakes, to make me feel that it's worth the price. Pros • It finds spelling mistakes and grammar issues that I missed using other tools, and with multiple proof-readings. • It’s easy to use, though performance c

Is Microsoft bringing Mr Clippy back?

Just after I paid for a year long subscription to Grammarly, Microsoft went and announced their own AI-powered grammar and style checker for Word Online: Ideas In Word . According to the article, "Ideas for Word might propose swapping 'society as a whole' for the more concise 'society.'" Oh come on, really? We're getting rid of all filler verbiage?! That's going to make things very short and concise and boring. Meanwhile, Google has announced it's own AI-powered grammar suggestions feature coming in Google Docs. Microsoft getting into AI-powered grammar checking reminds me of a certain utility that Microsoft offered a long time ago; Clippit, commonly referred to as Mr Clippy. Mr Clippy got a lot of—probably deserved—bad press. One of my favorite pieces about Mr Clippy was in an episode of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me when the panel was imagining Mr Clippy being taken out and shot.

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