They’re or their?

Frequent grammar and spelling mistakes

Do you recognize this intuitive grammatical convention? Adjectives in English shall be written in this order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose and noun.

Try it. You can only have a “lovely little old rectangular green French silver pocket knife.” Better not to mess with that order. And since size comes before color, a “green big car” can’t exist in a sentence. Or can it?

Sure, it can.

How to write is drilled into us by our culture, upbringing and our teachers. We’re not taught how to run with our words.

We follow grammar rules intuitively and blindly. And AI grammar tools ensure that we do, no matter what.

They alert us, for example, to “avoid passive voice”. Even though passive voice is often a very powerful storytelling tool.

So, creative writers need to break a few ingrained grammar rules eventually to stand out. But there is a big difference between original writing that leaves your head spinning, wanting for more, and sloppy writing that makes the writer look careless.

The latter tinkers with spelling and grammar rules that are essential to comprehending content. AI tools are of no help in these cases since they don’t understand the hidden…