How's the book?

A friend asked, "How is your book going?  What was the outcome of the phone meeting with the consultant?" (questionnable punctuation)

"Fine, good" was about out of my mouth, when I thought better of it.  The truth is, it's OK–not great, but OK.  I realized that blogging is quite different from writing (duh).  While story telling may be a strength, formal writing is not.  I wouldn't (contraction) say I'm a professional editor's worst nightmare—maybe just a bad dream. 

I thought I was doing well by cleaning up my language.  I wanted to be a cooperative client writer, not waste people's time, maximize the potential of my computer software, correct glaring typographical errors and misspellings before relying on humans (run-on sentence). I was also too close and familiar with the content to dependably edit myself.  Certainly Heidi and Earl had been editing continuously during the past two years, but once I started reorganizing content, it was clear I had many carts before horses (confusing jargon).

The publishing company did an initial evaluation of my manuscript that didn't (contraction) seem too bad (overused modifier).  The publishing consultant had some great suggestions.  My "go to" (questionnable punctuation) ataxia guru provided some clarification and gave permission to use his words.  The ataxia website staff member, being new to the blog, was the first one to spot a cart–horse problem (en dash, not hyphen). They were good, doable (real word?) corrections and I thought this was going to be a snap (colloquialism).

I got my comeuppance (real word?) from a machine.  According to the word processing grammar checker, my verb tenses were inconsistent, the italics and punctuation in dialogues needed work.  I'm (contraction) the queen (sexist language) of the contraction, the incomplete sentence, and the overused modifier—(em dash, not hyphen) none of which have a place in good writing.  Politically incorrect and sexist language abounded.  Really? (incomplete sentence) I had no idea.


 The lesson:  You're (contraction) not likely to hear Tolstoy and Schuman in the same breath. Fortunately, that was never a goal.

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