WRiTE CLUB, right? A slushpile reader’s caution

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally took the plunge – I’m now officially one of the 20 initial judges (aka, slushpile readers) for DL Hammons readers’ choice contest, WRiTE CLUB. At first, my fear was that I’d never find the time to read the more than 200 500-word entries he anticipates. As DL noted, the task would be equivalent to reading an entire book. 

Scratch that – my real first fear stemmed from the realization that I couldn’t both be a judge and a participant in WRiTE CLUB, which I have participated in at least three times, twice making not only the initial cut but surviving more than one round of readership votes. But since DL and I are fellow critique group members, how much new stuff do I have that he (and probably other judges) wouldn’t recognize? Might as well pay it forward.

So I might as well warn all readers now furiously polishing their prose of the obstacles you’ll face. Yes, you will have barely two pages worth of a story. And with those, you must gain the approval of 20 slushpile readers who will winnow those 200+ entries into an initial 30. Then, still more harrowing, you will face dozens, perhaps hundreds of readers who will vote for their favorites in the ensuing one-on-one story bouts. Followed by the final judgment by a panel of publishing professionals.

But I’m not here to discourage anybody. I’m here to offer you a fighting chance.

No, I can’t tell you how to write an enticing hook or an unforgettable character speaking breathless dialogue and engaging in heart-stopping action in 500 words. (Seriously, if you know how to do all that, contact me ASAP!)

What I can do is tell you how to overcome my own final fear as a WRiTE CLUB slushpile reader: check your spelling, punctuation and grammar. Please. Because my new nightmare is that entries with all the characteristics of the above paragraph will hit my Dropbox from writers who not only failed to proofread their work, but also disdained the suggestions of their word processing programs.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Really.

Not that proofreading and writing programs are foolproof. Yes, I have gnashed my teeth through the ages over writings of fellow critique members that made me wonder why they didn’t just spell check. Or what comes to mind more recently – why they didn’t check punctuation. 

I mean, theirs vs. there’s? How hard can that be?

At least that’s what I thought until I ran samples of my own writing through both my Word and Grammarly programs. (I even popped for Grammarly Premium, which just shows you how much I’m willing to do for readers of this blog.)

Here’s what happened, using a song fragment from one of my historical works in progress (misspellings are my deliberate inventions):

It’s a long way to Tipperary, a long way to go.

Its a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know.

Whats the use of worrying, it never was worthwhile.

So, pack up you’re troubles in your old kit bag and smile, brother, smile!

Easy, peasy, you say? Not. Microsoft Word’s spelling & grammar check caught “Its”, “Whats” and “you’re” correctly, recommending “It’s” (for a contraction), “What’s” (also for a contraction), and “your” for a possessive. However, to my surprise, it was baffled by “know,” recommending “knows” because it apparently took the subject to be that sweetest “girl” instead of the immediately preceding “I”.

Grammarly Premium also correctly caught “Its” and “Whats” and had no problems with “know.” But again to my astonishment, it failed to remark on the “you’re,” which in this case is written incorrectly as a contraction instead of the correct “your” for a possessive. 


User beware! But don’t throw the sweetest girl out with your old kit bag. Use whatever software editing program you have. And use your eyes. WRiTE CLUB opens for entries March 18. Keep an eye on DL’s site for specifics.


(Note: In the course of checking this post for errors, Grammarly informed me that I appear to have plagiarized two phrases. “After a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally,” matches a phrase used in the article “My Experience with Progressive Lenses,” and “why they didn’t just spell check” was used in a post by fellow blogger Denita Stevens. Although I don’t recall ever seeing those articles, I apologize to the writers.)

The thrifty writer’s guide to more readable writing

The email in my inbox touted reviews of four editing programs. With spelling and grammar checks already available in my software, what I wanted was a program that will tell me how to, i.e., force me to, write better. And then my eyes went straight to one with that promise. OK, it was Hemingway, which promised to locate all those too-long sentences, pesky passive constructions, and convoluted wordings guaranteed to trip readers.

Oh, and it was free, the reviewer said! Apparently, what he meant, I realized after several minutes of Googling, is that there’s a free trial offer. But I wanted something not only magically delicious but also completely free. And I realized I already had what I longed for—in the readability statistics on my version of Word. Free, that is, because it’s included in software I’ve already paid for.

A writing friend introduced me to these statistics years ago, under the terms Flesch Reading Ease Test and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test. After that introduction, I spent many obsessive lunch breaks running every scrap of writing I could find through these tests, which analyze sentence structure, sentence length, word and paragraph length, and that dreaded issue of passive construction. 

image: wikimedia commons

Rudolf Flesch first developed his reading level test to determine how hard (or easy) written English documents are to understand. Later, he and J. Peter Kincaid developed the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test for the U.S. military’s technical manuals.

At approximately the same time, as a journalist I was being told to keep my writing at a sixth-grade reading level to avoid straining the attention spans, not to mention educational levels of readers. (The Wikipedia article, “Flesch-Kincaid readability tests,” rates sixth-grade level writing as “conversational English for consumers.”)

However, nobody ever told me how to write at a particular grade level. I must have managed, since I keep moving up all the way to editorship at the city desk, but I longed for tools to quantify the process.

With the Flesch tests, I had those tools.

I copied my own writing, emails from co-workers and bosses, even legal decisions into the program and chortled inwardly upon finding a federal judge’s ruling reach a level good ol’ Flesch rated as only likely to be understood by post-doctoral graduates. (By the way, multisyllable words affect the scores more than sentence length. Short, punchy words are Flesch and Kincaid’s darlings.)

My writing was at the desired sixth-grade readership. Its level actually decreased since I first discovered Flesch-Kincaid. I can now write about murder and mayhem with words and sentences comprehensible by a third-grader, and usually with zero percentage passive sentences. (This post, however, clocked in at a ninth-grade level, considerably above my usual. Blame it on those multisyllabic repetitions of Flesch-Kincaid.)  

Then I changed computers a few times, and Flesch and Kincaid disappeared somewhere in the depths of my software programs. 

However, determination not to pay for what I already had led me to unearth it from the depths of my Microsoft Office Word software. The process wasn’t quite what I remembered. Depending on your own version of Word or similar programs available for Macs, you may need to tweak my instructions. But here are the basic steps:  

·       Highlight the passage you want to edit

·       Click on “file”, then “options”, then “proofing”

·       Check to be sure you’ve enabled “grammar and spelling” and “show readability statistics”

·       Hit OK

Once you’ve toggled back to your writing sample, you may need to click on the “home” tab to bring up the results. After I did this several times, Word got grumpy and required me to click on “search” to locate the program in my history. But once all the spelling and grammar checks are run, a box will appear with the Flesch-Kincaid results.

These tell us, among other things, our average sentence length and what percentage of our sentences are in passive voice.

(A secret: if passive sentences comprise less than 1 percent of the sample, Flesch-Kincaid gives you a break and marks the total as zero. So, if every 150-200 sentences you feel compelled to throw in one in passive voice, feel free. Just don’t tell anybody I said so.)

Unlike Hemingway’s software, Flesch-Kincaid doesn’t highlight these areas in your writing sample. If you see a problem, it’s best to work with small batches at a time until you feel comfortable with sentence length and non-passive writing.  

Of course, neither Flesch-Kincaid nor Hemingway or any other program can make our writing fascinating. Or create unforgettable characters. Or thrilling plots. Only we can do that.

If you’re afraid using short words, maybe even sentences short enough for a grade-schooler to read means your writing will be boring, consider this. “Life” and “death,” “love” and “hate,” “war” and “peace,” “he” and “she,” “we” and “they” are all short words. But the concepts they stand for have kept human beings intrigued for millennia. 

And although I’ve sometimes heard writers dismiss a book as “readable,” no agent, editor or publisher ever has refused a manuscript because its writing was too clear and easy to read. Readers have enough reasons to throw books down without being kicked in the teeth by unreadable prose.

(And a final tip of the hat to the [Electric Speed] newsletter of Jane Friedman for bringing the software topic to my attention!)