Gary McGath

About Gary McGath

I am a freelance technical writer in Plaistow, NH.

Can you rely on Grammarly?

This entry was posted in Techniques Tools and tagged grammar Grammarly on by

Mistakes in spelling or grammar can torpedo an otherwise great article. Grammarly is a popular online tool for catching them. I use the free version regularly to check articles before submitting them. It does a decent job at catching the worst of my blunders. It hasn’t impressed me enough to go for the paid version, too. It has its quirks, being obsessive on some issues and plain wrong on others.

My cat Mokka guarding a dictionary

Mokka sternly protecting a dictionary. December 30, 2008.

If I agree with Grammarly’s recommendation, I use it. If I don’t, I leave my writing as it is, or I make a different change. But I get the impression that a lot of writers take its recommendations as Holy Writ, and I wonder how much it’s affecting writing styles on the Internet.
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This entry was posted in Writing on by | Open »

I’ve just updated my settings to create nicer-looking permalinks. Unfortunately, this has broken the existing links to all my posts. The posts are all still available from my blog page.

The soul-crushing client

This entry was posted in Writing as business and tagged editors rejections on by

Writers have to deal with rejection and not let it hurt too much or too long. Sometimes you write a really great piece and it’s just not what the client wants. Sometimes clients don’t make it clear what they need, or their needs change suddenly. And sometimes you have to admit you were in over your head, or you had a bad writing day and wrote a piece of garbage. It’s all part of the job.

What’s harder to deal with is the deliberately malicious client. The one who tells obvious lies just to spite you. These people claim you made errors which you didn’t make, or that you didn’t do work which you did. Many of them like to string writers along. They’ll encourage you to submit a revision and then claim you didn’t follow instructions when you did meticulously, or they’ll reverse their previous requests.
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What writers should know about HTML

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged HTML writing on by

When you’re writing for the Web, usually your material will end up as HTML. With modern online editors, you may never have to write it directly, but you still need to understand it. The formatting of your writing has a close relationship to the final HTML, however it’s dressed up.

Properly using HTML tags helps a page’s accessibility. Browsers may present the content as spoken text, with enhancements for readability, or otherwise modified. Mobile browsers will present it differently from full-sized ones. Good markup will let all representations of the page work better.

HTML markup should focus on the semantics of a document. The site will use CSS to make it look however the webmaster wants. Tags shouldn’t determine how an element looks, but what role it plays. There are several common mistakes, and they cause problems in the final page.
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Which English are you writing in?

This entry was posted in Techniques and tagged usage writing on by

My writing work goes to several countries. Just in the past couple of days I’ve written for American, English, and Australian customers. Keeping the customer happy requires writing in the kind of English they want. You can’t always assume it from the country they’re in; I have a regular customer in the UK that wants American English.

Spelling

Spelling is the easiest part to adjust. Britain tends to use “-ise” where Americans use “-ize,” “-our” where we use “-or,” and “-re” where we use “-er.” Australia and New Zealand generally follow Britain. Canada does sometimes, but not always.
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Using and abusing technical words

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged usage on by

Good writers use words precisely. We know that we may lose things if we loose them. We know it’s a sad and messy occasion when someone literally explodes. Technical terms can be trickier to get right. They have complex definitions which not everyone understands. But they’re precise definitions, and it’s a shame to throw that precision away. Sometimes, too, people use those words to appear precise when they aren’t. That’s just another kind of imprecision. Let’s look at a few ways writers fall short of the accuracy which tech talk ought to have.
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The tyranny of SEO

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing on by

A huge amount of the text on the Web is written more to satisfy Google than to please or persuade readers. The name of this game is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. Websites maintain blogs not to inform, but to get in keywords that will improve their search ranking. There are sites that have blogs for no reason except to improve their search ranking. Writers make money from this — or at least they will till AI does it better. (Having machines create text to please other machines seems entirely appropriate.)

There is software to enhance SEO, analyzing pages and suggesting keywords to add. At the same time, Google’s software includes tests to detect keyword stuffing, repeating phrases incessantly for their own sake. I’d give an example, but that would hurt my search engine rank. :) There are WordPress plugins dedicated entirely to SEO. It drives trends, sometimes in a good way; people who wouldn’t add HTTPS support for security reasons will add it to get a slight boost in search rank.
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Don’t be an accidental plagiarist 1

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing on by

In the strange world of “content creation,” freelance writers often see requests to “rewrite this article” or “write an article similar to this one,” with a link to an article that the customer didn’t create and doesn’t own. They border on requests for plagiarism and sometimes step over the line. Is this a request you can fulfill in good conscience?

I’m going to skip over the issues of legal liability here. That’s for lawyers. Whether you get sued or blacklisted or not, plagiarism is appropriating the work of other writers to make money for yourself. It’s wrong.
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