Posted on by seasonsshadow

Spellcheck and AI

For those of you who don’t know, I get paid for writing. I know I’m lucky and I wouldn’t change what I do or the company I work for. Even when people tell me AI is coming for my job and how programs like chatGPT will make me irrelevant in my field.

Now, maybe you’re intimately familiar with AI programs. Maybe you’re laughing to yourself about how the technology is promising but it’s far from being able to replace writers in long-form content. Or maybe you’re biting your nails because you’re the kind of person who knows very little about AI writing programs and it seems like they WILL take our jobs from us.

Either way, for laughs or reassurance, please allow me to tell you about a very frustrating thing that AI is fully capable of, but doesn’t do.

Spelling and grammar checks.

When I was growing up, we were assured computers were only as good as the information we put in them. It seemed kind of like casting a spell because you had to be really specific, you had to give it all the raw data or ingredients for what you wanted, and you needed to make sure it had the capabilities to actually process/think/calculate the thing you wanted it to do.

In today’s day and age, EVERYTHING is online. Including dictionaries. Including encyclopedias. Including translation rules. Including grammar. Including very detailed timelines of the evolution and modifications of the English language.

SO WHY THE HECK CAN’T AI SUCCESSFULLY CHECK MY SPELLING FOR ME!?

I have Grammarly installed, which is great for spelling and basic grammar. I write my drafts in Google Documents, which has spellcheck built in.

The other day, I submitted a draft and the word “accidently” got through Google’s spell check. (I believe they use Oxford but I have my suspicions.) When it got flagged by a coworker I panicked, thinking I had submitted the draft without doing my regular check. Pulling the original up, I re-ran it through the spellcheck and…

nothing

Nothing? Why wasn’t it at least flagging the “accidently” I KNEW was there?

Well, turns out “accidently” is defined by Merriam-Webster! It’s in the dictionary! MW, how could you do this to me!? Hopped into the Oxford Dictionary, and it was there too! Just to be thorough, I jumped into the Cambridge Dictionary, but it was completely absent! Same with dictionary.com. This, of course, sent me down a rabbit hole of searches.

What is the difference between “accidently” and “accidentally”? Where has “accidently” been used before? Why, when you google “accidently” vs “accidentally” does it not give you the concrete information that it’s incorrect?

Essentially, it has cropped up enough times in enough publications that “accidently” has now been defined and added to dictionaries.

Out of curiosity, I also searched for “nevermind”, which is one of my personal pet peeves. Oxford? It’s in there. And NOT JUST for the singular usage of “pay it no nevermind”. Merriam-Webster? No entry. Cambridge? Also no entry. The last one I checked was dictionary.com and to my delight, it was in there as JUST for the use of “pay them no nevermind.”

So, what I’m proposing is teaching AI English. All English. Every English. It’s a HARD language to learn, and honestly, that’s where I want AI’s powers of logic to go. Not into creating a procedural story with WAY too many keywords. Play around with an AI pickup line generator sometime! It’s a lot of fun, and the lines you get are SO STRANGE. Like, it takes all the information you give it, but it doesn’t understand how an actual human brain would take that information and put it together in a way that makes sense. No one would swoon over those lines.

This is fine. Styles are different across all writers. Why are we trying to make AI replicate THAT when it would be a million times more useful to make it tell us when we’ve used a word that’s only technically in the dictionary because SO MANY PEOPLE mess it up?

I’d love to set my location to “Canada” and have it ACTUALLY tell me how things are spelled in Canada. We have this gross soup of British English, American English, and French Canadian spellings, and it’s ROUGH to navigate! Especially when my location is set to Canada, but my work needs to be submitted in American English, preferably only using words that are in circulation as of this century. Can I please set my location to “Portland, OR” and have it prompt me to correct spellings and remove all my extra Canadian letters?

So here we are. This is where I think AI should be utilized. Please help everyone like a strict teacher, instead of like that weird kid who you pay to do your homework and only get a C.

References

Posted on by seasonsshadow

My OTN -> One True Nemesis

Affect vs. Effect

So the hope in writing a post on my OTN super duper early in this website is twofold.

1) I will get a handle on it a bit more and maybe help others in the future.

2) If this website takes off my deep dark grammatical failure will be hidden away in the recesses of time.

Not to be dramatic though.

I have read a lot of descriptors about how to use affect and effect. I have heard all of the tips and tricks. A is for Action and that is Affect (a verb!). E is for End result and that is Effect (a noun!). I have put it in order so it spells RAVEN (Remember! Affect is a Verb! Effect is a Noun!) If it was as easy as that, then I wouldn’t be here, lamenting my inability to keep the two straight.

Affect

Let’s start with Affect. The Verb. A refresher on verbs? Merriam-Webster considers the essential meaning of a verb “a word that is usually one of the main parts of a sentence and that expresses an action, an occurrence, or a state of being.”

If you are impacting something, you are probably affecting it. If you act on something, you are affecting it. If you change something, you are affecting it. If you influence or improve something, you are affecting it. Now, just in case you are thinking “well of course this is all very straight forward” I have two more for you. If you have steady, unchanging, baseline emotions, you have flat affect. Another, in case you were still feeling confident. If you are pretentious, or you are pretending to be someone you’re not trying to impress other people, you affect that trait. You can affect an accent. I mean, please don’t. But you could.

If Thing A is doing something to PRODUCE a desired result, then it is affect.

Effect

The noun! Similarly to its precursor, I will start with the Merriam-Webster definition. “A word that is the name of something (such as a person, animal, place, thing, quality, idea, or action) and is typically used in a sentence as subject or object of a verb or as object of a preposition.” I personally find this one helps me less but in the interest of treating these words fairly I pursue.

If the subject experiences the thing, it is effect. If you can replace “effect” with the word “result” or “consequence” then you have used it right (for most applications). If you are effective, you are successful. This is the end result.

Examples? Sure.

“This will take effect tomorrow.”

“Despite how many he had downed, the beer seemed to have no effect.”

“Nurse April handed over the husband’s personal effects.”

Closing thoughts

I read that if there’s an “a”/”an”/”the” in front of the subject/object then that’s a pretty good way to determine that the correct word is effect. I haven’t tested this myself but it seems to check out so far.

Just because I am an Agent of Chaos I will give you a counterintuitive example. It is better to effect change than it is to affect change. To affect change means that you are impacting the change, which is pretty good. To effect change is to create and bring about change. That is a much stronger movement in most everyone’s opinion.

Because affect and effect are my OTN, this post was hard to write. Even though I spent a week reading articles on the difference. This is a call to all Grammar Nazis. Please comment if you see something in this post that represents affect and effect poorly (besides my attitude). I’d love the opportunity to reign victorious over my nemesis!

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