Prose Healing

Writing may be a creative pursuit, but there are some rules that should never be broken; the basic structure of a sentence—capital at the start, punctuation at the end—is sacrosanct.Writers never break those rules because they exist to assist the act of reading and are not a means of expression.

Did you notice the missing space between the last two sentences? Of course you did. When you write you fix such errors as you go. These are not mistakes in the way that a typo is a mistake. More likely it is the result of an edit—a change you make to your words that introduces an error as a side-effect.

Take deleting a word (always omit needless words). You would typically do this by double-clicking with the mouse or trackpad and pressing backspace. The word is gone, but if the word was in the middle of the sentence the two spaces either side of the deleted word are now collapsed together, resulting in a double space where only one is needed.

Another example would be breaking a run-on sentence into two independent sentences. You would do this by clicking or moving the cursor to the comma, hitting backspace and typing a period. But you still wouldn't be done. The following sentence would need to be capitalized—so you move the cursor again, press backspace again, and type the capital letter.

These tiny mechanical edits are trivial in isolation, but you perform them many times in any given writing session. They can consume more of your writing time than you might think. If you are curious to find out how much, I would recommend taking a screen recording of your desktop as you work. Notice how many keypresses aren't really adding new content, but rather fixing the "scars" created by edits.

Can't a computer do these for you? Well yes, and that is the very purpose of Ishmael's Prose Healing feature. Ishmael repairs the scars of edits automatically in the way you would do it yourself virtually every time.