Ishmael
Prose Healing
Heal the scars of editing
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.
The following are a few of the prose healing actions Ishmael provides. All of them are live in the browser demo, so you can try each one as you read.
Fixing spaces
When you delete a word via a selection, Ishmael will collapse double spaces into one. This is one of a class of prose healing edits regarding spaces. For instance, if you paste text mid-sentence, Ishmael will ensure there is one space on either side. If you collapse two paragraphs into one, Ishmael will make sure there is a space between sentences.
Note that if you want to replace a word with another, you wouldn't need to delete it first. Select the word and start typing and there will be no double spaces to heal.
Auto Capitalization
Prose healing will auto-capitalize sentences if you delete a word or paste text at the start of a sentence.
New paragraphs
Ishmael will heal new paragraphs by adding a period to the end of the current paragraph (if required) and capitalizing the first sentence of the newly created paragraph. You also don't need to be especially accurate with the cursor when creating new paragraphs. Hit Enter when the cursor is anywhere on a word, and the new paragraph will be created at the end of that word. This is based on the observation that you almost never want to split a word across paragraphs.
Dialogue tags
If you have a line of dialogue that ends in a period, and you later add a dialogue tag ("he said", etc.), then Ishmael will replace that period with a comma. The inverse is also true. If you later remove the dialogue tag, Ishmael will restore the dialogue punctuation to a period.
Customizing Prose Healing
If you spend some time writing with prose healing features on, you may come to find they are practically invisible—just quietly saving you time. But if any one of them annoys you, they are easy to disable in settings. Ishmael is highly customizable to your personal writing style.
