Your Guide to Writing the Perfect Story

The Wonders of Word! . . . And Spell Check

Have you ever read a story where you had to pause to decipher what someone was trying to say? Have you ever noticed and laughed whenever someone spelled a word wrong or used it in the improper context?

The question I should be asking is: is that you making people laugh? If the answer is "yes" then you have come to the right place.

I will be talking about all you can do to avoid this. By now, I've gone over all the most important things to do with punctuation but everyone makes mistakes. People have typos. Wattpad has already installed a spell check. Notice the red lines that underline those random words? Yeah, that's spell check doing its job. Right click on the word and a drop down menu will give you a list of what it thinks you were trying to spell.

This is a life-saving tool. Honestly. It can save you some embarrassment and make you look more sophisticated. Your readers will thank you.

Remember that even though it may say your writing has no spelling errors, that's not necessarily true. There are homonyms, homophones, homographs, etc. Computers are smart but not that smart. Most spell checkers don't know the context you are writing in. This is where a proof-reader may come in handy. Ask a good friend, a guardian, your brother/sister, a Wattpad editor... anyone. Someone will be happy to help you out.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk punctuation! I know what you're thinking: didn't we already do that? Well, yes, but even those who think that they are punctuation freaks have their little "oopsie daisies" when it comes to punctuation. Before you post a chapter, I highly suggest you copy and paste your chapter on a Word document and fix all the places where it is underlined in green.

Don't be lazy; it's important! Especially if after all this you still haven't really figured out how to use a comma or the difference between a colon and a semi-colon (you know who you are). This isn't saying that you don't need to know all those punctuation rules — you do. Because when you go to format your sentences and paragraphs, you may have to decide between a semi-colon and a dash. And it'll save you a lot of time fixing your mistakes if you do it right the first time. Part of becoming a writer is knowing how to structure a sentence. If you can't do that... well, you need to step it up.

The point is, Word is like a spotter in gymnastics — it catches you if you fall, but you aren't intended to in the first place.

I hope that this helped any of you who struggle with punctuation and grammar! Thanks so much for reading. 

P.S. I used spell check on this so let's all hope it worked.