Catching up on weekend news
Generally: Festival events, preparations for the Assumption Day festivals at various churches on 15th August, busy nights in the village square, a couple of private helicopters coming in and out, many boats, a cruise ship on Saturday, hot weather (34 degrees in the shade in the courtyard), clear skies, live music playing at various venues and lots of happy holiday makers.
At home: finishing draft two of ‘The Witchling’, the follow-up to ‘The Saddling’, about to start on another major project which has a deadline, cleaning windows, cleaning the floors, washing the sofa cushions, watering and feeding the plants, going out to dinner with friends, long walks for Neil, up to To Vrisi at sunrise, a couple of jogs back, rehearsing a dance routine, checking arrangements for the civil partnership next month, sending emails, doing some blog admin, reading, watching television and doing some shopping.
These days, when I am writing, I use a couple of add-ins to my Word programme. Grammarly is one, and I use this one for checking my punctuation and any obvious typos; it doesn’t always catch all of them. The other one I have started using is called ‘Pro Writing Aid’, and you can use both online or have them plugged into your computer; not physically. This one is much more detailed although I find it’s grammar check and punctuation not as good as Grammarly, which is why I use both. It has checks for all kinds of things such as repeated words, clichés, over-used words, as in over-used generally by people, words like all, like, quickly, felt, saw, etc. It also has a full analysis function which I’m now going to run to see what it says about this post so far…
Average sentence length (28.3) but should be between 11 to 18. That’s because my first two sentences up the top are lists. Sentence variety, ok, no long sentences found (which seems to contradict the average sentence length report, average reading age (10.9), other ‘readility’ indexes fine. (I just noticed that word ‘readility’ I think they’ve abbreviated readability.) No house style issues, thank you, and no ‘sticky’ sentences found, but I do score a glue index of 46.3%, and the target is up to 40%, and I haven’t worked out what they mean by glue index. I know now, I just looked it up. Glue words are the most common words in the English language; in, on, was, that, will, be, think, much, have, with, etc. I use a lot of them in the blog.
I have no idea where that bit of writing chat came from, but it has made me realise that I now need to run all the pieces for the forthcoming ‘Symi, Stuff & Nonsense’ through Pro Writer Aid and boy, is it going to have some fun with some of them.
It’s a wonder I get any time to write this blog. Sometimes I don’t, which is why on some days you find only photos, but on other days I have half an hour to ramble on. Example: what’s you’ve just read. The photos today, are from Neil and there are more to come through the week. Have a good one!
