Helping you tell better stories

Helping you tell better stories;

closer to your vision than you ever dreamt possible.

Wednesday

No More Excuses...




Well, this is nice: a free grammar checking plugin for my web browser now has a personalised referral link here and, if you sign up and install their browser extension, we both get a week of their Premium service free. Win-win.

There are so many reasons to have a smart virtual assistant watching over your shoulder, it's really crazy not to install one. Sure I don't agree with everything it suggests, and sometimes I just wanna riff on the English language, but it's great to have issues flagged up before you proofread.

Now a word of caution: I'm not certain that I'd recommend installing it in your main writing app, where free-flowing thoughts are of paramount importance and editing should be left to later, but online and for writing blogs it's very handy indeed. It really speeds things up.

When you first sign up there is an option for American or British English and in my case it was initially set to American but easy to change. Then as far as I can recall that's it, you're ready to go. It pops a little green G in the lower right corner of the text box you're typing in, which turns red and shows a number corresponding to flagged potential errors. You can ignore the suggestions if you wish.

Lastly, one thing you might want to look out for: in certain web forms I've noticed it caused sporadic flickering of the text box while it refreshed its overlaid suggestions, but once I realised the cause it was simple to disable it temporarily by rolling over the circle and clicking the power button symbol.

Try it out, see if it fits your needs, and let me know below in the comments if it was helpful to you.


RK


Monday

Do Better Movies Make More Money?


The always interesting Stephen Follows has impressed again with a simple bit of statistical analysis this week, probing into the correlation (or lack thereof) between a film's quality — as measured by a film's Metascore — and its profitability, where known.

There are some surprising results, especially when the numbers are broken down by genre.

Go here to read the full article.

RK