We shouldn't necessarily pay attention to Word's Grammar corrections

Courtesy Pixabay

In a draft of a book I'm writing, there's this sentence: 

They were dressed in a variety of ways, one in an expensive suit, another in overalls; one in a track suit and running shoes, another in a jersey and gardening trousers.

A perfectly reasonable sentence for a Kiwi author to write: jersey being the common equivalent of a 'pullover' or a 'sweater.' Which doesn't explain Word's idea that the following are two better and more grammatical alternatives: 

'...some jersey and gardening trousers.' Or, '...in jersey and gardening trousers.' I'm a bit hard-pressed to know what they think 'jersey' means here. I'm intending the first of these two definitions: 

a close-fitting, knitted sweater or shirt.

or a plain-knit, machine-made fabric of wool, silk, nylon, rayon, etc, characteristically soft and elastic, used for garments. 

A football jersey is a prime example of such a thing. Of course, I could be thinking of a Jersey cow, but it's unlikely in the context. 

It seems as if Word is somehow thinking of the person being dressed in the material called jersey as opposed to the garment. Which plainly doesn't make sense. Few people merely wear the fabric of something, especially when doing the gardening. Most of them wear a garment made out of the fabric. 

Word already has a thing about my not using a comma after such sentences openings as 'Of course he went...' or 'After all it was...' Their idea that this kind of opening phrase automatically requires a comma is false; it's grammatical only in the sense that some sentences do require the comma. It depends on what follows. 

I rely hugely on Word's Spellchecker, because my typing isn't topnotch, and it can be easy to miss a spelling error. Of course Word isn't always right on these either: you have to keep an eye on them, just as they're keeping an eye on you...

PS: I notice the man in the photo is wearing gumboots, so I think the sentence in my draft should read: They were dressed in a variety of ways, one in an expensive suit, another in overalls; one in a track suit and running shoes, another in a jersey, gardening trousers and gumboots.

Uploading to Smashwords

I'm just about to upload my book, Grimhilda!, to Smashwords. Or rather, I was going to, except that I needed to ask them one question, and now have to wait until they get back to me. Which hopefully won't be more than 24 hours.

It's been an interesting process. The original document I used for uploading to Kindle wasn't able to be used for the Smashwords site, not even as an epub version. I had to strip the Word doc right down to the bare bones and start again, which was a bit of a pain, as it meant putting in italics and bolds and such all over again, and reformatting the headings and taking out colour. This version is the super simplified one, but at least it should be of a quality that it will adapt to any e-reader going, pretty much. That's the Smashword promise.

I spent Friday reading through the enormous Smashwords instruction page - I'd already worked my way through the e-book, Smashwords Style Guide, while reformatting the book, so I was familiar with a lot of what was in the instructions page, but there seemed to be considerably more detail, and repetition. Anyway, I went through it and marked it and made notes and updated some things on my file, and so on. All in all, I'm hoping that the document I now have should be ready to be uploaded without any hitch. But we'll see. Both the book and the instructions page warn that it's normal for the first upload to produce a few Autovettor 'errors' which have to be repaired before you can proceed.

Patience is required. At least I'm not waiting around for months before the book appears. That's one of the great wonders of the digital age that we can produce books (of varying kinds) in such a short time. Such services as Eoncode web to print solutions make the process remarkably speedy. Of course, you still have to have something ready for the printer that will pass muster, but that's all part of the learning process. This year has been full of learning curves, and I don't suppose they're over yet.