7,000,000 words in Grammarly and still tapping away
The thing about writing professionally is that you probably don’t measure how many words you type. Or edit. Or read. Or retype over and over again. Or post, and so on and so forth. You just write, edit, move forward, refresh a page once or twice maybe, come back… and keep going. Always a job to do, and all that. There hasn’t really been a metric for ‘how many words does someone do’ before (to my knowledge, at least). Before I joined Grammarly, I only thought of word count through my word docs when someone slapped a strict word count on me, and I had to edit down sentences one word at a time while cursing (politely, since it was at work) at grammar and anyone who believed 100 words was an acceptable paragraph limit.
As you can see in that screenshot up there, I didn’t reach 7,000,000 words because I’ve been with Grammarly since its founding. I joined in December 2019… so basically around a year and a bit? I only joined due to the fact that my boss pointed out that any form of editing tool is helpful when you write in volume. It helped her, and as an extra incentive, she had an ongoing competition with my other boss on how many words they had written since they joined.
(If anyone is interested in this competition, the boss currently languishes in the 2,300,000 range.)
The only impression I had of Grammarly back then was that extremely aggressive marketing push back a few years, where Grammarly was on Youtube, on TV, everywhere, with good-looking fashionable young adults smiling vaguely at their phones and tablets before endorsing how Grammarly helped their business emails. When I downloaded it, I realised it was just a great way to have a 100% there extra eye that would highlight potential areas that could have issues.
Grammarly doesn’t have eyestrain, doesn’t get headaches, doesn’t have a weekly booking schedule for Zoom calls, or lunch breaks, or the requirement to stay on their good side, after all. It’s a very good omniscient sort of grammar cleaner, even if it starts faltering on long documents, misses the point of colloquial speech, and struggles with ‘human tone’ things. But that’s what a human is there for, so it’s fine.
Its weekly email also makes it fun by providing statistics on how what ‘tones’ you’ve used and how you compare to other Grammarly users.
So finishing up on Grammarly… Not the perfect editing tool just yet, but it tries its best and is very helpful for those who are time-poor and write in volume. A functional five star out of five review.
Writing professionally
When you have a job, you write it out. You edit, try your best to fit the brief, submit or post, and you move on. It’s really just as simple as that.
I’m sure there are people who have reached 10,000,000 in a year who say the same thing. Build up decent writing stamina, and you’re just crunching through what you have to do. Having been in a few writing classes and listened in on a few professional writers who have gone to share their experiences, passion and liking your writing is a great motivator to continue writing (or to choose to pursue writing as a career), but passion and inspiration are unreliable when your writing output needs to be stable. Stability is necessary because your body doesn’t automatically stop wanting to eat when your muse flees to another dimension.
Agonise over your personal writing projects as much as you want, as that’s probably your art child. If you’re going to work though, it’ll be easier to keep your head straight and attitude professional, and just crunch through. You’ll get better, promise, especially with people around to help and tools like Grammarly (or whatever editing software you like).
Not much else to it, but forge forward.
Good luck, writing enthusiasts.