Three More Tools for Your Proofreader’s Toolbox
Tools like After the Deadline are a great safety net, but you’ll still want to make sure your writing is clear and grammatically correct. Keep upping your grammar game with help from these three sites:
Daily Writing Tips has posts on everything from common grammar errors to homonyms (their, they’re, there) to rules for writing numbers, and beyond. It’s a great one-stop-shop to find answers to common writing questions, as well as the more obscure.
Grammar Girl dishes the dirt on grammar issues large (avoiding the passive voice) and small (knelt, or kneeled?). Best of all, her posts are quick, fun reads.
Apostrophe Abuse is great for a laugh, and for examples of what not to do. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at a misplaced apostrophe on a flyer or billboard, this blog’s for you.
After the Deadline for Firefox – Released
We received addons.mozilla.org approval of After the Deadline recently and we’re pleased to announce the release of the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox.
After the Deadline works in text areas on most webpages. Simply push a button (F7) or click 
to check your spelling, style, and grammar no matter where you are.
This add-on has all the After the Deadline features. You can enable the style checker options you use in the preferences and you can ignore errors to prevent them from coming up.
Links of interest:
- Download After the Deadline for Firefox
- View the documentation
- Visit the homepage: http://firefox.afterthedeadline.com
After the Deadline is an open source proofreading technology. You can also embed it into web applications using TinyMCE, jQuery, and CKEditor.
WordCamp NYC Ignite: After the Deadline
I see that the After the Deadline demonstration for WordCamp NYC has been posted. This short five-minute demonstration covers the plugin and its features.
Before you watch this video, can you find the error in each of these text snippets?
There is a part of me that believes that if I think about these issues, if I put myself through the emotional ringer, I somehow develop an immunity for my own family. Does writing a book about bullying protect your children from being bullied? No. I realize that this kind of thinking is completely ridiculous.’’
[Op-Ed] … Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to role back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting rights to women’s rights.
The success of Hong Kong residents in halting the internal security legislation in 2004, however, had an indirect affect on allowing the vigil here to grow to the huge size it was this year.
These examples come from the After Deadline blog, When Spell-Check Can’t Help. You can watch the video to learn how After the Deadline can help and what the errors are. You can also try these out at http://www.polishmywriting.com.
You can also view the WCNYC session on how embed After the Deadline into an application.
Where I’d like to see AtD go…
I often get emails from folks asking for support for different platforms. I love to help folks and I’m very interested in solving a problem. I don’t have the expertise in all the platforms folks want AtD to support. Since it’s my occupation, I plan to keep improving AtD as a service, but here is my wish list of places where I’d like to see AtD wind up:
Wikipedia
I’d like to meet Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. First because I love Wikipedia and it tickles me pink that so much knowledge is available at my finger tips. I’m from the last generation to grow up with hard bound encyclopedias in my home.
Second, because I’d love to explore how After the Deadline could help Wikipedia. AtD could help raise the quality of writing there.
Since the service will be open source there won’t be an IP cost necessarily. The only barriers are AtD support in the MediaWiki software and server side costs. Fortunately I’ve learned a lot about scaling AtD from working with WordPress.com and given a number of edits/hour and server specs, I could come up with a good guess about how much horsepower is really needed.
I’d love to write the MediaWiki plugin myself but unfortunately I’m so caught up trying to improve the core AtD product that this is beyond my own scope. If anyone chooses to pick this project up, let me know, I’ll help in any way I can.
Online Office Suites and Content Management Systems
There are a lot of people cutting and pasting from Word to their content management systems. There are many web applications either taking over the word processor completely or for niche tasks. For this shift to really happen these providers need to offer proofreading tools that match what the user would get in their word processor. None of us are supposed to depend on automated tools but a lot of us do.
Abiword, KWord, OpenOffice, and Scribus
It’s a tough sell to say a technology like AtD belongs in a desktop word processor. I say this because AtD consumes boatloads of memory. I could adopt it to keep limited amounts of data in memory and swap necessary stuff from the disk. If there isn’t a form of AtD suitable for plugging into these applications, I hope someone clones the project and adapts it to these projects. If someone chooses to port AtD to C, let me know, I’ll probably give a little on my own time and will gladly answer questions.
After the Deadline 
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