[stylist] JAWS features for editing and writing guides

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Jackie,

First, with JAWS, there is a feature you can turn on called All
Punctuation. It will read out any punctuation as you go along in a
document. To my knowledge, there's no way for JAWS to distinguish words
like there and their, or to and too though.

Purdue has a fantastic website that not only has grammar rules and
information, it has info about the various writing styles such as MLA,
APA and Chicago Manual, which are predominantly used for academic and
scholarly writing, but some rules will apply as well for creative
writing especially when submitting work to editors and publishers.

If you have access to BARD, several writing books are available such as
Strunk and Whites Elements of Style, which is a good short one. There
are many others though as well.

Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan

Message: 10
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:38:16 -0700
From: "Jacqueline Williams" <jackieleepoet at cox.net>
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Pet PVS
Message-ID: <634F687DFE894FF1A8C6B3B0D2293502 at JackiLeePoet>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

Donna, Lynda, Bridget and all,
I am in this same boat. Since I try to remember to use the spell checker
with every message, I am terribly upset with myself when I forget and
later become aware of missing words, and other errors. It annoys me when
others can see red and green lines under words and punctuation and can
read exactly  what is wrong as when you should use "that" instead of
"which" and when a comma is necessary  with one and not the other. Why
does not JAWS read that information to me? I edited my mother's poetry
book, "Hardly Anybody Lives Forever," and also had five other people do
so. When it was published it had fifteen errors most of which got by the
spell checker and all other eyes. It appears that the eye sees what it
wants to see so the brain sees the correct word. If any of you have a
good source for brushing up on punctuation on the internet, please let
me know. I have resource books but can no longer read them and my
scanner makes many mistakes. Jackie -----Original