Good grammar, style and humor: writing

Little known fact of the world: adding spell check to Firefox was one of the best things that happened to my life.

You see, I am a stickler for proper spelling and grammar. I am fairly confident in my grammar skills, but I know that I have the spelling abilities of a ten-year-old. So, in the past, I would write up whatever I was blogging or sharing and then copy it into Word to check for spelling errors and then paste it back into whatever screen I was using at the time. It was time consuming and frustrating. And then one day after Firefox had finished up an update I noticed a familiar red squiggly line under a word I had tragically misspelled. I ventured over to right-click to see why this was happening and several options were listed to correct my error. Suddenly, I was safe to write online again. True, I would be forced to rely solely on my own skills to ensure that my sentences followed proper structure and grammar rules...but no longer would word be needed to check for spelling errors. 

"That's great, Courtney. But how is this life changing?" Just wait, you uproarious (spelled correctly) crowd, I'm getting there. 

I am a firm believer that in order to write, you need to be in the right head and physical space - and I think that includes your writing medium. If I'm going to write an academic paper - it's going to be in Word. If I'm going to write a news article - it's going to be in InCopy. If I'm going to blog - it's going to be in a small, rich text format editing screen. There's just something about this screen and it's tiny window and limited formatting abilities that tells me to write for me. Not for a paper. Not for Seminar. Not for the news. But for me - and you, by extension. 

So again - how is that life changing? Well, it's life changing because it falls into the category of small, somewhat ridiculous, things that make me happier than they should. Spell check in Firefox combined with good grammar, style and humor (see above title) add up to writing - one of the most fundamental parts of my hypothetical pie chart of happiness. And I believe that pies, even the chart variety, are better when shared. Hence the blog of things that make me happy.


And thus we have a blog entry that serves two purposes. It both sets up the blog's overall theme and acts as the first wedge in the pie chart. 

Tastes like apple, I think.