I am currently creating the finishing touches on my story “Forbidden Decent.” That what I would like to talk about today. How can you take your story and make it better(other than using the spell checker)?
I found a really cool program called WhiteSmoke. It’s a little expensive($79.99 for a one year license) but it is amazing as to what it can find. Yes, it does check spelling, but so much more! Grammar, punctuation, style, and structure checks as well. I use MS Word as my word processer. It tells me immediately when it detects errors. But after one use of WhiteSmoke (its trial ware) I was convinced it was worth it.
All you do is highlight a section you want to check and press F2. It will find errors neither you nor Word realized where there.
It’s not perfect though. There have been a few occasions where it will suggest I change a word. So I change the it and then it says to change it back to what is was in the first place. Silly.
The other tip I would like to pass along is a book I have found. The art of stylizing sentences by K.D. Sullivan and Ann Longknfe. It has some introductory grammar stuff where people make most of their mistakes and then spends the rest of the book describing sentence patterns. It shows a writer how to elegantly use colons and create some amazing sentences. Each pattern is detailed with a short explanation, several examples, amazing professional examples. (that was pattern # 4)
I haven’t read the book cover to cover, I have just paged through it and found some patterns that really seem to fit well in my story. Here is a line from my story that I felt needed help.
“As I opened this door, I was assailed with the stench of feces and ammonia.”
Yeah…not so wonderful. But how about after using pattern 7a:
“Upon opening the door, I was assailed with a foul stench–feces and ammonia–that made my stomach churn.
Using this pattern gave more meaning to my story and made it more entertaining to read.
wr414andmycats 
This is really interesting, I’ll have to check the program out. I suppose it raises the possibility of compromising your own personal writing style, if it gives suggestions of how to make it better, but the suggestions aren’t how you would necessarily write it. Even still, if it shows that areas could be better, and gives suggestions of how to do so, then it would cut down on the hours spent reading and re-reading sentences to figure out why they don’t sound right. Nice discovery.