Ugh, Brain! I agree, that is an annoying one, yet an easy mistake to make and not catch, since it's also a word. It's not like spell check will catch it. I don't know that Google Docs has ever changed Brian to brain for me, but it used to tell me that Howie was spelled wrong all the time. I think I finally had to add Howie's name to the custom dictionary so it would stop giving it the red squiggle. It's weird what words it recognizes and what words it doesn't.
Edited to add: Also, the Google thesaurus is freaking hilarious! When I'm struggling with word choice, I'll often right click on a word and click on "Define" to get some synonyms. Some of the ones they have for body parts and bodily fluids crack me up!
Which is annoying because why would brain be capitalized or say anything! Google, you should know better! It doesn't tell me in the documents that Howie is spelled wrong (it does here on the forum), but I know that I didn't add it to the dictionary. It tells me all the time that the country names are spelled wrong, but not consistently. Sometimes it's fine and sometimes it's "spelled wrong" and I have no idea why. It never tells me that Minako's name is spelled wrong either. I really don't get the logic. But it also probably hates me because Howie uses the "royal we" and it blue lines everything when I match the verb tenses to the "we" but the rest of the sentence seems off to it. Whatever I wrote always sounds correct if I say it out loud though.
I'm going to need an example for your edited to add so that I can laugh too. Also I can see why you would get tired of typing the same body part or bodily fluid over and over again.
I don't typically make many grammatical mistakes, unless they're typos I didn't catch, but one that I've noticed I used to write a lot was "So-and-so's heart sunk" instead of "sank." Now that sounds about as bad to me as saying "I seen" instead of "I saw," but apparently it used to sound okay. I've been trying to fix that one when I come across it in the stories I care about.
"Rose" versus "raised" was one that got me all the time in the initial run of PBox; I changed so many of them in the edit. Which is so silly, because I
know that the something or someone causing whatever is a big part of raise versus rise. I probably just thought "Oh, in this third person omniscient dark place, 'rose' sounds so much more poetic" or something.
The biggest typos I make and don't always catch are leaving out words. That is definitely a case of my brain going faster than my fingers, or sometimes it's the result of me accidentally deleting one too many words when I edit a sentence. That's where the text-to-speech, if I can stop laughing at it, will come in handy. I used it to listen to the last few chapters of Bethlehem before I posted them, and I do think it helped.
That's the main reason I started using the text-to-speech. Catch the things my brain fills in, please! As long as it's helping, even if you laugh at it the whole time, then it is worthwhile to use! I'm glad it's done you some good service.
What about things you do that you know are considered "bad writing," but do anyway? For example, I enjoy using occasional adverbs and dialogue tags other than said. Necessary or not, sometimes I just like the way they sound.
For dialogue tags, "interjected" is the one I find myself still using sometimes. "Interjected adverbly" or "questioned adverbly" were all over PBox. I tried so hard to get rid of most of them, but then I worry I may now have the opposite problem. Suddenly, everyone is a busy body who is always doing something as they speak! I blame language arts at the time we were growing up when we got told that "said" was lazy. And it's not wrong, said is lazy when you could show the characters' tears or something, but "'insert dialogue here,' so-and-so sobbed sadly" is also lazy... and just kind of weird. I feel like there was detail missing in the "said is lazy" instruction. "Said is lazy because..." The other way I've been trying to get around it is making everyone's speech patterns so abundantly clear that there's never a question of who is speaking. It's harder when everyone is together than when it's just two or three of them having a conversation.
Oh, I know one that I do so much, it's abysmal. "So-and-so clenched their fist." I don't know why I wrote "so-and-so," it's usually Nick. "Nick clenched his fist." "Nick's clenched fist shook violently." "Nick growled and clenched his fist." [An aside... Yo, they're demons; I figure they can actually growl like dogs. And I hope that when I've written it, anyone reading has read it as "*growling sound* I'll murder you!" because that's exactly what I meant rather than "A rough and gravely voice shouted, 'I'll murder you!'" (Though people growling dialogue would be another one in general, probably, but that's not what I'm focusing on.)] By definition, a fist is a clenched hand! It's so stupid. But "balled his hands" sounds so lame. And I could use hundreds of words that show he's angry (and often do as well), but in the movie in my head, he's ready to punch 90% of the time, so y'all should know that too. I don't have a good solution for this one. I 100% know that it's bad and I do it abundantly.
