Inexperienced Editor Wannabes Using AI To Do Their Job.

My experience with Medium Editor wannabes has been nothing but a big disappointment. I hate to say this, knowing my articles will hardly be seen without their acceptance. What are my chances of success on Medium without a publisher, I’ll never be Boosted, that’s for sure.

I say ‘wannabes’ because I don’t believe these people are qualified to make these crucial decisions, very few have any previous experience, and let’s face it, Medium publisher/editor qualifying requirements don’t exist. A professional editor usually has years of experience, while most Medium Editors only have experience editing their articles, with a biased opinion.

Medium Publisher Requirements:

• You must have a Medium account with an active membership subscription in order to create a Medium publication.

That’s it, you’re now qualified to publish and edit articles submitted to your publishing page on Medium. Depending on the data source, this means there are anywhere from 50–100 million potential editors currently on Medium. Are they all qualified to judge your work… I don’t think so. That’s why they use AI to edit your submissions, they don’t know how to edit.

Sure, it’s important to use proper grammar, after all, you don’t want to look like a fool. But when it comes to the way you express yourself, only you can do that. It’s your style, your MO, your personality, Grammarly can’t ‘fix’ that, it doesn’t know how to create ‘emotion’, it doesn’t understand what it means to ‘express’ yourself, it doesn’t understand your intentions.

Grammarly

So, why do editors use Grammarly in the first place? Well, it‘s’ easy to use and diversified. It corrects spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, hence the name. Grammarly saves time for the editor, while continuously providing soulless suggestions for sentences that it has determined to be erroneous, thus creating a time-consuming nightmare for the author.

Meanwhile, the editor looks like he or she is hard at work, editing up a storm, when in reality, they have allowed AI to do their work for them. I wouldn’t be surprised to find editors who haven’t even read the article, they just apply Grammarly and move on to the next project. It’s a phony process that is insulting to many writers, myself included.

Unfortunately, Grammarly does not have the ability to interpret the subtle influences of human emotion and personal expression, this results in a lack of comprehension about the ‘intention’ of the author, replacing our words with its neutered nonsense, eliminating the ‘creative’ process that we all utilize when we express ourselves with the written word.

Wasn’t that the whole point of joining Medium… to express ourselves?

I joined Medium because I wanted to express myself, my guess is that’s why most people do. Having a platform where you, as an individual, can write short or lengthy articles about anything you like (within certain guidelines), free to express yourself as openly as you desire, with all the emotion you care to share. It’s good for you, and it’s good for Medium.

This is why it bothers me that editors use Grammarly so often, it strips the human element from the equation, the story is no longer your personal expression, it’s now partly created by AI, the one thing almost all Medium editors, and certainly Medium itself, say is forbidden for us to use.

HOW IRONIC!

Medium editors using AI software to correct articles we’ve been told can’t be written using AI software. I can’t wrap my head around it. Medium should restrict editors to correcting only spelling and punctuation, thus allowing the writers to structure a sentence the way they feel it should read, emphasizing the flow of the story as the author intended.

It’s Not Just My Opinion

According to Wikipedia, “some users have criticized Grammarly for incorrect suggestions, ignorance of tone and context, and reduction of writers’ freedom of expression.” In addition, several search detection engines will quantify Grammarly corrections as AI-generated. Personally, I feel Grammarly sucks the humanity right out of the article.

On occasion I’ve allowed Grammarly to make the change it suggested, only to have another issue immediately pop up at the other end of the sentence due to the alteration. Grammarly now finds fault in the new sentence… the one it made me change. It’s like playing a grammar version of ‘Whack-a-mole’. Grammarly makes changes, regardless of the consequences.

Many of you may be thinking, “What a baby, can’t you take it? Why are you so thin-skinned?” “Can’t you accept a little constructive criticism?”.

I can handle constructive criticism as much as the next person, however, I don’t believe ‘criticism’ belongs on Medium. This place should be all about support. Support from Medium and support from other writers. If a publisher had given me a $500 advance on an article I submitted I wouldn’t even have a problem with the critique, but that’s not the case here.

Many people who become editors do so because they like the power they feel when they ‘tell people what to do’ when they are ‘in complete control’. It’s an addiction, like most power trips, and many people suffer from this misguided trait. Let me give you a real-life example I experienced when I worked for Habitat for Humanity at their Denver location.

My Personal Experience

About 8 years ago, when I lived in Denver Colorado, I worked for Habitat for Humanity (HFH) at one of their Restore locations. Every year HFH staff picks one day when employees are encouraged to work a different job title in another department. HFH believed this helped employees appreciate the job their coworkers did and improved workplace relationships.

My choice was the ‘website blog’ writer position. My assignment that day was to interview a recent recipient of an HFH home and to write a blog about her experience. Returning to the Habitat office building after the interview I began to work on my article for the HFH website. It took me about 90 minutes to write the original submission.

I went to Kathy’s (not her real name) office and presented my article for her review. She immediately got out her red pen, making more than a dozen editorial suggestions. When she finished, she handed the paper to me, requesting that I make the corrections. I returned to my cubicle and began working on the issues she wanted me to address.

For the record, there were no spelling or punctuation corrections.

30 minutes later I returned to her office with my revised edition. She quickly looked it over, again making several corrections she wanted me to make. When I returned to my computer I looked at her latest suggestions, realizing most of the things she wants corrected were the same things she told me to put in the previous time she gave me ‘suggestions’.

It was then I realized she didn’t know what she was doing, she was just pretending, she was ‘playing’ editor. To make my point, I removed everything that had been corrected and went with the first draft I had handed her. Later, when she read this recent ’revision’, the original paper I presented, she briefly glanced at it and said, “Okay, that’s good”. Wow!

So all of the suggestions she had made were phony. She just wasted three hours of my life making me tinker with the article, twice suggesting changes, only to end up approving the original article as I had written it. This is a good example of an ‘editor wannabe’. She didn’t know what she was doing, she just wanted to appear to be ‘in control’, to play boss.

Editor Wannabe’s

I believe many Medium Editors play the same game. Making silly unnecessary changes to the copy so that it looks as if they know what they are doing and are a necessary part of the publishing process. If they want to be real editors, just stick to checking the spelling and punctuation, and leave the structure and word flow to the authors.

I’ve had editors change the spelling of my words to the British version of the word, when the article was clearly about a National Landmark in the United States and targeted toward Americans. (Nonsensical) I’ve even had editors tell me to change the title, and once, the whole article. (Insulting)

I’ve removed most of my stories from their respective publishers. I can use AI to locate minor errors as easily as any Medium Editor, but I will not allow Grammarly to change any word, phrase, or sentence. It might not be ‘perfect’, but it’ll be my words, and that’s alright. Who needs an editor?

I’m just here to express myself with the written word, that’s what matters.

One last thing…

Writers

As a writer, using Grammarly as a tool to improve your writing skills is not a bad idea, as long as you don’t allow it to dictate what you write. Use the tool to guide your thoughts, not replace them. If you hand over control to Grammarly, you’ll probably spend most of your time playing grammar ‘Whack-a-mole’.

If nothing else, Grammarly is a decent spell-check app.

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On Reflection:

As I said earlier, you want to have an error free article, without spelling or punctuation mistakes. You want the basic function, the nuts and bolts of your article to pass inspection. AI can be a tremendous tool for this kind of editing and should be used to save you time by exposing all the errors.

However, when it comes to the way you ‘express’ yourself, the way you tell your story, the only thing that matters is… Does your story make sense to the reader and does the flow of your article retain the readers interest long enough to complete the story? Grammarly cannot ‘fix’ the way you express yourself, that’s all on you.

The Bottom Line

When you use Grammarly suggestions to replace your words or phrases, you are using AI to write your article, it’s that simple.

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Thanks for reading my article.

Info Sources: In addition to my personal experience, most ‘researched’ information was gathered from the websites noted below and from various Google searches.

• To learn how to become a Medium Publisher, visit Medium’s help page concerning publishers here.
• To visit the official Grammarly website go here.
• To learn more about Grammarly visit its Wikipedia page here.
• *Public Domain WikiMedia image used with permission via Creative Commons License BY-SA 3.0 Deed and/or BY-SA 4.0 Deed