Turns out the author omitted a period at the end of the previous sentence.
In my other test document, it flagged a capital “They” in what appeared to be the middle of a sentence. Sometimes a red flag turns out to be correct itself, but it looks like an error to PerfectIt because of another error.The sidebar remains unchanged while you’re editing in the text window. Bonus extra-like-like: Ever done a search (ctrl-F) in Word, clicked on a result, and edited the text? Then you had to make a couple of clicks to get back to where you were, and maybe scroll back down the list of results to find the one you were on? Not the case with PerfectIt. Some of the red flags weren’t fixable automatically: instead, PerfectIt prompted me to make the change myself within the text.( Remember rule #1 of editing: “Do no harm.”) Since I didn’t take the time to customize PerfectIt for my chosen style manual, I could check each red flag to make sure I wasn’t introducing a style error. I like that it allowed me to make each decision individually.If you use a spell/grammar checker, keep using it: PerfectIt is intended to complement, not replace it.This sounded promising: an automated way to catch the non-controversial, objective errors so I could focus more attention on style, flow, and tone. It won’t catch dangling modifiers or pronouns with vague antecedents, but it will certainly catch the fact that you hyphenated “start-up” in two places and closed it up in one. Recently I’ve seen a number of prominent editors casually mention their use of PerfectIt, a plug-in that will check your document against a pretty detailed style sheet. So do we throw up our hands and say, “Nobody’s perfect?” That’s why, when a manuscript absolutely MUST be error-free, the smart project manager has two or more editors go over it.
Take that a step further: Once an editor has thoroughly combed a manuscript, he or she may now be blind to certain kinds of errors. This isn’t so bad for a blog post or three-page essay, but what about an 85,000-word novel? But even if I can manage 100% accuracy, there’s no doubt it takes time (read: money) to scrutinize a manuscript and cross-check for consistency.
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