Onion basket, Farmer’s Market, Cambridge, N.Y.

Finally.

In a brief blog comment about my panic attack, Marcia became the first of my many blog readers to notice: “This is one of the best things you have ever written. (And no typos, for some reason!)”

I was waiting for it, Marcia. The reading is my new eerily smart proofreading program.

After years of whining about my now famous typos, it took the spelling snobs (not you, Marcia) several weeks to notice that they were almost all gone.

Some of you will cheer.

I do have a new proofreading program, and it’s nagging me into shape.

For years, I’ve been getting snarky messages from school teachers, grammarians, and anal readers about my typos. I’ve written about them quite a bit and gotten attached to them. I imagine there will always be some, no system is perfect, and I already miss them in some ways.

I don’t have many trademarks as a writer, that was one of them.

I’ve defended my typos, stubbornly, and consistently. They have been with me for a long time.

We Dyslexics are taught not to hide our disability, but to learn to live with it, and to be upfront with it.

So I was.  People don’t understand Dyslexia, you often can’t see the letters and mistakes that other people see. I can spend hours reading and re-reading my text and still not see a typo that is right under my nose. I don’t want to spend my life doing that.

I admit I was stubborn about it. And defensive. I was proud of getting past this, I was told that Dyslexics couldn’t be bloggers.

I don’t like being told what to write, not by people, not by software.

When I started my blog, I spend days looking at other blogs on the Web. I didn’t like too many of them.

I saw people so obsessed with spelling and “good English” and so wary of making any mistakes or misspellings or screwing up subjunctive clauses that they didn’t write much. They were too busy trying not to look dumb.

The clean and spare sites seem contrived to me, constipated in away. They were too corporate, too slick.

My idea – my Dyslexia had something to do with it – was to spend my time writing and taking photos, not agonizing over spelling and proofreading. At the time, there were no proofreading programs, just me and the blog and an online dictionary.

I wanted people to see something new on the blog every time they looked, often more than one new thing. I want my blog to be genuine, not polished. And productive. It makes me crazy to think of somebody coming across the blog and seeing nothing new, photos will do fine.

I don’t mean to brag, but my vision worked out for me. Most of those tight little blogs I looked at are gone.

My blog audience has mushroomed, I get about four million hits a year, nearly 400,000 of them unique visitors. People want ideas more than they want the perfect spelling and bless them, and nuts to my English teachers, who worked hard to make me feel dumb.

I got complaints, but they were from an infinitesimal fraction of my readers. Statistically, they didn’t register.

That doesn’t mean the typos weren’t important, or that I shouldn’t look for a way to reduce or eliminate them. Misspellings don’t mean the writing is bad, typos don’t mean the writing is good.

I have never believed that proper spelling and correct grammar had anything to do with quality writing. Mostly, it made young writers think they were stupid if they didn’t obsess on memorizing grammar. To me, teachers in America seemed to be teaching children that they couldn’t write, not that they could. I was one of those children.

I will miss those anguished letters from retired English teachers, they never gave up on me and groaned through thousands of posts year after year. Most of you are still here, and this post is for you.

But the truth is I know many brilliant writers who can’t spell worth a shit, and who write beautifully.

This is why there are editors. But I don’t have an editor for the blog.

I like to think I’m capable of change and growth, and I began to hear that some proofreading systems are sound, and don’t slow things down. I waited for the right one.

Last month, I found a highly recommended writer’s proofreading program (I’m sorry, I’m not ready to share it yet, maybe never. It’s personal) and decided to try it out.

I liked what I saw.

The program caught about a half-dozen to a dozen typos each time, and it also made some excellent suggestions about brevity, repetition,  and clarity. This one has some AI in it, life my Iphone, like Siri. The reviews say it grows with the writer and learns his or her style over time. Poor thing.

It is annoying sometimes.

We fight about language and clauses, but I like the fact it sharpens and cleans up my writing without losing its informality and voice, at least so far. I move my text into the software edit page and it lights up with suggestions and red and green and blue lines. It insults and challenges me to paragraph after paragraph.

I do fight back sometimes. I don’t want to write like everybody else or even spell-like everybody else. I want me to be me, for better or worse.

That is what voice is all about. Writing isn’t like corporate work, and you want to stand out. And I do fear these proofreading systems will ultimately make all of us sound alike.

There are no prompts for style or individuality.

But I will be honest. I was happy to see Marcia’s message. It took long enough.  As with anything important in life, something will be lost, and something will be gained. A new era for the blog.

Now, people can just squawk about what I write, not how I spell. Thanks for coming along with me on the ride, we aren’t done yet.

And one more thing: if you see a typo, I’d rather you kept it to yourself. This thing costs a lot of money.