Hi all...I agree with what almost all of you are saying. I've noticed some poorly written reviews, but I myself am still getting the hang of this, mostly because I'm not used to writing with a word limit, and I'm used to having an editor. I joined this site for two reasons- one is that I have been writing online for many years, reviewing (movies) and mostly reporting news...and I just have a need to write on a regular basis. Writing things like reviews is simple and easy but helps act as a warm up for my 'main' writing, which is fiction. Also, working on long fiction projects, you don't get much feedback. So I love writing for websites because I get feedback from readers. The second reason I joined is because I love this site as a customer and I am launching a business of my own that creates fantasy kits. I consider Eden a great model to follow for selling online sex toys...I love the 'vibe' here; easy going, friendly, fun and classy.

Writing is a passion for me, and I do it frequently and well. Yet I still need an editor, and I think everyone does. When you read over your own work, you begin to memorize it. You just can't catch every little mistake, like the 'an' when you mean 'and'. Spell check is great, and I always use both the spell checker in Word and the one in Firefox. It misses things, and I have noticed Word makes mistakes on grammar issues a number of times. I always use a thesaurus and I have quite a few books that I consider to be invaluable to a writer, like Strunk and White's Elements of Style. I also consider writing to be artistic though and so I will 'break the rules' if I need to in order to convey whatever I'm expressing. That's a choice I make in my fiction, and it carries over in to my technical writing as well.

So I always ask someone else to read my work, if possible, to catch any errors I have missed. I guess what I'm trying to say is nothing replaces a live human editor, and everyone benefits from one. If no one is around, I just roll with it, and I cringe when I re-read my own work and see little mistakes, or a comma when it should be a semicolon. But that's life- no one is perfect, not even machines!

I would like to say though that most of the reviews I read here are fair to excellent, and interacting with other writers is another reason I joined. I do agree however that truly horrid reviews should be taken down, as they reflect poorly on the site.

Just my two cents on editing/spelling/gramm ar!