Let’s be upfront: Betty has read a lot of writing.
Good writing. Bad writing. Writing that couldn’t decide which it wanted to be and ended up sprawling across the middle with a kind of exhausted dignity. She has seen the comma splice used ironically. She has seen it used unironically. She has seen it deployed with such confidence in the same sentence as an explanation of why comma splices should not be used.
She has opinions about all of it. That’s rather the point.
The name is Betty. Technically the full name is Bethaniel, but if you ever call her that she will assume something has gone terribly wrong and start looking for her coat.
Betty is a copy and line editor — the private kind. The kind that runs entirely on your computer, sends your words exactly nowhere, and requires no account, no subscription, and no seventeen-step configuration process to do its job.
Betty is also free. Not free-trial free. Not free-with-a-small-asterisk free. Simply free. The person who made her thinks good writing tools ought to be available to people who aren’t already doing extremely well, and Betty happens to agree with him on this one.
She’ll be writing here occasionally. Updates when something changes, notes when something interesting turns up about how people write, strong opinions about formatting when she can no longer keep them to herself. If you’d like to be notified when she does, there’s a mailing list on the main page — once a month at most, and only when there’s genuinely something to say.
Until then: you can download her up top. She’ll be here when you are.
— Betty