After the Deadline

Diacritical marks are those accents and marks we leave out when we’re writing words like resumé, naïve, and San José. This is common practice because most of us don’t know or can’t remember the codes to produce these marks.

For proper nouns like São Paulo, a city in Brazil, it’s critical to have these marks as they are part of the proper spelling of the place.

For other words the marks are optional. I can write cafe and you’ll know what I mean. But what about resume? Am I referring to continuing an action or a document that I gladly deleted when I joined Automattic? Ok, you can pick up the meaning on context. Let’s agree that resumé is prettier than resume.

In the interest of correct and pretty writing, After the Deadline now helps you restore diacritical marks in your writing. This is a style checker option that you enable through your WordPress profile.

Also, After the Deadline is now better at learning words with diacritical marks. What does this mean? It means if you type Beyonce, After the Deadline will tell you it’s misspelled and suggest Beyoncé. Try it. It’s pretty cool.

And, if you read The New Yorker and want to write like them: After the Deadline will now suggest a diaeresis for words with two consecutive vowels that are treated as separate syllables. This comes up for words like coöperate, reënter, and zoölogy. It’s an old pronunciation cue and I have a friend named Matt who is bound to love this feature.

Now you can accent your writing with After the Deadline. Try it out at www.polishmywriting.com, download the plugin at wordpress.org, or add it to your application through our developer support.