When a member of my writers
group suggests a writing tool might be useful, I sit up and take notice. When April Taylor sent
the group an email about ProWritingAid, I decided to explore. We’re
an odd bunch, but all professional published writers with varied experience and
we tend to filter out the dross for each other.
ProWritingAid is a text
editing suite. A trial version allows a writer to paste text into the program
and obtain an analysis. It’s a useful introduction to the application, but
doesn’t give a comprehensive understanding of the wide variety of tools on
offer.
I rarely write articles,
other than the posts I place here or as a guest on other blogs, so some of the
features are of less use to me. Fiction doesn’t require the rigid guidelines that often
apply to reports and corporate writing. However, if you write such matter,
you’ll find you can set house rules and the analysis will show where these have
been broken.
For my fiction, I’ve used
a number of methods for editing my text to produce a level of competence that I
can present to readers with confidence. I still use that multi-layered system
but I now employ ProWritingAid as the penultimate tool. My wife, hawk-eyed,
reliable and honest, makes the final check. Since I’ve employed this editing
tool, she’s found very little, and that’s been mostly opinion rather than
grammatical or syntactical queries.
So, how does the tool
work? You paste a copy of your text into the box on screen, press ‘Analyse’ and
wait a few moments for the program to scrutinise it. This can take three or
four minutes for a piece 5000 words long, depending on the complexity of the language
(for this post, it took 17 seconds). Once complete, the result is a series of
reports, which detail the findings and suggest changes where necessary. One
aspect I enjoy is the praise for being right. Along with the errors, the notes show
where the writer has avoided them and gives a brief note of approval.
The following list of
reports shows the depth of analysis:
Summary – just that; a listing of all errors found.
Overused words – frequency of commonly overused words.
Sentence variation – gives a visual representation of sentence
lengths and highlights long sentences.
Grammar – a check on grammatical accuracy.
Writing style – checks for passive and hidden verbs.
Sticky sentences – finds those sentences that contain any of the
200 most used words: these sentences can slow the reader down.
Clichés & redundancies – highlights clichés and expressions
that say the same thing twice.
Repeated words & phrases – highlights repetition of words and 2,
3 and 4 word phrases within short stretches of writing to give an opportunity
to introduce variety.
Corporate wording – shows ‘jargon’ usage, which you may or may not
wish to avoid.
NLP Predicates – I had to look this up – Neurolinguistic
Programming relates to how we express ourselves and use language to express
feeling, amongst other things. For more info, try this website: http://www.renewal.ca/index.html
Pronouns – highlights repeated use of pronouns to start sentences.
Diction – shows possible diction problems and suggests alternatives.
Vague & abstract words – shows those words that lack strength
or that might lack specificity.
Complex words – indicates word length by number of syllables –
suggests simplification where appropriate.
Alliteration analysis – shows phrases where alliteration may have
crept in inadvertently.
Pacing – identifies places where the pace is slowed by
introspection, backstory, etc.
Consistency – points out inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation
and capitalisation.
Sentiment – shows where sentiment might vary suddenly from positive
to negative, etc.
House style – allows the user to develop a house style and ensure
it remains consistent through the piece.
Time – allows the user to check for consistency in the usage of
time references.
Dialogue – finds those rogue dialogue tags that you might want to
avoid.
Homonyms – checks for those words that sound alike and therefore
may have slipped through your spell check.
I’ve avoided giving
examples in the list above, as it would have made the post too long. I hope
most serious writers will be sufficiently aware of the content to understand
the context. I’d advise those who aren’t to invest in a couple of good grammar
books, as an understanding of language is an essential prerequisite for a
professional writer. In the same way that you’d be unlikely to employ a plumber
who lacks a knowledge of his trade, you shouldn’t expect a reader to struggle
through work that displays no understanding of the tools of the trade: words.
Using this program as my
penultimate editing tool has helped me enormously. I can’t honestly say it’s
speeded up the process, because it hasn’t! But it’s made it much more thorough
and I feel far more confident about sending my words out there into the reading
world.
There are a few niggles,
which you need to know. If you use a PC with MS Word, you can download an application
that will allow you to make changes within Word. But if you use a Mac, like me,
you can’t yet do that (they are, apparently, working on a fix.) I haven’t found
a way of preserving the formatting of my text. I paste it in the form of a
normal fiction template, which has no line spacing between paragraphs and uses
indents. But the copied text, when corrected, is returned as line-spaced
paragraphs without indents, and the font is changed. This is easily corrected,
of course, but it would be helpful if such changes didn’t occur!
Having discovered that I
can email the reports to myself as a .pdf document, I now use this and place
the MS document on the left of the screen and the .pdf reports on the right and
make the changes that way. Works a treat, if a little laboriously.
There is also a visual
aid, producing a word cloud, as in the illustration, that gives a graphic
impression of the weight of the words you’ve used. Useful in the way that it
really draws attention to word usages you might otherwise overlook.
Do I recommend the
software? Absolutely. It’s relatively inexpensive at £22.70 ($35.00) per year
and it certainly does all I need. If you decide to try it, here’s the link: http://prowritingaid.com/
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