 ProWritingAid This past week, I took a break from working on “Henrietta’s
Legacy” to get a head start on blog posts for the coming month. It’s called
juggling, I think. I’m committed to
doing another NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month) Camp in April. I’ve set
a goal of 30,000 words in 30 days. That’s low for NaNoWriMo veterans, but it’s
a goal I’m sure I can reach. It’s entirely possible to write 1000 words a day,
every day, so long as I do not let myself get distracted by other activities,
like doing the laundry or grocery buying, or planting tomatoes, or keeping a
blog up to date. One way I can keep my work focused is to have a backlog of
blog posts ready, so once again I’ve been exploring and evaluating new writing
programs. Today, I have new editing software that promises not just to
correct one’s existing manuscript but also to make the user a better writer from
now on. Sounds good, right? I bought it, downloaded the program, and ran it on
the first completed chapter of the new book.
The program offered a whole set of grades, and most of mine were not
passing. Imagine: this old English teacher, with thirteen published books,
FAILED the grammar section. Horrors! I’m really bad at this! At first, I was
angry; then I started to realize that the program has its own definition of
grammar, which includes typos, extra spaces between words, spelling variations,
and missing punctuation. I’m still not very good, but I can attribute at least
some of my mistakes to fat fingers and blind typing rather than pure ignorance. But first things first. The program is called ProWriting
Aid. That’s what it is, of course, although the title is not very catchy or
memorable. This is a serious program, written by experts, and their advice does
not come cheap. But then, no editing software will cost you as much as an
editor would. A free version exists, but it has several limitations. It can
only handle 500 words at a time. If you have a manuscript with 100,000 words in
it, you’re going to spend a whole lot of time chopping it into 200 pieces and
then loading them, one at a time, into the free version. I opted for a one-year
license at $50.00 that does not limit my file size. This version works from
within several different writing programs, like Microsoft (both Windows and MAC) and Scrivener. I tried
it with Scrivener and found that it works extremely well—much more smoothly
than Grammarly, which requires a certain amount of cutting and pasting even in
its most expensive form. Next, I considered the topics covered. The first shot at
analyzing a chapter is called the “Summary.” This includes scores in four key
areas, along with the document statistics (number of words, etc.), and a quick
analysis of the main problem. Mine said
my “glue index” was too high, and I had entirely too many sticky sentences.
Now, I had no idea what that meant, but I would eventually find the
explanations. But first, I had to make my way through an analysis of my
vocabulary, sentence length, readability, dialog tags, pacing, transitions, clichés,
consistency, diction, grammar, spelling, and style. Each heading gave me scores, numbers of
corrections needed, and a comparison to all other users of the program. For
example, my readability level was a 73, which, it turned out, corresponded to
the average sixth-grade reading level. It also said my readability score was
better than 78% of all other users. By the time I finished reading the whole summary, I was
convinced that I needed to make major improvements. But where were all these
problems and mistakes? So far, I had just seen final scores. To locate
individual errors, read the explanations, and make corrections, I needed to run
the program again, and again, and again because the program covers just one
issue at a time. Next time, I’ll tell you how the correction process worked
for me. |
