Great news! There is another grammar checker you can now use with the Hemingway Editor if you are not fond of Grammarly. You can now use the free Ginger grammar checker with the Hemingway app. It is super easy.

Here is how you do it. First, go to the Google Chrome store for Ginger here.

Next, add it to your Chrome browser.

Third, you will have to set up a free account to use it.

Now it will be active and you will see the Ginger icon in your list of extensions: 

Go to the Hemmingway Editor here.  You will see their stock verbiage explaining their application. You can delete that and paste in the text you wish to check to make sure it is both easy to read and grammatically correct.

In this example, I have loaded a paragraph from my current work in progress. It looks like this:

Here is their explanation of what each of the colors means:

You can see that the Hemmingway Editor highlighted a few places where I can simplify sentences, swap out adverbs for more active verbs, and even get rid of a few instances of passive voice.

What the Hemmingway app did not catch was that I mistakenly used the word “failing” when I meant to use the word “falling”. By having the Ginger chrome extension activated, Ginger spotted this error and highlighted it. Sweet!

That is all there is to it. Very simple and straight forward. The two tools together give you a very powerful, free and easy to use tool to strengthen all of your writing. Ginger is even easier to use than Grammarly with the Hemingway Editor, though my sense is that Grammarly is probably a little bit more effective at finding grammatical errors.

As I noted in my earlier blog, using the Hemingway Editor with Ginger is not only for writing a novel or other fiction. The two together are a powerful method for all of your writing be it business, research, or college.

I am finishing up my upcoming military sci fi novel, Lonely Hunter, and I’m using both the Hemingway Editor and Ginger to together as I submit my last chapters to my fiction writing workshop.

I have learned a lot about ramping my sales with my first novel, which has made it into the top 10 of 9 best seller lists. I hope to do even better with my upcoming novel. If you want to learn more about what I’m going to do and how to ramp your book sales, see My 6 Most Popular blogs of Fast and Easy Book Marketing and Promotion Tips

Best of luck with your writing, and please share this blog with other writers, and let me know how it goes for you.

PS: As always, I don’t have an affiliate or any other relationship with any company. I wanted to share this info because I found it helpful, and I think you will, too.

The post Hemingway Editor + Ginger = Paradise (almost) appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

I have written about grammar checkers and style checkers before. I continue to believe they are a powerful tool in a writer’s tool bag. AutoCrit has revised their editing software product and has an active marketing campaign underway. I signed up for their trial membership for $1 for a week. Yesterday I spent about 3 hours working on my upcoming novel with their cloud-based app. In the end, I had two strong opinions about their updated writing software.

Before I go on, I want to emphasize that I do not have any affiliate relationship with anyone. So everything I say below is my own opinion without any influence from any third parties. 

The new and improved AutoCrit:

First, I have always been impressed with AutoCrit. It is one of the more helpful writing apps. Not only does it offer sophisticated analysis, it has (IMHO) the nicest user interface going. For one thing, as an online book editor, it allows you to work on chapters that you can assign to a book that you save at their website, which is a nice way to group your work and deal with your work in manageable sizes.  Of course, you can use it as a short story editor as well, dealing with your stand-alone pieces.

Below is an example of the feedback I got from their Summary Report when I had it look at my entire 116K word novel:

Attractive, clear and helpful. And when I say it is helpful, I mean that literally. It tells you exactly what you need to hunt down and change. Their tool even goes so far as to give a prioritized list of tags that you should use less often and if you click it, the text will move to exactly where it is so you can go to work on it. Sweet!

AutoCrit has many such tools: Overuse of pronouns, passive voice, repetition (of both words and phrases), etc. In addition to running summary reports and statistical summaries, here is a list of the reports you can run and how they are grouped:

Pacing and Momentum:

• Sentence Variation
• Pacing
• Paragraph Variation
• Chapter Variation

Dialog:

• Dialogue Tags
• Adverbs In Dialogue

Strong Writing

• Adverbs
• Passive Voice
• Tense Consistency
• Showing vs. Telling
• Clichés
• Redundancies
• Unnecessary Filler Words

Word Choice

• Initial Pronoun and Names
• Sentence Starters
• POV Consistency
• Generic Descriptions
• Homonyms
• Personal Words and Phrases

Repetition

• Repeated Words
• Repeated Uncommon Words
• Repeated Phrases
• Word Frequency
• Phrase Frequency

AutoCrit is an impressively powerful, helpful and easy to use writing application and proofreading tool. I have no doubt that it will help every author with their fiction writing. However…

Don’t even think about buying it. At $59.97 a month, the price is outrageous for typical freelance or occasional writers.

I wrote Jocelyn at AutoCrit. I’ve traded emails with her several times over the last few years. She has always been helpful and clear. When I suggested to her earlier this week that the price was very high, she wrote back and said:

“Our new membership level at $59.97 / month includes more than just the software.  We have courses on the things we cover in the software, separate weekly sessions on how to rock your revisions (covering things like revising for plot, characters, setting, etc.) and bonuses.

“You can also get just the software for $29.97 /month.  Our customers have been asking for a monthly option for a long time – and now we have delivered.

“As for the AutoCrit software, our latest updates take it to a whole new level.  Digging deeper into fiction writing and the specific genres.  We also added our new Summary report that gives you customized recommendations on where to start and what needs to be done in each category.”

In contrast, ProWritingAid offers a comparable editing tool for an advertised price of $45/year. That is less for a year than AutoCrit charges for a month (for their full offering).

I do want to be clear that from a follow-up email Jocelyn sent me, it seems that AutoCrit does offer their SW for months at a time. That is: 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, etc. So that is nice in one sense, but it also creates another dilemma. Though $30 for one month allows you to pay for just the time frame you want — and $30 is reasonable for a burst of work — my experience with editing is that it always drags on longer than you expect, and when you are done, you might forget to shut down your subscription, so even if you are not using it, your credit card is getting charged. So again, compared to PWA’s pricing…kind of hard to get on the AutoCrit bandwagon.

In fairness, PWA does not have as clean and as an intuitive interface as AutoCrit has, but it actually has more features and more ability to customize what you want it to find for you. And if it matters to you (it may not), PWA also has a Microsoft Word Plugin, which AutoCrit does not have. On the other hand, AutoCrit will be offering courses to help writers, according to Jocelyn. In short, though different, they are both powerful and extremely helpful writing apps.

Related, if you want a powerful, free editing software, see my article on how to combine the free versions of the Hemingway App and Grammarly. Not as powerful as either AutoCrit or ProWritingAid, but damned impressive results for free if you need some editing help when writing fiction.

As a courtesy to both AutoCrit and PWA, I will let them both know of this blog and invite them to comment.

The post The New AutoCrit editing software: A Review appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

Writers always need help with editing, so this is pretty damn cool: Two of my favorite tools are now working together for free. The Hemingway App has always been free, and Grammarly has a free version. But now, with the Grammarly Chrome extension, not only can you use both of them, you can use both of them together. It’s not the same as having a human editor, but if you are trying to figure out how to write a book, this combination can be a big help. Let me explain…

I’ve long been fond of the HemingwayApp because it is a simple, free, very easy to use tool to help you spot and address long, complex, convoluted and adverb-heavy prose. Such sentences can wreck havoc with your creative writing.

Grammarly checks your grammar. They claim it is the best there is at doing such things. I’ve always been a bit skeptical, but it does catch a lot of issues. It is not flawless, though, so when you use it be attentive to what it calls out. Sometimes it is wrong.

But be that as it is, these two writing apps now work together in powerful, simple ways that can help any aspiring writer, and do so for free. Let me show you.

In the screenshot below you can see that I have gone to the HemingwayApp site and that I have already loaded the free Grammarly Chrome Extension from the Chrome store. I then typed in a sentence with a couple issues. You can see that Grammarly is already working; it is reporting in the red circle that it has spotted two issues.

When I click on the red circle, look at what comes up (see below): a new Grammarly screen on top of the Hemingway screen (which you can still see in the background).

I’m going to accept the two corrections Grammarly proposes (in green to the right) simply by clicking on the green text. Doing that approves the proposed change. Once I do that, it looks like below. The sentence is now grammatically correct. And also look in the upper left-hand corner to see a button that offers me the opportunity to return to the HemingwayApp.

When I click on that button…wow…what is loaded in the HemingwayApp now incorporates the changes that Grammarly recommended and I approved without me having to do any work to copy and past or otherwise transfer the (hopefully) grammatically correct copy to the HemingwayApp.

From here I can go to work on the things that the HemingwayApp is good at flagging and Grammarly is not. In my one-sentence example Hemingway did not flag anything, but in a longer entry, it would.

Very nice! Simple, free, easy. And powerful. For any writer in need of such support (I always am!), this is a new way to help you improve your writing. No matter which creative writing prompt you start or what level your creative writing skills are at, you will need to polish your prose.

Of course, once you do publish your novel you will need great reviews to help you ramp your sales, so I’ve also written another easy-to-follow guide that you can use to get reviews from top Amazon reviewers.

And this combination of Hemingway App and Grammarly is not just for writing fiction or writing a nonfiction book. If you are writing college papers or even a high school student writing a paper, together the Hemingway Editor and the Grammarly Chrome extension are powerful tools.

Good luck with it, and pass it on to another writer! Though they were not working together when I wrote my Amazon bestselling novel, I did use them both, and now I’m using them together as I work on my next novel.

PS: I don’t have an affiliate or any other relationship with either company. I just think this is cool and wanted to pass it on.

The post Hemingway Editor + Grammarly App = Nirvana (almost) appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

We are writers, not editors

Few of us think of ourselves as editors. Of course, we all want our submissions to be grammatically correct and stylistically clean and easy to read while being true to our voice. It is hard, though, to get it right. The great news is that there are powerful tools that can help, some of which are free.

Where can we find help? We could go to a commercially available editing house. A Google search will list hundreds of them. They usually charge at least two cents a word and offer a universe of possible services (which can cost much more). A simple copy editing of a 3K word story would cost you at least $60.

Worse than the cost, it is difficult to figure out the good from the bad editors, though online reviews can help. In addition, each requires a discrete contract and payment, and a few days to get the job done. Generally, if you are willing to pay a premium, you get your story back faster.

An alternative is to use grammar checker software or style checker software

My goal here is to provide insight into these SW products, how to use them, and their pros and cons. This is not a full review of any of them, and it is not a review of everything available on the market, though I’ll hit on a few of the biggest. I have not been funded by any of these vendors.

I look at these packages as having one or two distinct functions: grammar checker or style feedback. Some do both.

The executive summary: Not so good as grammar checkers, but very helpful at checking your “style” and usage

Let’s start with the grammar checkers. The first challenge is that sometimes we intentionally use bad grammar as part of our “style” or “voice.” Even if we strive for perfect grammar, sentences are too complex for “rules”-based software programs to identify consistently what is and is not “correct.” I’m sure that someday they will. Technology will continue to advance, and these products will get better. Until then, do not put too much faith in these programs providing complete and accurate feedback on your grammar.

I have a very different view when it comes to their ability as style checkers. These tools can be helpful by making what I call “observations” about your writing. For instance, to varying degrees, they will call out sentence variation and length, frequency of adverbs, how often you start sentences with a pronoun or noun, use of vague and abstract words, instances of given phrases being repeated, use of passive construction, etc.

These types of observations can be extremely helpful, and many of these packages can be customized to zero in on specific things you might want to avoid. For example, if you want to keep your adverbs to one out of every 200 words, then these programs can help.

So you better understand my perspective, let me share how I use the product I purchased. I use a product that has a Microsoft Word “add-in.” Because I’m in MS Word, I can still use the MS Word functionality at the same time. I don’t use the grammar or style checker, though, until I’m on my third or fourth draft.

I am not strong at grammar, and in my early drafts, I pay less attention to sentence variation, excessive use of adverbs, etc. After I’ve gotten through my first drafts and am ready to start optimizing words, sentences and paragraphs to evoke the emotions I’m after, I will use my grammar and style checker to go through my work to start flagging things that could be issues. For the most part, I don’t find it helpful for grammar. For checking style, I use it more aggressively.

My first run with the style checker is usually on a specific aspect, such as looking for adverbs. Then I’ll run the diction report. After I feel like I have those where I want them, I might look at how often I use pronouns to start a sentence. And on and on.

Don’t Panic!

These applications will flag a ton of stuff. So don’t panic or get defensive the first time you see the output. In an “overused words” report, it may say something like “up – consider removing 14 of 17 instances”. And you will see all 17 instances of the word highlighted. If your story includes a scene in which people are lifting rocks up to other workers to load them onto a truck, maybe the frequent use of “up” is appropriate. There will also be “false positives” that you will have to ignore. Again, these tools make observations. It is up to you to decide what to do, if anything.

For those of you that are interested and want to try one or more of these, I’ve provided a high-level survey below of a few of the bigger products: Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and Ginger.

First, a couple notes on the common aspects and the use of these products:

• No two of these programs are the same. They can vary dramatically in the functionality they offer. Keep that in mind if you go shopping for one of these applications. Be sure you know what you are looking for before you make your purchase.

• From my experience, Word, Ginger and Grammarly are better at spotting grammar issues than ProWritingAid (PWA). Conversely, PWA is much stronger at reporting patterns and related stylistic aspects of your work.

• Most of the products I looked at offered both online and MS Word “add-in” options and a few would work with Word but not as an add-in. However, except for MS Word, they all need real-time internet access to work. Even as a Word add-in, your text is actually being scrutinized on a server somewhere. So if you don’t have internet access, none of these programs will work.

• There is also some variation between them as to which OS and which browser and which word processor they support, so be clear on that before you make a purchase decision. I prefer those that work with MS Word so I don’t have to keep copying and pasting big chunks of text back and forth between an internet site and my Word doc.

• Because the actual work is not being done locally, in almost every case you are not buying a complete SW package. You are getting a “front end” that runs locally, so you are paying a recurring fee for a subscription to access the backend. Be sure you understand this before you give someone your credit card number.

• You won’t use these all the time. In all their various forms and interfaces they are an intrusive, mechanistic proofing tool. As such they are at odds with the creative process of writing. Just as a lot of writers turn off MS Word’s grammar and spell checker when they write because their real-time error reporting is too disruptive to the writing process, you will not want these on while you are actually writing. In truth you will rarely use these applications.

• Related to the above, these things run in different ways. Ginger goes sentence-by-sentence while you watch (which takes about half a second per sentence in my experience), and you have to address each flagged sentence before it will go on. Others, such as PWA, will process the entire section before they report anything. These types take some time to run based on a number of variables: How much text you are asking it to proof, how many of the various reports you are asking it to run (more on this below), how much of your work it is going to flag (essentially how well your write), the speed of your internet connection (to include the speed of your wireless router if working wirelessly), the performance of your PC, and how busy their server is at that moment. To provide a very rough estimate, my experience with PWA on my equipment is that it takes about a minute per thousand words when I run eight reports concurrently. Your mileage will vary.

• Almost every site I have looked at has a free online version. With one exception (After The Deadline), I’ve not found a “free” version that is worth the effort if you are writing more than ~500 words. All these free tools will give you a sense of how each different package works and feels, which is good. The better news is that almost every product has a free “trial period” that allows you to download and use the SW for a defined period of time before your credit card is charged. It is a great way to test out the package that most interests you.

• Costs: If you are willing to spend money on these tools, most cost a few dollars a month, but see the various sites for details and for different packages. My experience is that if you register with them for a trial and then let the trial expire, they will likely email you an offer to stay with them at a discounted rate.

• Documentation is weak for all these products. I’m not talking about the grammar rules. They all do a good job of explaining the issues they are reporting. At a high-level these products are intuitive, and you will be able to start quickly. But it will take you some time to find and learn how to use the finer, more nuanced features, and to understand what has changed in subsequent releases. I’ve managed product managers, and I would have been very unhappy with my team if we were putting out such poorly documented SW. So assume you will have a bit of learning to get to the full capabilities of these products.

Specific thoughts and observations on several that I have tried:

• MS Word (I’m speaking to the 2010 version): There is only a very modest style checker, but it includes a grammar checker that does a credible job. It is not customizable (at least not much), but it can be helpful in spotting some basic errors. It does not offer, though, many of the other features the other SW packages offer. Given what it is today, you should always use the MS Word grammar checker (assuming you use Word) as a starting point. If you want more than that…

• ProWritingAid (AKA: “PWA”): PWA is by far my favorite. Nothing is perfect, but it is easy to use as an add-in to MS Word and offers many style and usage reports. It is also easy to customize. It has a Creative Writing mode (and several others as well), but even within that you can further customize it. I like that I can define how often I want it to highlight words and phrases that I default to more than I should. I also found it to be the least expensive. They have some good online discussions about grammar and how their SW works (though they are a bit evasive about some of their specific formulas). I have also found them to be responsive and helpful when I contacted them via email for assistance. Overall, I’m a happy customer, and it has been a huge help.

• Grammarly: I recently tried this one for a week. I had played with it online and decided to give it a go as a Word add-in. One thing that annoyed me from the start was that I could not figure out how to define sections for it to check – it insisted on checking the entire 77K word novel. At least it tried. At about the 40% mark it would stop checking. Perhaps it was a RAM issue with my local PC. I don’t know. I just could not figure out how to get it to check specific areas short of breaking up my file, which I’m not going to do. The grammar checker is better than PWA, or so it seemed to me. It was finding errors in my work that PWA did not. Its other features were much less capable than PWA’s, unfortunately, and I saw no room to customize it, though it also has a creative writing mode. It does have a nicer interface than PWA. One thing I really did not like about Grammarly was that it underlines issues with just a faint line, which was difficult to spot at times.

• Ginger: This vendor released a version that works in MS Word, but it is not an add-in. It does a good job of checking grammar (better than the other programs, it seems). It also did a nice job of identifying instances where I used the wrong word (homophones). It does grind through each sentence one at a time, which you get to watch it do. And it will stop each time it hits something it flags. You have to intervene and tell it what to do before it goes on. Unlike PWA, you can’t jump back and forth between different reports to work on different things. There are some obvious pros and cons to this model. Ginger also has a nice feature that will “read” your work to you, and do a credible job of it, so you can (sort of) hear how your writing “sounds”.

• AutoCrit: This one has a big fan base and a nice web site. I have not purchased a subscription, and I probably won’t test it for another month or so.  I know AutoCrit has a big following for what it is today, so I think I’ll give it a spin, but not until their next rev.

• After The Deadline: This is a free product that seems fast and easy to use. Its feature set is limited compared to PWA, and it offers no metrics. It does not seem to work with MS Word, so I have only played with it. That said, if you like working online in Chrome or Firefox, and $0 seems like a good price, this could be the right product for you.

• Hemingway App: This is another one that is free. And it is limited compared to some of the more comprehensive products like ProWritingAid, but free is nice, and it does focus on a few things that can make our writing difficult such as adverbs, passive voice and sentence length. So the price is nice, and it has a tight focus on a few things that if you get right can be very helpful.

Are any of these better than a professional editor? No! Yes!

Professional editors are different from these applications. Humans are not as rules-bound and will have an “ear” for your voice and your style, so the feedback they give you can be far more insightful and helpful. They will tell you when you are wordy, which is something these packages won’t do. And they will tell you when your logic does not follow, and if you are showing action out of order. A human editor can also tell you when you are making confusing POV shifts. These are just a few things a good human editor can tell you that these applications won’t.

On the other hand, you are not going to customize your proofreader the way you can some of these applications. As insightful and thoughtful as a great editor can be, they are not going to count adverbs for you, and they might miss how often you use a favorite four-word phrase that might actually annoy the hell out of your eventual readers. Perhaps most importantly, a professional editor won’t check your 4K word story in four minutes at 11:30 on a Friday night when you’re sitting on your couch in your PJs. And you do not have to put a discrete contract in place every time you use your grammar checker software or style checker software, which you would have to do with a human editor. There is no emotion involved, either. You will not have any expectation that the SW is going to smile at you with a gleam in its eye and tell you that your work will displace Dune in the Science Fiction canon. Your human editor may say this as she hands you a stack of papers dripping red ink, but the twitching under her right eye might make you wonder if she is really thinking, This is incomprehensible crap. Please don’t ever contact me again.

In short, consider these SW packages as tools that can help you proof and improve your work, and help you become a better writer overall. A professional editor (a good one) is a different resource whose feedback would further strengthen your work.

For my own experience, these SW packages are hugely helpful when preparing my work for submission to a fiction workshop and beta readers. Given the convenience of being able to use it any time, and at the cost of a few dollars a month, it is a nice fit for these situations. I would never think, though, of actually self-publishing my work without hiring a highly qualified editor to proof my work for me.

To summarize my thoughts on these SW tools: What I have used are not compelling grammar checkers, though they will catch a few things. As style checkers, they can be very helpful. They do make observations you can review and address. As such, these tools can also help you learn how to write better as you internalize what triggers their rules. But writing is work, part of which is making decisions. These tools won’t do the work for you. Be ready to make your decisions, roll up your sleeves, and do the work after it runs and reports.

For those of you that have also used these and other such tools, please share your own perspectives and elaborate on anything I missed or glossed over.

Here are links to some of the products I mentioned:

ProWritingAid

Ginger

Grammarly

AutoCrit

Hemingway App

The post Grammar Checkers and Style Checkers: Can they help? appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....