Nowadays, there are more ways to edit your writing than ever before. Whether you are an author, blogger, student, or just need to fix up your personal letter writing skills, there is help at hand.
Today’s blog post will cover the different tools that can assist with editing your text. Once you realize how easy it is to edit your writing using these free tools, you might just want to use them more often!
AutoCrit
AutoCrit is well organized and offers a lot of information in a clean interface. In my writing, it revealed an excess of generic descriptions, passive voice, and too many initial pronouns, names, and “ing” words. I also use too many “ly” adverbs. On the plus side, I’m great at showing and not telling, and I don’t repeat words and phrases or use a lot of filler words or clichés.
All these were easy fixes once I was made aware of them. But hey, if you’re feeling depressed about your errors, just click the “compare to fiction” tab to show how your writing stacks up against published works, including mass-market paperbacks and bestsellers. It might make you feel better.
The manuscript analysis provides a lot of constructive criticism in a clean, easy-to-read layout. I like the visual charts representing sentence length and paragraph pace, too.
AutoCrit is $29.97/month.
Pages
Think of Pages as the Mac alternative to Microsoft Word.
It has a variety of beautiful templates to choose from, has a simple design, and syncs with all devices from within iCloud so you can access it in a number of different places.
Personally, I love the ease of Pages. It works great for creating ebooks or manuscripts with a variety of writing tools you can get creative with.
Consistency Checker
This free software will find the mistakes your spelling and grammar checkers don’t see, such as inconsistent hyphenation (part time vs. part-time) and spelling (color vs. colour). It also finds things like numerals in the middle of sentences, compound words, and abbreviations that appear in different forms.
It does not check spelling and grammar, just consistency. Note: this is the freemium version of the $99 PerfectIt app for Microsoft Office 2013 and Google Docs.
It targets long nonfiction document like proposals, grants, and how-to manuals. I wish this kind of tool had existed back when I was a Silicon Valley technical writer! I will definitely run it the next time I edit my how-to book, the Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Authors. What the heck, I’ll run it in my narrative nonfiction works, too.
Install Consistency Checker in Word by visiting the Microsoft Office 2013 store. To install it in Google Docs, go to the store listing, log in and click “Free,” then run Google Docs and Consistency Checker will be in the “Add-ons” menu.
FastPencil
FastPencil is a nice little platform with lots of tools. You can also use it for distributing your ebook. It is free to start writing with, but they offer paid services as well.
Everything happens online in your browser, which means you can access your files from any computer (as long as you’re connected to the Internet).
Book Writing Software Cost: Free (paid upgrades are optional)
FocusWriter
FocusWriter is a word processor for writers that’s intended to eliminate distractions to help you get your book written quicker. It’s a basic, lightweight writing tool that was designed to be completely free of progress inhibiting distractions.
In its fullscreen mode, there are no toolbars or additional windows, just a background and your text so that you can concentrate solely on writing your draft.
FocusWriter also allows you to choose what your screen looks like, as seen in the example below.
You can customize the image in the background to suit your project to help inspire your writing.
It’s simple and effective. If you need a lot of features, it probably won’t work for you. But if simplicity is your thing, then you may have found your perfect free writing tool.
Draft
Draft is a writing, editing, collaboration, and publishing tool you access online using your browser. Each contributor’s changes show up in different colors, with “accept” and “reject” options. You can mark major revisions, find and revert to previous versions, import docs from Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive, and publish directly to places like WordPress, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and even MailChimp. They’ve provided a handy Chrome extension that lets you turn any text area on the web into something you can write and edit with Draft. You can even hire a human editor via the program.
You can email a document to your Draft account and create a simple presentation, then select segments of writing and the “simplify” robot catches common words and duplicate words and attempts to detect and delete unimportant sentences. More features include an audio-video transcription tool, analytics, and a website builder tool. “Hemingway Mode” provides distraction-free writing.
Draft is free, but donations unlock more benefits.
Grammarly
Grammarly is my favorite electronic editor. It delivers information both line-by-line and in summary form. I bought an annual subscription in 2015, and I like the way it follows me around the web to check my WordPress blog posts, my Google Docs, Gmail, and comments and feedback forms on other people’s blog posts and articles. As I am a professional writer, it is embarrassing when I make basic spelling and grammatical errors in quick, social media posts and emails, so I appreciate this feature.
Like most robust editing tools, Grammarly offers settings for various kinds of writing: business documents, novels, creative nonfiction, medical, technical, and casual. I set mine to creative nonfiction.
A basic version of Grammarly that roots out spelling and grammar errors is free, while the full version is $29.95/month. If you need a human editor, quick, you can reach one through their site for a reasonable price.
Hemingway Editor
Hemingway is a distraction-free writing tool that displays a row of formatting elements across the top for bold, italics, bulleting, numbering, headings, and links. Slide it from “Write” into “Edit” mode and you’ll get a clean, visual take on what might be wrong with your writing. The word and character counters are also very handy.
The browser-based version of the Hemingway app is free, and with the desktop app for Mac and Windows ($19.99), you can import and export your text to Word and export as HTML or Markdown language for your blogging platform, WordPress, or CMS files.
Some people like to write and edit in Hemingway and then import their work into a tool called StackEdit, a browser-based markdown editor, though you could easily use any of the other tools I’ve already mentioned.
MasterWriter
MasterWriter is a valuable addition to any of the editors described here. It’s a thesaurus on steroids in the cloud that will improve your vocabulary and your prose. Enrich your writing with its synonym finder, rhyming dictionary, alliterations, word families, phrases, dictionary, and even a set of 11,000 icons of world culture to add imagery to your writing.
Instead of your story’s sun being “hot,” you’ll find choices like blazing, sizzling, fiery, torrid, punishing, merciless, or raging. Just put a word in the left side and click the dictionary you want to use and get results on the right side.
Check out the video tour and I think you’ll be impressed. An audio page enables you to collect your thoughts or music. There’s a free trial, with licenses offered at $9.99/month, $99.95/year, or $149 for a two-year license.
ProWritingAid
Of all the tools reviewed, ProWritingAid probably offers the most value, especially with their clean, updated interface and detailed reports with the click of a link. I was so impressed that I bought the annual subscription even though I also subscribe to Grammarly. I love their free Google Docs and Chrome browser extension, too. I still use Grammarly because it follows me everywhere on the web, but with its thorough critique, I think ProWritingAid makes me a better writer. As an editor and publisher, the reports also help me communicate better with my authors.
A scaled-down version of ProWritingAid is free online, with Premium editions offered at $40 annually, $60 for a two-year license, $80 for a three-year license, and $140 for lifetime use.
ProWritingAid also offers a couple of advanced features you may be interested in using. As a publisher, I can create my own rules and house style that detects patterns, wildcards, overused words, dialog, and repeated words, plus it lets me create customized advice messages for my authors. Their developer API allows software developers to add writing analysis to applications they are developing.
SmartEdit
SmartEdit is a first-pass-editing tool for creative writers and novelists working in Windows. Since I’m Mac-based, I couldn’t review it, but gleaned a lot of information from the screen shots and user reviews on their site.
Like AutoCrit and Grammarly, SmartEdit runs a series of checks on your work and highlights areas of concern. You can open your manuscript directly in SmartEdit, or copy and paste from your word processor into the SmartEdit Editor.
Unique features include a sentence length graph and detection of curly/straight quotes, plus hyphen and em-dash counts. A sentence-start list displays your sentences and counts the number of times you begin them with a particular word, which can be a real eye-opener.
SmartEdit, like ProWritingAid, may deserve consideration by professional editors and publishers as it allows you to export lists of problems the program caught to Excel, PDF, HTML, CSV, and text. This kind of feedback helps a lot when communicating with writers and editors.
A single SmartEdit license is $67, SmartEdit for Word is $77, and the SmartEdit Bundle is $109.
Conclusion
Every author wants and aims for self-editing for perfection, but they do not have enough time to edit their own written content. There are so many software, more so online tools available free of cost that can help you in effective writing and editing of your essays, reports, stories, novels or short stories.