Have you ever seen an ad for Grammarly? They come up all the time on my YouTube videos (clearly, Google knows I'm a writer)!
For a long time, I felt a bit suspicious about the whole idea of using a piece of software to edit. After all, spellchecker gets things wrong and misses things all the time ... so why would Grammarly, and other automated tools, be any different?
What I've realised more recently, though, is that these tools can be a handy second pair of eyes on your work, in situations where it's probably not cost-effective to hire an editor – for your blog posts, for instance, or your freelance work.
They're not a replacement for careful self-editing and proofreading – but they might just flag up a mistake or clumsy bit of writing that you'd otherwise have let slide. All have fairly richly featured free versions, as well as premium options.
Here are three of the main ones you might want to try out:
This is probably the best-known automatic editing tool, and interestingly, two of the clients I've taken on recently specifically ask their writers to use it.
I've found Grammarly most useful for spotting poor word choices and small errors (like missing hyphens in words that should be hyphenated, for instance). It's also been particularly handy for flagging up any times when I've used UK spellings in work for my US clients! I do always read through carefully for words like "colour" / "color", but it's helpful to have the software handling this for me.
Sometimes, though, Grammarly does make suggestions that are incorrect. For instance, it's occasionally flagged up words that it thinks I've confused with another word – where the one I had in the first place was definitely what I wanted. As with any tool, you definitely don't want to apply its suggestions without thinking them through.
I reviewed ProWritingAid in detail for the Daily Writing Tips blog a few weeks ago, so if you want lots of details plus screenshots, you might want to check out my review here:
In brief, though: ProWritingAid goes quite a bit further than Grammarly in offering lots of different lenses on your work. If you're a novelist, for instance, you can use it to find out what percentage of your work is dialogue, and to see what dialogue tags you use frequently.
It also offers lists of overused words, and handy charts – like one of sentence length where you can instantly spot areas where you have loads of short sentences or loads of long ones.
The Hemingway App is supposed to teach you to write like Ernest Hemingway, making your writing "bold and clear". In practice, this means it flags up sentences that are "hard" or "very hard" to read, and suggests simpler phrases for more complex ones. It also spots uses of the passive voice, and encourages you not to use too many adverbs.
While I applaud the app's creators' efforts to help writers craft easy-to-read content, I do think it's possible to go too far. While short, pared-down sentences suit some contexts, they're not right for everything. On the Aliventures blog and in this newsletter, I don't want to make my content as simplistic as possible!
If you've never tried an automatic editing tool before, why not give one of these a go? You might not want to use them all the time – but if you're creating a particularly important piece of content for your blog, or if you want to give your short story a final check before submitting it, they could be really handy.
