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.Īll these were easy fixes once I was made aware of them. In my writing, it revealed an excess of generic descriptions, passive voice, and too many initial pronouns, names, and “ing” words. AutoCritĪutoCrit is well organized and offers a lot of information in a clean interface. In alphabetical order, here are some of my favorites (this is by no means an exhaustive list). Some of these tools will even connect you with a human editor with a click of a button. These programs can alert you to overuse of adverbs, clichés, redundancies, overlong sentences, sticky sentences, glue words, vague and abstract words, diction, and the misuse of dialog tags, to name just a few.
Automated editing is not as good as human editing, but it is probably a good idea to get one of these programs to make some obvious corrections before sending your manuscript to an editor. Some offer “first-pass” or “last-pass” editing to clean up mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation others make suggestions for improving your language.
Manuscript editing software programs do much more than the built-in spelling and grammar checkers in your word processor. While a good, professional (human) editor is invaluable to your book – the purchase of manuscript editing software can be another prudent investment.