Misadventures in Writing Tools

So, as I slowly, ever so slowly, gear up to begin writing anew, I'm trying out some new tools. I have several unfinished novels to complete. Blog posts to write. Gotta get writing again, somehow. As such, I did a quick survey of what is out there as of today. 

Office 365 / Word

Microsoft Word is in many ways nicer than ever. I still get these crazy, random horizontal lines that I can't get rid of without deep googling an answer. But other than that, it's looking pretty sweet. I particularly enjoy 'Read Mode', as it lets you massage the text to the fullest, getting exactly the layout you want. Important, to me, because I have a lot of half-assed formatted books floating around. A subscription to Office can take you a long way, and the automated back-up feature is kind of useful.


Snooty Kboard twats can likewise kiss my ass. Siriusly.

Scrivener, which I've never really actually used, seems like a decent choice, beyond that. Some of the things I'm working on now, Reduction of Forces, and Star Hustle, call for non-linear techniques. I actually found some parts I forgot about when I generated that second link, in fact.

Reduction, because some of what I'm doing involves self-contained stories from work. So they can exist as little chapters of their own, without needing a bigger context. Or much of one, I suppose. An example of this is the short story 'Burnout'. Scrivener will let you arrange and rearrange chapters and snippets to your heart's content, until things are just the way you want them.

Star Hustle benefits as well, because it's a crazy, jumbled up mess of time travel multiverse stuff, and I've employed some William S. Burroughs techniques while writing it, as befitting the feel of the story itself.

Reedsy

As my first test, I put what I had in my notebooks and my blog into an online writing tool, Reedsy, which offers some of those features on a webpage. Not to mention, they have a cunning business plan. Editors and proofreaders, among others, are on call for you, for a fee. In fact, you can throw your hat into the ring as an editor yourself. I haven't explored it fully, but Reedsy seems to take you from your first sentence all the way through publishing and marketing, if you so choose.

That's pretty sweet.

For the life of me, I couldn't get the first sentence of each chapter to indent properly. I let that one slide. It was probably me. (It wasn't me.)

But it did have a lot of other nice features. It set up a title page, etc. where you just fill in the blanks to get a fairly pro-looking frontend with ease. And, like Scrivener, you can drag and drop chapters all you want.

Reedsy Interface
Give me my chapter one back, you bastard!

Great. And I would still be using it, except for one glaring issue.

My laptop dropped connection for a few seconds. After that, I got a warning, but things resumed and seemed okay. When I started to change chapters, I got another warning. A warning indicating something wasn't saved.

So I copied the part I was leaving, just in case. Went to another chapter, went back. I got a warning each time, but no data loss. The warning was annoying, but not as bad as losing some of your work.

I should have reloaded the entire site. I knew better.

When I started on a fresh chapter, left, and went back...it was gone. I don't have to tell you, if you had typed a full chapter into Reedsy and this happened, you'd be upset. As it was, it was only a few hundred words, at most. But enough for me to move on. There's probably a fix/workaround for the little indentation problem I was having. The data loss is a dealbreaker, even though it could have been avoided. I shouldn't have to reload a site just to keep from losing my work.

Besides, if I had kept with it, I'd be working on my novel, instead of checking out more tools.

There's a lot to like about Reedsy, silly name aside, and I do recommend you evaluate it yourself, caveats in mind. It is free, afterall. If you're just getting started in the writing game, it might be the only site you ever use. With a tiny bit more technical polish, I think this one could be a gamechanger. There is a paid app version, which would eliminate the catastrophic failure aspect entirely. One hopes.

Hemingway 

Hemingway Editor aims to be your go-to for shorter pieces. It provides a lot of color-coded mark-up that shows where your pieces might stand some improvement. It's sort of along the lines of Grammarly, which I am not including in this review. But for bloggers and short story writers, this might be a viable option. As an example, I'll post my unedited copy of this piece into it.

True to its name, it is divided into Write and Edit portions, without distracting overlap. Write, I guess, drunk, and edit not so drunk. Or high. This can let you crank it out at a good pace, and then take a sobering look at the results. It may aid your workflow to do things this way. There are very few distractions to be found when in writing mode.

Getting told you're writing at a 5th grade level is a bit of a kick in the nuts.

Okay, so I'm going to ignore all that, of course, but it's sound advice. You should at least listen to criticism, even if you don't employ it. And, wow, 5th graders read pretty well, if they can decipher all of my comma-heavy asides. I enjoy convoluted sentences, and nothing is going to change that, at this point. No one reads my stuff anyway. Especially 5th graders.

It does have some features beyond simple text editing and grammar analysis, as you can tell from the toolbar at the top. I recommend this one for things like cover letters, where content can really make or break you, and beginning writers, who need to learn what not to do. Adverb adverb adverb. Notice that the complex sentences are shaded purple. Hemingway would have slapped me.

It did miss a change in tense that I caught on a proofread. Maybe Grammerly would have caught it, maybe not. There's no substitute for your own eyes. And computer suggestions are just that, suggestions. I find reading aloud is the all-time best editor.

A fun aside, my now-deceased fiance's father used to fish with the man. 'A Movable Feast' is a masterpiece of non-fiction, if you haven't read it. Of course, it's Hemingway, so perhaps "non-fiction" is the proper word choice. Damned interesting, regardless.

Moving on...


Further down the list of usefulness, to me, is Readable. This one is aimed almost purely at bloggers, with its ability to evaluate a URL or even an entire website in bulk. 

Let's see how it does with this now lengthy column...


This thing is like an English professor. Three PhDs, but it can't write...

Ho ho! Now we're getting somewhere. I'm surprised at the depth of analysis presented here. Like, wowzers. It sort of liked six of (consults statistics) one hundred and three sentences. ALSO LIKE AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR.

I kid, I kid.

This is some top-notch stuff, here, if you're trying to address a wide audience, conducting search engine optimization, or a variety of scenarios which exist but I can't be bothered to think about.

At least it cushions the blow by calling them "possible" adverbs, "possible" spelling errors. The Readability ratings are very in-depth, which I guess makes sense in an app called Readable. There are several indexes that I've never heard of. And, damnit, as I'm writing this, I'm eliminating adverbs in advance, because I've now been chastised three times tonight.

While I don't think this sort of stuff would necessarily help you write a great novel, for technical writing and the like, this seems the way to go. Also, if you're extremely nerdy, anal, or want to do things...BY THE BOOK, you'll love this site. Reading the critique is like a small writing course by itself. And that can't possibly be a bad thing. 

10/10, will recommend to the right people. Do yourself a favor and check this one out, it stands out like a shining beacon (trying to flip the cliche meter intentionally) in the field.


Okay, someone has to come in last. ProWritingAid fulfills that need. It wants a log-in up front, and I'm just not. It also has a free grammar checker plug-in for Chrome. Nope, not gonna do it. It might be an AI best-seller generator, but I'll never know. Too many hoops to jump through. Plus I bet it just spits out ads all day long.

Douchy, punchable hipster? Snobby tagline? GoDaddy looking site? Yeah, no.
$0/year
  • Summary Report of Key Issues
  • 19 Writing Reports
  • Edit 500 words at a time
  • Use online only

This...is not very compelling. 

I guess if you have $79 a year ($89 for academics, includes plagiarism checking), and you're willing to bite the bullet and evaluate it fully, it might be worth it. With all these other great free tools. I'm not sure why many people would. I guess if your job or university is buying, hey, why not?

But they don't even have a Google ID log-in set up. Not worth my time and effort. Sorry, guys. This column is long already, and I'm not quite done yet. 

So, at the end of a long day where my sole output was some transcribing and editing, and this blog post, I've uncovered some perhaps useful, interesting applications, and I have narrowed my main tool down to Word or Scrivener. 

I intended to write up Scrivener, too, but I haven't even installed it yet. Plus it has a LOT of features beyond content analysis. Most of which I will never use. But when you're trying to psyche yourself up for writing again, your tool choice is crucial. I'll be spending more time with the app I choose than any human for the next year or so, more than likely. 

I probably will do a full review of Scrivener in one of my next posts, so, erm, stay tuned. Both of you.

I sure do use the word 'but' a lot.

Full stats generated by Readable for this piece:

Language Issues

Spelling Issues251%
Grammar Issues64%

Readability Issues

Sentences > 30 Syllables159%
Sentences > 20 Syllables4326%
Words > 4 Syllables91%
Words > 12 Letters20%

Writing Style Issues

Passive Voice Count71%
Adverb Count624%
Cliché Count20%

Text Density Issues

Characters per Word4.3
Syllables per Word1.4
Words per Sentence10.8
Words per Paragraph32.0
Sentences per Paragraph3.0

Readability Grade Levels

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level5.2
Gunning Fog Index7.2
Coleman-Liau Index6.5
SMOG Index8.8
Automated Readability Index4.0
FORCAST Grade Level9.3
Powers Sumner Kearl Grade4.7
Rix Readability6
Raygor Readability5
Fry Readability5

Readability Scores

Readable RatingA
Flesch Reading Ease77.0
CEFR LevelB2
IELTS Level5-6
Spache Score4.5
New Dale-Chall Score4.1
Lix Readability29
Lensear Write94.8


Text Composition
Adjectives1498%
Adverbs493%
Conjunctions17710%
Determiners21612%
Interjections30%
Nouns52430%
Proper Nouns372%
Prepositions18611%
Pronouns21012%
Qualifiers251%
Verbs26115%
Unrecognised161%
Non-Words00%
Yay! I used zero non-words! And 300% too many adverbs.

Anyway. Thanks for reading. Thanks for writing. If you have anything to add, I think there's a comment button. It would be nice to hear from another lone voice in the wilderness. (Cliche_Count++)

Also, I have a disastrous free book on Amazon that is very dated and was in part, wrong from the start, for various reasons. But it's still considered a fun read. Even though halfway through it, I started cursing in my columns. Some of the reviews are even more fun...

Self-Publishing Tips and Tricks

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