Today marked the debut of my second book in the Star League Assassins series, and the 22nd book in the Milky Way Universe, Last Cohort. These are massive undertakings in the aggregate, with over a million words typed out in this particular corner of the genre fiction woods.
One of the things that helps in quickly producing these books is to submit as clean a copy as possible. In that regard, I have discovered one of the editing software suites that has been out a while, ProWritingAid. Joanna Penn has recommended it for a long time on her podcast, and I tried the free trial version a few months back then bought the whole package.
There are different ways to use it. For me, short chunks in the web version works just fine, so long as the Internet is up. If you’re used to the squiggly colored lines in Word, ProWritingAid offers something similar, with a lot more suggestions.
It works really well for passive voice and suggestions for making your content stronger. For dialogue and other instances, I often ignore the suggestions. People sometimes speak in passive voice, and that’s okay. But for narration, it’s often quite useful.
I’m bad about repeating words, and although it won’t highlight when a word is used twice in one paragraph (a weakness of mine), it will list multiple words in a side panel for you, showing which words appeared 10 times, 9, 8, 7, etc. Start three sentences in a row with the same word, though, and the system will prompt you about it.
It’s also great at picking up lost words that I think about while writing but sometimes forget to type. Also it can highlight instances where I forgot a letter on a word. That won’t show up in Word’s spellcheck, but ProWritingAid will often flag it. A good example is typing “the” instead of “they.”
I find it’s good for my second read-through to paste a chunk in ProWritingAid and take a look. The different font in the web version also helps errors stand out.
The company does have an affiliate program, but I’m not part of it. I can, however, happily recommend ProWritingAid for anyone who would like to produce the cleanest copy they can before someone else looks at it.
What a great insight about your writing methods, Jaxon. Thank you very much. Also, Last Cohort is purchased, programmed to read it this week. Happy Halloween! 🎃👻🧡