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Question Two things I've added to my editing process

8 years 3 weeks ago - 8 years 3 weeks ago #1 by konzill
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    • I've made two additions to my editng process. The first is the Hemingway Editor . This is a nice online tool that highlights obvious problem areas. Sure masters can write long and involved sentences that are perfectly coherent. But for where I'm at right now revising to get rid of red and yellow highlighted sentences is valuable.

    The second is text to speach software. I do my witing on an android tablet. And as a final editing pass I past my work into Type and Speak . And make it read it back to me. Nothing picks up bad punctuation as efficently as making a computer read your work because while a human might fix things, a computer reads exactly what is there. Not only do I have a habit of throwing in stray commas but the input method I use also adds stray periods.
    Last Edit: 8 years 3 weeks ago by konzill.
    7 years 10 months ago #2 by Yolandria
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    • That Hemingway site looks very promising. But how accurate is it?
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    7 years 10 months ago #3 by Valentine
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    • Yolandria wrote: That Hemingway site looks very promising. But how accurate is it?


    If I knew how accurate it was, I wouldn't need to use it. :silly:
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    7 years 10 months ago #4 by XaltatunOfAcheron
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    • I tried it with a couple of excerpts from a current work in progress (not Whateley). It looks pretty good. For a wonder, it correctly identified several passives and suggested a target number (I use fewer than its suggestions). It also flagged several adverbs. As far as I'm concerned, they were all necessary - the whole "don't use adverbs" thing is a crock as far as I'm concerned. The issue is that written English isn't spoken English, and if you were trained to write like you speak, editing needs to remove about a dozen specific adverbs.

    It flagged a couple of spelling errors - I use Emacs and don't spell check until I'm done.

    It also flagged several long sentences, and gave a reading grade level of 6 for one excerpt and 8 for the other. I presume it's using Fleisch-Kincaid, but there's no way of telling.
    7 years 10 months ago #5 by Valentine
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    • One of the other problems you run into is dialogue. People rarely speak in "proper" English, so grammar checkers are fairly useless there.

    I had one change a sentence I wrote to completely reverse the meaning of what I had written.
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