Tag: easy editing

Review: Ginger Software

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After my Grammarly review, another proofreading software company offered me a premium trial to do a review. This one I’d never heard of – Ginger, a startup out of Tel Aviv. This video shows it best:

Ginger specializes in helping people who are learning English as a second language). According to the website, it uses “patent-pending technology to decipher the semantic meaning and context of text input, by comparing it to billions of similar sentences from the Web.”

Ginger’s emphasis on semantics and context, combined with its home country of Israel, made me interested right away – as I understand it, Hebrew is a language even more complex than English, in that a single word can have many meanings (mah-kor means both “origin/source” and “bird beak”!) – therefore Hebrew-speakers are even more dependant on context than the average English speaker, and therefore presumably specially qualified to create a software like this.

AT A GLANCE

Ginger beats both Grammarly and Writing Dynamo right out of the gate for two reasons:

  1. Pricing model.
    • Free version (not sure the difference between this and basic)
    • Basic version = $4.90/month OR one-time payment of $39
    • Premium version = one-time payment of $89

What??? Nobody else is doing a one-time payment model! That’s awesome.

  1. Integration with MS Word

No cut/paste, no uploading documents. No restricting yourself to a few thousand words at a time. Download Ginger and it becomes a convenient yet unobtrusive button at the top of the window when you open Word, and reviews all your text in-doc with a click. FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS MY NEEDS! (This is currently available on Windows only. They are working on a Mac version.)

THE NITTY GRITTY

I ran the same tests I ran on Grammarly (which I stole from blog Grammarist):

  • Obvious Spelling Errors – Ginger catches them all, beating Grammarly.
  • Less Obvious Spelling Errors (like “form” instead of “from”) – Ginger catches all, beating Grammarly
  • Grammar and punctuation mistakes – Ginger is split. It makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did, but fails to catch some problems, including dangling modifiers.
  • Questionable Style Choices – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly.
  • Commonly Misused Words – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did.
  • Commonly Confused Words – Ginger catches two out of five, which is two better than Grammarly.
  • Redundancies – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections.
  • Troublesome Compounds – Better than Grammarly, but a little strange. For instance, for the sentence “We are already to go” instead of suggesting “We are all ready to go,” Ginger suggested “We are already going.”
  • New Words, Colloquialisms and Nonstandard Variants – Ginger loses to Grammarly by just a little – suggesting “computer mice” instead of mouses.
  • American English vs. British English – Ginger wins for being adjustable between US and UK English, though while it catches “odor/odour,” it failed to catch problems with some other examples. I ran a few more of my own tests for comparison – it caught four out of six issues. Not bad.
  • Grammar Myths – Ginger ties with Grammarly.

 

EXTRA NOTES

PRO: Ginger did catch some mistakes neither I nor MS Word caught.

CON: Instead of proofing all at once and showing you the problems all at once, it proofs one sentence at a time while you watch – you can see the sentences flash at the top of the screen – and only stops when it’s found something wrong. The proofer automatically shuts off when you click to another window, so you have to wait while it works, and you can’t do anything else on your computer in the meantime.

PRO: Since they gave me a Premium trial I got to try out the text-to-speech reader. While it lacked the inflection of a human reader, it did offer the options of male or female voice, US or UK accent, so I had a lot of fun hearing my words read aloud by robot Emma Thompson.

WEIRD: Ginger also has a “Sentence Rephraser” which suggests different ways you can say things (usually synonyms). Sometimes its suggestions were helpful, other times troubling. For “She wondered if they would invite her to play with them” Ginger suggested “She wondered if they would pay for her to flirt with them.” What?!?

 

CONCLUSION

This is a tough one, especially since, as a native English speaker, I’m not in Ginger’s target audience. I do think Ginger would be helpful for someone who struggles a lot with spelling and major grammar issues, thought they shouldn’t depend on it solely. Compared to what else I’ve seen, the price and the functionality are the best. In its current condition, it’s not much use to me, personally, but I would keep an eye on it for updates.

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Grammarly Prices and Review

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I recently got an email from the affiliate marketing manager at Grammarly.com. She’d seen my Writing Dynamo review and was offering me the chance to become an affiliate marketer for Grammarly.

That means I’d promote Grammarly on this blog with ads and/or text links,* and for every person who clicked an ad and signed up for a subscription, I’d receive a commission.

Affiliate Marketer Commission

  • $20 for a one-month subscription
  • $30 for three months
  • $50 for one year

Before replying, I did some research. The Grammarly site has an excellent landing page full of information – except the prices. You have to give them your name and email address just to access the price list. Of course I displayed it here for your benefit:

Actual Grammarly Subscription Price (2013)

  • $29.95 for a one-month subscription
  • $59.95 for three months
  • $139.95 for one year

{{ UPDATE: The Grammarly rep has informed me that the prices do appear in the FAQs section of the site. I’ll note that it is still difficult to find: you  have to scroll all the way down the very long homepage to find a small text link. Better than I thought, but still. }}

There’s a free 7-day trial, but you have to select one of the above subscriptions and give them your credit card number to access the trial.

So I wasn’t surprised to find negative reviews of Grammarly around the web: people who’d been charged before they could cancel after using their trial, or who said they’d tried to cancel, but had still been charged. Whether or not Grammarly intentionally charged these customers against their will, it’s still Grammarly’s fault for setting up the subscription system that way.

They were very kind, however, to set me up with a free one-month trial without asking for a credit card number.

So I tried it out.

First, I read a detailed review on Grammarist that had run a series of tests on the program last year. Their tests faulted Grammarly for (unless I miscounted) 42 errors, and praised it for 17 successes. Many of these errors were overcorrections, suggesting changes for all instances of passive voice, personal pronouns, and contractions, all of which are acceptable in creative writing (though passive voice should be used sparingly). Grammarly’s other faults were largely mistaken words it failed to catch.

I ran all the same tests for 2013. On the first run through, I counted seven former errors Grammarly had corrected in itself. They still had 35 uncorrected, and added two new errors.**

Then I noticed something: hover over the “Start Review” button, and you get a drop-down menu for the type of writing you want reviewed (Grammarist either didn’t have that in the 2012 version, or didn’t notice it).

Options!

Options!

Most of Grammarly’s overcorrections disappeared when I selected “Creative” vs. “General” writing, but then it missed even more actual mistakes.

I do like the way Grammarly separates the errors into categories, like Verb Agreement, Punctuation, etc. And how, for certain categories, it provides long and short explanations.

Long and Short

Long and Short

The worst thing I noticed was its “Commonly Confused Words” section. See below. Since when is a synonym a “similar word with different meaning”? I believe the word they are looking for is homonym.

What?!?

What?!?

So I clicked on the question mark beside “sent” and discovered this:

Srsly?

Srsly?

Am I crazy, or is that first definition actually for the word “cent”?

How does it hold up against Writing Dynamo?

  • Does not have the super cool repeat-word catcher
  • Handles more text at one time – 20 pages, which is about 5,000 words
  • “Upload Text” button works
  • “Add to Dictionary” seems to work
  • Wishy-washy on British spellings (allowed some in the Grammarist test, but not in my further tests)
  • Didn’t flag em dashes – yay!
  • Writing area still not adjustable

Conclusion:

I chose not to become an affiliate marketer. In some ways, Grammarly is better than Writing Dynamo and MS Word. I like the option to tell the program what kind of text you are editing. I like the way the reviews are organized. But it still has too many bugs to be worth the price. Thirty bucks a month, and two-thirds of that goes back to the person who told you to buy it? With significant programming updates (and changes to the subscription system), it may be worth our attention in the future. For now, I think good ol’ MS Word will suffice.

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* You’ve already seen some Grammarly ads on this site because I have Google AdSense, which scans my blog for keywords and automatically places relevant ads. I get paid a few cents per click. I do not get a sales commission, and I do not personally endorse any of the products advertised.
** Take these numbers with a grain of salt; I did disagree with Grammarist’s assessment for a few of them. 

Review: Dictionary.com’s “Writing Dynamo” program

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 If you’re on Thesaurus.com (owned by Dictionary.com) as much as I am, you’ve probably seen their Writing Dynamo program advertised. Tagged “Your personal writing coach,” the program professes itself to be “Accurate, effective, web-based proofreading.”

Were you excited?

I was.

Thesaurus.com is hands down better than MS Word’s synonym tool, so why shouldn’t they be better at everything else? Especially if they charge you for it every month! It even says it tests for overused expressions, sentence length and voice!

I signed up for the free trial to find out. I only played around with it for an hour or so, but here’s what I found out.

Disclaimer: It looks like the program was designed for students writing essays, not for fiction writers. But I only tested it on fiction. Take it as you like.

What it looks like.

What it looks like.

Problems

  • Can’t handle large text – it won’t offer feedback on much more than 3,000 words at a time.
  • “Upload Text” button didn’t work – the window popped up, but none of my documents were even visible.
  • Small writing area – the text box is kind of small and not adjustable.
  • Useless dictionary – The spell-checker flagged foreign/made-up words (like MS Word would), but when I clicked “Add to Dictionary” the red underline disappeared on that instance of the word only. Where the word appeared elsewhere in the text, it was still flagged.
  • Didn’t flag all of the foreign/made up words, which indicates it might not catch all misspellings, either.
  • Set to American English – and I couldn’t see a way to switch it to British English.
  • Flagged em dashes as spelling errors.
  • Flagged sentences longer than seventeen words – which could encourage you to be more concise, but there’s no law against eighteen-word sentences.
  • Suggested changing “would have” to “had.” Wrong!
  • Sometimes gave false apostrophe corrections – telling me plurals should be possessives and vice versa (don’t people have enough trouble with this already?!?)
Closeup of the sidebar.

Closeup of the sidebar.

It called the em dash a spelling error.

It called the em dash a spelling error.

The Best Part

It flagged words repeated in close proximity. If I used the same word twice—or even two words with the same root – within a few sentences, it flagged both and offered a synonym suggestion. It’s a pretty useful feature; one MS Word doesn’t offer. Wordle can help you identify words you use too often, but not at this level.

Quick tips appear beneath the sidebar.

Quick tips appear beneath the sidebar.

Conclusion                                                                                      

It didn’t live up to “accurate,” and I don’t know what parameters it uses to judge voice, but I don’t think the world has yet seen software sophisticated enough to judge voice as we define it.

Don’t use Writing Dynamo if you don’t already have a solid grasp on grammar and punctuation; you’re likely to get led astray by false flags. But if you just want a second pair of eyes – particularly for repeated words – this program is worth the free trial and possibly a one-month subscription ($4.99). I’d suggest waiting until your story/book is in its final editing stages, sign up, edit 3,000 words at a time, and then cancel your subscription.

However, the program is fairly new and they are accepting feedback, so they may improve it. I’ll keep you posted if I learn anything.

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6 steps to judging your own writing

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When the pages are closing in on you. [image by Thanakrit Du]

When the pages are closing in on you. [image by Thanakrit Du]

You’ve been working on your novel for so long, you no longer know what’s good and what’s bad. You can’t tell whether the tone is right, the pacing is fast enough, or the characters are believable. All you can see is a swarm of words.

You either think it’s all wonderful (you’re wrong) or it’s all terrible (you’re wrong).

And when it comes to editing, with or without beta readers, you’ll have to make your own decisions at some point.

So is it possible to look at your own work with complete impartiality?

Well, no. But with the right preparation, you can get close.

  1. Step away from the novel. Don’t even look at it for at least a month. Work on something different (NOT the sequel).
  1. Feed the machine. In that same month, read some classics and award-winners. Avoid the “guilty pleasure” books that are horribly written but that you love anyway – those are for another time. Get your brain used to the good stuff so it can recognize the bad stuff (like eating McDonald’s after months of home-cooked meals, it stays with you in a nasty way).
  1. Feed the machine some more. Also re-watch some of your favorite movies – being shorter than books, they more clearly show the plot as a whole. Note how each story is structured. How does it open? How does the tension escalate? How does the hero reach his lowest point? What ultimate decision does he make?
  1. Review. Read good books and/or movie reviews, especially ones that point out plot faults. This will help you identify problems in your own work. For instance:
    1. David’s amazingly insightful reviews at Twilight’s Warden
    2. The hilarious animated video series How It Should Have Ended
    3. The brilliant (though horribly crass, so be warned) reviews at Red Letter Media (I’ve only watched the Star Wars ones)
  1. Tell your ego to shut up. We writers have a tendency to waver between extremes of pretentiousness (“They just don’t understand my brilliance!”) and anxiety (“They’re going to think I’m an idiot.”). Tune out both these voices. Neither is truthful.
  • For the pretentious voice: Let go of the things you refused to change before. Pretty paragraphs you refused to delete. Lovable characters you refused to kill. Look at those “non-negotiables” and ask why? If you don’t have a real reason (e.g., “to be edgy” is not a real reason to be gratuitous), then change it. There are many ways a story can play out, and there’s probably a much more exciting and meaningful way yours can.
  • For the anxious voice: Every good writer is scared when he releases something new into the world. That’s normal. But ask yourself: does a certain part scare you—a certain phrase or scene? Does it scare you because it sounds juvenile, or because it exposes a piece of you? If the former, change it. If the latter, have the courage to leave it.
  1. Create a deleted scenes file. You know you should cut something—but it’s also pretty good writing; what if you need it somewhere else later? Don’t be paralyzed by uncertainty. Simply copy, cut and paste any major deletions into a new file. Soon you’ll have a much cleaner manuscript and a whole list of ideas to fall back on should you ever need it.

What part of self-editing gives you the most trouble?

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How to edit your novel: 5 more practical tips that really work

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 Continued from last week’s Part One: The Forest

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photo by David Mellis

Now we move in for a close up, a focus more on the words and sentence structures than on the story itself. But let’s say you’ve got the grammar stuff down. How else do you clean up your prose?

Part Two: The Trees

Clarity and Flow

1. Compare sentence and paragraph lengths.* Take a sample chunk of your manuscript—say, one to two pages—and, highlight each sentence in alternating colors. The first sentence blue, the second red, the third blue again and so on. Then, take a step back and look at it. There should be a variety of long and short sentences: if all your sentences are about the same length, that’s a sign of bad flow, and you’ll need to do some tweaking.

Bonus tip: Different parts of the story may require different types of flow. Intensify action scenes, like fights or chases, by using more short sentences.

Then, take a sample chapter and do the same thing, but highlighting paragraphs this time. There should be a variety of paragraph lengths.

2. Compare sentence starts.* Using the same samples outlined in #1, highlight the first word of every sentence and then compare them. This helps you ensure a variety of sentence structures. Be on the lookout for pronouns and names. I’ve often had four or five sentences in a row beginning with “She did such-and-such.” Yuck. It makes the prose choppy and repetitive. Rearrange a few of these sentences to improve flow.

3. Search and replace words you use too much. Create a word cloud of your manuscript on wordle.net. ** The biggest words are the ones you use the most (Wordle automatically filters out naturally common words like the and and). Your main character’s names will unavoidably be huge, but look out for others. My most recent test revealed “like” to be pretty big—a sign I may have too many similes. There’s no magic number for how many is too many, but try taking the two or three biggest words in your word cloud, and then searching your manuscript for them (the “Find” feature in MS Word). If you see a pattern emerging, work on editing out at least half.

4. Read aloud. This is what critique partners and writing groups or for: an excuse to read chunks of your writing out loud. Bonus if you can get one of them (who is good at reading aloud) to read it for you while you stand by with a red pen. This way you can make sure an objective reader will:

  • Emphasize the right words. If not, try restructuring the sentence, altering punctuation, or italicizing the words that need to be emphasized.
  • Pause in the right places. If not, you need to add punctuation—commas, semicolons, periods, etc.
  • Doesn’t stumble too much. Passages that are tricky on the tongue can be tricky on the brain, too.
  • Doesn’t repeat the same words too close together. The same adjective, for instance, should not appear twice on the same page.
  • Doesn’t rhyme. Unintentional rhymes sound awful and interrupt flow.

5. Commit to cutting words. You may be horrified at the idea of slicing phrases out of your so carefully crafted masterpiece. Don’t be. Force yourself to cut, say, 100 words per chapter. This doesn’t necessarily mean cutting whole paragraphs, or even whole sentences. Get crafty. See if you can find a word here or there that you can cut without sacrificing meaning. Here’s what will happen as a result:

  • You’ll start to recognize patterns of superfluity and be able to avoid it in the future.
  • You’ll start to recognize when to cut bigger passages that are dragging the story.
  • Your writing will tighten up: it will be clearer, more powerful, and easier to read; which means readers will keep reading.

If all that doesn’t convince you, I’ll appeal to Strunk & White to back me up: rule #17: Omit needless words. Here are examples of words you can cut.

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What editing tips have you picked up? Tell me in the comments!

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* I owe these two tips to my first writing teacher, Miss Judy. Thanks, Miss Judy, wherever you are!

** I owe this tip to Jubilare—pay her a visit; she’s got a new blog!