Weekly Writers: Polishing The Draft, Tip #3

Ways to improve your writing: software tools

Software tools help hugely in flagging up potential errors in your writing: though you’ll then need to apply human consideration to understand the issues raised and weed out false positives.

What do I mean by that? Software can’t understand context, so there’s no distinction between real issues, and possible problems (that are actually fine in the way you have used it). For example, software might point out that you used “boiling hot” once with a hyphen, and once without. But, of course, grammatically it won’t have a hyphen in the sentence “The water was boiling hot,” but it will in “He poured the boiling-hot water,” so that isn’t a true inconsistency or indicative of anything that needs changing. Hence the need to evaluate everything that gets flagged up by software.

Tip: in cases where you’ve used two different versions and they really are inconsistent, but where there is a choice, then choose one and record your decision in your personal style guide. Then, in future, you’ll stick to that version. E.g. the decision between “no one” and “no-one”. I will discuss style guides in a future post.

Sometimes it is best analysing a full book chapter by chapter rather than all at once, to avoid the reports becoming overwhelming (though the single-chapter approach will miss out on an overview of repetitions and echoes across the whole work; there are pros and cons to both methods). Here are three software tools I have made use of.

• Hemingway. It’s free. You can paste a whole book into this, or just do a chapter at a time.

• Online Consistency Checker. Also free. It is handy for flagging up possible inconsistencies, though note that (as ever) some will be false positives.

• ProWritingAid. A paid tool, but potentially worth it. I focus mainly on these reports: Overused; All Repeats (though I only check phrases longer than four words); Echoes; Cliches; Consistency.

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