Notes on ProWritingAid from James Elstad’s talk, August 18th
Jim is the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, and is using ProWritingAid to help with his fourth novel. You can find him at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6491416.James_R_Elstad or look for his books at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=james+elstad&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss Pick up spare copies of notes from his talk at our next meeting if you missed it!
ProWritingAid is available online free at https://prowritingaid.com/. But the free version only accepts 500 words at a time, which could make for very slow progress with a 50,000 word novel. Subscriptions cost $70 for a year, $100 for two years, $140 for three, and $240 for a lifetime subscription. Even then, you won’t want to upload your whole novel at a time (or the results would take forever). Still, one chapter at a time, around 3,000 words, will feel much better than just 500 words.
Note from Sheila: if you buy a subscription, you can download an add-on to Word which allows you to analyze text without uploading to the internet. You still need an internet connection for it to work, and it makes Word take longer to start up. Also, it has some odd quirks that might make you either think twice or only use it on temporary files. That said, Sheila still agrees with Jim that it’s really useful.
What will PWA do for you?
- Make you work
- Make you look at alternative ways to write those sentences
- Make you take 2 hours over tidying up one chapter (2 hours well spent!)
- Might lower your word count (by helping you get rid of fluff)
- Teach you to write better (so maybe you won’t need the lifetime subscription after all…)
When you upload your text (or open the PWA tab in Word if you’re using the Word extension) you’ll find several options at the top of the page.
Core offers a summary of PWA’s analysis, or the option to have suggestions and comments highlighted in the text. Left hand margins provide more information when you click on, say,
- Style (looks for readability, passive verbs, long clauses, too many adverbs, repeated sentence starts, emotional tells, and more…)
- Grammar (underlines possible errors, offers the option to go straight to the error and read suggested alternatives—offers suggestions on commas and spelling issues too) It’s not perfect, but it’s helpful
- Thesaurus (highlights nouns, verbs, adjectives etc and offers possible replacements—while the list would be way too long to be useful, it’s good to check on replacements for words that maybe jump out at you, or that other parts of the program say you have overused, which leads to…)
- Overused (checks whether you are using any words more frequently than normal) Of course, you might have used those words intentionally—e.g. legal-speak during a trial scene.
- And Combo (a kind of “set your own combination report” feature)
The next tab after “core” looks for “repeats,” and recognizes what phrases are repeated in your text. You may have intended the repeats of course—it won’t know; just tells you what it sees. The echoes option lets you go through repetitions one by one. The All Repeats option looks for, say, 8-word phrases, 7-word, 6-word etc. that are repeated in your text. Again, the repeats might be deliberate, but it’s a great way to spot when you use “so” too often, or when “Fred” is always mentioned by name instead or using “he.”
The structure tab tells you what percentage of sentences start with the same word, with an adverb, with…, what percentages are long, etc… with information on how your writing compares with the average, which might be useful. Transitions highlights all those dreaded and/but/for/first words—again, could be useful.
Then there’s readability, which has lots of subsections:
- Readability estimates how long it takes to read (useful if you’re reading aloud to a critique group), how hard it is to read, and which paragraphs are particularly difficult.
- Sticky looks for “glue words.” E.g. in the sentence For those who asked, yes, she will produce a booklet, but don’t wait for the book to come out, the glue words are for/those/who/asked/yes/will/a/but/do/the/to/come/out. Can you tell, it doesn’t like that sentence!
- Cliches does the obvious
- Diction looks for vague or abstract words
- Pronouns highlights pronouns. I wish it told me which ones were ambiguous, but at least it helps me find them. Again, it tells you how your writing compares to average, or to good.
- Alliteration – great if you mean it, sad if you don’t, so good to see it highlighted.
- Homonym points out all the familiar homonyms, but can’t tell you if you got them wrong.
Then there’s the consistency tab which checks spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, quote marks, m-dashes etc. I think it may even suggest adding or removing spaces around dashes. Acronyms are covered under this tab too.
Fiction looks at dialog and pacing. What percentage of your document is dialog? How much is slow, introspective backstory? Where are those slow bits so you can rewrite them (if you want to).
The “house style” claims to let you create your own patterns. Sheila might use it to help impose a house style on the anthology.
And finally plagiarism checks whether you’re stealing someone else’s words—more useful in non-fiction probably, but maybe useful for that section of backstory that you worked on with Wikipedia’s help. (It’s slow!)
- Does PWA “fix” your manuscript? No.
- Does it help you fix your manuscript? Yes.
- Does it replace an editor? No, but your editor can concentrate on the serious stuff if you fix the dumb stuff first.
- How does the price compare with hiring an editor? Editors might run from $500 to $2000 for a short novel. If you’re paying that sort of money, using PWA first makes a lot of sense. And if you’re not, it still helps you self-edit, makes you self-edit, and makes you more self-aware in reading your writing.
- Does it find details like eye color etc? Don’t know yet.
- Does it fix unmatched quote marks? Don’t know yet.
If you uploaded text from Word, you can download the edited text back to Word and retain the formatting. Or you can use the add-on to Word, but be aware it slows Word down.
Is it good value for money? Jim and Sheila both seem to think so. But why not try the free version first and see what you think? https://prowritingaid.com/