Having worked as a ghostwriter for eight years, writing nearly every day while working quickly and efficiently sparked my need to develop ninja wordsmithing skills. And for this, I turned to machine-editing tools.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
When I first started, I suffered some backlash from my writing friends. The common sentiment was this:
Sorry, I totally disagree with that. To me, the most important thing for a new writer is finding their individual voice, and I’d far rather see them trying ambitious things, failing, and learning from them than being convinced they should stick to a few levels up from “see Spot run.”<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
But I’m not proud. With a clear and honest assessment of my skills, I realized if I wanted to make money at ghostwriting, I needed help. Grammarly<\/a> was my first dive into machine editing tools, and it helped with my grammar, but not writing style or word grooming. Then I climbed onboard the ProWriting Aid<\/a> train, and though I have an issue with certain of their metrics, I use it to edit every word I produce. Analyze My Writing was the next go-to I employed in my roster of machine warriors. Here, I check the Lexical Density of my work and have employed it in line-by-line edits. I flirted with AutoCrit<\/a> but found the interface too cumbersome to produce work quickly and the app too pricey for my parsimonious heart. It has since improved, but I still don’t want to part with the cash. However, I continue to utilize the free version to scope areas to improve on, then shift back to PWA for the editing. For a while, I used Hemingway, and while it’s useful, I found it gutted too much content to make the writing sparkle. I don’t recommend it for fiction writing, except for the rare passages where readability is too complex for enjoyable reading. And then I stumbled on Expresso App, the heavens opened and angels sang. Okay, that’s overstating the case, but Expresso has something I have not discovered in other machine editors, and that’s weak verb analysis. Go, Express App!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But Beth<\/em>, you ask, how do you kn<\/em>ow what marks to hit when you edit?<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n