Hemingway, Grammarly, Ginger......?

I have only tried the free versions. Here is my opinion on the ones I tried...

Prowritingaid
The free version is helpful, you'd have to put your book in there in chunks. It spews out a butt load of information, some good, some not helpful. The pro version is suppose to be more customizable. I was disappointed that common modern words such as "blog" is shown as misspelled.

Hemingway, Writersdiet, After the Deadline, Editminion
Seemed unhelpful for longer pieces.

SmartEdit
I liked the free version, but it's limited.

Grammarly
I didn't try out at all. I don't like having to give them I email, just the test a sample.

Ginger - I haven't heard of.


Sadly, they don't/won't clean everything up, but used in combination it's helpful.

I run my short stories through them all! My novel I did a chapter or four, it allowed me to see what my common problems were, then I was able to read through my novel and find the problems much more easily. I think it gets your brain in the right mode, you know what I mean?

All grammar/editing software barely checks for the most elementary grammar problems, does not check it correctly, and misses almost all rules and constructions by principal alone. From a grammarian and linguist standpoint: Grammar/editing software is worthless and causes more problems than they solve.

Beta-readers aren't editors--unless they somehow have a background in professional editing with appropriate training and willing to edit your novel. Beta-readers are there to test if your language and story work the way you intend it all to work.

Just because you haven't been in school to learn "standard" grammar, doesn't mean you can't relearn and properly learn grammar. There's hundreds of free resources online, in books, videos, ect.. You can take classes at your local college/Uni. If you're a native English speaker, there should be no reason and excuses why you can't edit your writing.

Agents and editors don't expect perfect grammar in the works they get, but they do expect the writer to have a good, working knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and usage. Take the time to learn and apply it; stop making excuses.

The test of such software is running published stories through them. When I run a famous published story through any of these things, and I've tried them all, they say the story has numerous problems. The same happens when I run one of my own published stories though them.

If you listen to everything they tell you, your piece will be pretty bad. If you know enough to ignore everything they get wrong, you know enough not to need the program.

If you want to get a piece of writing anywhere near perfect, you either have to learn grammar, or you have to have someone proof the piece who does know grammar.

To tack onto what James said.

Those programs do not take in style either. So they can strip out all the good stuff too.

Since it's a matter of dusting off and relearning and not that you never learned it, a good editing book might help - may even be better. I like Edit-Proof your Writing by Don McNair. It's a quick and easy read with examples to help you visualize what's wrong.

English is my third language and my novel is in English as I like to tell myself I might actually reach an audience, so I might as well pick the biggest LOL. So I got Grammarly as I can't for the life of me afford a human editor. And Grammarly just told me I should replace "no matter what" with "any matter what". Can those three words in that order and no punctuation, even ever make sense in a sentence?

No, Grammarly. No.

Please do not rely on Grammarly. At least, take everything it offers with extreme skepticism. From what I've seen in your AW posts, your English is certainly good enough to get an agent or editor's attention already.

Filigree said:

Please do not rely on Grammarly. At least, take everything it offers with extreme skepticism. From what I've seen in your AW posts, your English is certainly good enough to get an agent or editor's attention already.

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You're so nice, would you be my editor?
...on a more serious note... if I get an editor's attention, don't I still have to pay them? I have less than $2 on my name Man... I'd love to give my paper baby all the best treatment and polishing and attention, but money.. money...

I tend to run spell check with grammar checking turned on, simply because once in a blue moon it does say something useful. (Most often that's an inadvertently doubled word, which I'm apparently very prone prone to.)

For Hemingway-style editors, I do sometimes use a previewer called "Marked," which highlights words as "avoid," "prefer alternate" and "passive voice" -- it's easy to mock those analyzers by running famous stories through them and seeing all of the supposed problems they highlight, but if you treat them as saying "here are things about this text that I noticed" rather than "here are things about this text that you should change," they can be useful. Most of the time I find the words Marked tells me avoid are filler words like very and really and of course, and I find being forced to stop and think "is that word truly carrying its weight?" can be a useful exercise.

I use Hemingway and Grammarly. I use the free versions of both.
For Hemingway app, that's online. You don't have to pay for it unless you download it.

Hemingway: I love it. It tells you when you're making a sentence work too hard. It alerts you of adverbs and past tense too. Something I like to be aware of. It helps me make things more readable.

Grammarly: I use the extension in chrome. You can turn it on or off but it reminds you to comma and corrects you if it thinks you're using the wrong word. I also use the site. It will help you fix most of the problems and at the bottom it will tell you that you have a certain amount of advanced fixes and that if you upgrade they'll fix those too. I don't buy that at all. I think that's for people in college who are doing English papers or something. It's pretty handy though. Right now it tells me it's helped me correct 602 errors.
Also, something handy is if you double click a word, Grammarly will tell you the definition and synonyms for that word.

I realise this is a slightly older post but I don't think anyone's addressed the point.

Ravioli said:

You're so nice, would you be my editor?
...on a more serious note... if I get an editor's attention, don't I still have to pay them? I have less than $2 on my name Man... I'd love to give my paper baby all the best treatment and polishing and attention, but money.. money...

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Literary agents and trade publishers do not charge the writers they work with for the editing they do. So if it's trade publication you're after, just get your work as clean as you can, and then submit it appropriately, and you'll be fine.

NicoleScripting said:

I use Hemingway and Grammarly. I use the free versions of both.
For Hemingway app, that's online. You don't have to pay for it unless you download it.

Hemingway: I love it. It tells you when you're making a sentence work too hard. It alerts you of adverbs and past tense too. Something I like to be aware of. It helps me make things more readable.

Grammarly: I use the extension in chrome. You can turn it on or off but it reminds you to comma and corrects you if it thinks you're using the wrong word. I also use the site. It will help you fix most of the problems and at the bottom it will tell you that you have a certain amount of advanced fixes and that if you upgrade they'll fix those too..

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Have you sold anything you used these programs on? I've yet to see either program do anything other than turn bad writing into worse writing, and good writing into bland, bad writing. If you can't do all these things for yourself, without help, no software, and probably no person, can help you.

Have you tried running a published short story through either of these programs? I've probably put sixty or seventy through them, and in every case these programs said the stories had all sorts of problems. The stories had no problem at all, but if you made the changes either of these programs said to make, the stories never would have sold.

I use the Hemingway app. I don't follow it blindly, but like Chipotle, I find it does a nice job of catching lazy words like really, very, etc that I don't need but had become blind to. It's not that such words made the sentence bad... it's just a little stronger, in some cases, without them. I also like it because it marks the complex sentences. In writing MG, sometimes I'll let a sentence ramble or have a slightly odd construction I can probably do a better job with, and the app highlights those.

I look at these applications a bit like that Gaiman quote:

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

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So I just see if it's marked something, then I figure out if there's anything actually wrong with what it's marked. If there isn't, I ignore it.

You're allowed to use whatever tools you think will help you best revise your manuscript. Lots of successful authors use lots of different tools.