I've never found any specific Grammar software that was worthwhile.

Still on a revision note, you may want to check out Smart Edit, if you're on windows. I use it fairly frequently, the repeated words/phrases function has saved me a ton.

From their main page:

That's the only program that I can think of that may be what you're looking for.

 

I've only used the free one.

 

I didn't know there was such a thing.

But yeah, I have to agree with Cheddar on this one. My grammar sucks, especially when it comes to writing things such as:

Harry said, "So, you mean to tell me that you killed Dobby with a pencil," his eyes darkened, "and that you got away with it?"

Sentences like that, with the action between the quotes really gets to me, so I think I could use something like that.

I do, however, use a spelling tool called "Tiny Spell," which sits on your system tray and flags down misspelt words. You click on it, or in my case, hit the shift key an you are presented with choices.

So something free, something that actually works and something that doesn't moan about licenses and such.

 

Hehe. Last time I used a program with a grammar checker, it was Word and it came on a stack of about 8 floppies.

I wonder if they work any better, now.

 

You could do it like this: "So," Harry said, "you mean to tell me that you killed Dobby with a pencil." His eyes darkened. "And you got away with it?"

Or like this: Harry said, "So you mean to tell me that you killed Dobby with a pencil," his eyes darkening. "And you got away with it?

Lots of ways to do it, but you should not put a sentence between commas.

 

Laughing my ass off . . . no, they don't.


I've just ended up going into Word and telling it to flag everything, and then take the things that it flags as suggestions, rather than absolutes. Damn thing still can't tell the difference between it's and its.

First one's okay. The second one is wrong. darkening eyes can't speak. If you want to keep it all one sentence, you can do it like this:

"So, you mean to tell me that you killed Dobby with a pencil"—his eyes darkened—"and you got away with it?"

 

I reformatted my computer and was looking to reinstall grammar/editing software when I came across this little gem. http://prowritingaid.com/

It's pretty robust, analyzing not only grammar and style, but also sentence and paragraph length, pacing of the story (though pacing is somewhat subjective), cliches/redundancies, repeated words/phrases, pronouns, "diction" report, vague/abstract words, complex words, "sticky sentences," Alliteration, consistency (are all uses of "Apparation" capitalized, for instance), and dialogue tags. There's a couple others, but they're not necessarily important to fanfiction/fiction writing.

Unfortunately, you can only post 1000 words and only a few of the above categories work in the free version, but the full version has a couple options, $30 a year or $120 for lifetime license. Also, if you use Word, there's an add-in that allows you to run the program inside Word (but it's still using the engine on the website, so you have to be connected to the internet, from what I read).

Also, at least on the internet editor version, you have the option via buttons to check for specific things such as overused words, time references, passives, adverbs, and hidden verbs, and even have it mark patterns of an author.

I threw in a very rough draft of a story and the report was pretty impressive, even catching echoes through alliteration.

 

Damn. That thing is certainly useful. I copy-pasted about 1,000 words and the program destroyed me. It points out overuse of words (could, had were some of my worst offenders), overuse of adverbs, and offers suggestions as to what should be changed. For example: I used was/were 22 times and they suggested I remove 8 of them.

It looks like its very easy to use. Good find, E.C. Using this in conjunction with Word would be excellent, but as I use Wordpad, its not that difficult to copy-paste small sections of text five or six times to complete a chapter. Definitely worth a look for any (serious) writers.

 

That's hilarious! I wonder, do you have it posted somewhere? Maybe it picked it up and compared it.

I haven't seen Grammarly. I may have to pop over to the website and check it out. Do you have any idea how Grammarly works with academic papers? I'd be interested to know.

And I agree about license vs. software, especially when you don't know if/when the company is going out of business, but it is what it is, I guess.

 

Gave it a try. Seems to work well. My only complaint is that all those functions you guys mention also include dialogue. So of course I have adverbs and was and were and clichéd lines and even spelling 'mistakes'.

I don't think it'd be that challenging to omit instances where dialogue tags are used. That's all I'd add to it.

 

I think I read that if you buy the license, you can exclude dialogue. I just bought it and am waiting for the confirmation emails, but I have other things I need to do now and can't mess with it at the moment. I'll get back to you later tonight about whether you can or can't exclude dialogue.

 

I think it says nice job if you have a sufficiently low number of adverbs proportional to the length of the text. Or is it telling you nice job in each specific instance of an adverb in the text?

 

Just thought I'd say that signing up allowed me to put in a 2395 word doc (not sure if it has a limit). Didn't cost money or anything, and I used my google account so really just pressing a button. But thank you E.C. Scrubb for this find, and hopefully I can become a better writer.

 

Cheddar . . . I make it a habit not to give out personal info, even things like codes. However, since I'm not willing to do that, I tried to do the next best thing and give you a walkthrough of the entire program in Word: with pictures.

(I'll go step by step in case others who aren't that computer literate are reading, so it may be pedantic, I apologize).
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So, to start out with, here is the way it sets up in Word. On the top right you see the add-in for Pro-Write. above "a" you see the button to search the text. Just below that, however, is the type of text you've designated. You get the choice of Professional, Creative, Academic, etc. It's a nice little feature, as it sets some general parameters for the searches. To the right of that is the settings menu (where I've written "b" though rather poorly).

The settings window looks like this. Yeah, pretty basic, at least for the connection tab at the top. The next tab is the Reports tab. I like the fact that you can choose the reports, but what I really like is the "House Style" report. You can choose your own things to search for in House Style Report by programming it in the Patterns tab. Here, I've set it so that all apostrophes are marked. This way, I can check to make sure that I've written all my plural and possessive nouns correctly. The next few are for academic writing, but I may still use it to find all uses of a "Naked This" in my text. Following that tab is the Analysis tab. I've grown to like the structure panel, which, on the first pic, was to the very left. I also like the fact that you can shut off settings in dialogue (though not all of them, like adjectives, unfortunately). The last tab is the Overused Word tab. I haven't messed with it, which is obvious, but it looks pretty solid. I really like the fact that it gives you the ability not only group words together, but then determine how many uses per 1000 is acceptable.

Back to the main screen, notice the structure panel. As you choose a report, that panel will light up to tell you where each of the occurrences are in the sentence (each bar) and thus, also the paragraph (the purple lines to the side).

The first report is the "Overused Words" report. Interesting that it gives you a figure of how many to remove. I've yet to find out how they came up with it (how many per 1000 word), but it's a good start, at least.

The "Writing Style" report is pretty nice, IMO. The one problem is that it counts adverbs in dialogue and I've yet to figure out if it can be turned off, but I don't think it can be. On the other hand, I really like the "Passive Index" at the bottom right to let me know whether those 7 passive verbs I've used are too many or not. Another feature that I really like is the "Repeated Sentence Starts." I was kind of surprised to find three continual sentences all started with "I."

The following report is the "Grammar Report" Frankly, it's a waste of time, since this part of the report is just for spelling, and I've already taken care of those in the Word software.

The next one is "Sentence Length." Nothing else much to say.

"Diction" seems to be what I'd put under grammar, but nevertheless, it's not. Of course, most of this is take it or leave it advice, but that's true of any software.

"Vague and Abstract Words" Self-identifying, but remember that you can tell it to not check dialogue here.

Most of the rest of these are self-identifying and I also caught the "report description" at the bottom, so I'll just link the screenshots.

Cliches and Redundancies
Pronoun
Repeat Words and Phrases I really like this one, not just because it highlights the word, but because you can see the color on the structure panel and see how far apart the phrases are.
Sticky Sentences
Complex Words
Alliteration
NLP Predicates (At first blush, I thought this one wouldn't be that useful in this type of writing. However, thinking about it again, I completely changed my mind. It's nice to be able to see just exactly what kind of sensory/thought words I'm using, how many I'm using, and whether I need to change anything or make it more balanced.
Consistency Note on this one, the software doesn't distinguish between a word pair used as adjectives that come before a verb from one that comes after, and thus, whether it needs a hyphen or not.
Pacing
Dialogue tags
Acronyms

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Working with Scrivener . . .

Here's the other thing I realized, Scrivener saves as a .txt. So, if Word is your writing software, you can use ProWritingAid on every story you are writing in Scrivener.

So, if your saving to the document library, go there and find the XXXX.scriv folder. Then files > Docs > click on your document. It'll have a number, so you'll have to click around to make sure you get them all. I haven't messed with changing the names and seeing what happens, my guess is it'll screw the entire file system up.

Anyway, I do like that you can basically use it with Scrivener, though I hope they'll make it so that you can actually use it in Scrivener at some point.

EDIT: It has a plugin for WordPress too, if anyone's interested. http://prowritingaid.com/en/App/WordPress