:facepalm Guess my wife is right about not listening . . .

Thanks. I've noticed that there's a couple options missing as well, and don't know why that is. For now, I think I'll work on it in Word, then when I'm finished, I'll cut and paste it to catch the last couple of things.

What's really screwing me up right now is figuring out how to work the tool into my writing process. Do I check it after I do all my edits, while I'm editing, do I edit, check, edit, check, etc.? It's these little things that I find drive my A.D.D. riddled brain mad.

 

I didn't last night. After reading your post I went back and checked a few minutes ago. Didn't have any problems with it crashing, though a few of the reports seemed to not want to come through. Slow server maybe?

 

In the eternal search for a good editing software, I found another contender, and I'm really growing to like it.

StyleWriter

• Style Categories:
  If you're familiar with prowritingaide (PWA), you're somewhat familiar with this part of the software, but it's so much more. It works based off of a number of subcategories, and then produces a style score that brings together all the different elements of style. Those elements are:
  • "Plain English Style." This section picks up passive verbs, hidden verbs, complex words, abstract words, overused words, legal words, cliches, business cliches, wordy phrases, overwriting, foreign words, and unusual words. I found StyleWriter to be heads and tails better than PWA in this area. Especially when it comes to overwriting and wordy phrases, which there's very little help for in PWA. The other thing I like is that you can turn off any single one of those categories with a simple click.
    
    
  • The next category is "Jargon." This category picks up abbreviations, difficult words, and certain phrases.
    
    
  • The third category is "Word Usage." the subcategories in this are "Misused words, confused words, confused common words, confused hyphen, hyphen help, sexist writing, sexist common, informal, and miscellaneous. The program does a good job with confused and misused words "accept" vs. "except" or "farther" vs. "further." I usually dismiss "informal" categories, especially in fiction, but not in this program since it will catch and mark "And then she pissed at me." Instead of "and then she hissed at me."These subcategories again can be turned off or on, and I've found are very good for helping catch things that Word or any other software miss.
    
    
  • the fourth section is "Spelling." Here, both the spellchecker, but also "questionable" spellings are highlighted. Questionable spellings are something like, "We hurried through the ides for March. This program picks those up and asks whether you meant to use "ides" or "ideas."
    
    
  • User Categories. Self explanatory.
    
    
  • Sentence analysis. This subcategory offers a section we're all familiar with "Long sentences" and one any PWA user is familiar with "High Glue" sentences. However, in this software, you get to determine what percent of glue words can be in an individual sentence before it's highlighted. Also, there's another category, "High Bog." According to the help file, "Bog Index is a measure using a weighted difficulty score for more than 200,000 graded words, lsentence length, an style issues. It gives credit for many writing features that make socuments easier to read." In other words, it is an integrated score.
    
    
  • pep and "exclude quoted text." Pep is a box that you can check or uncheck for the software to calculate. It measures "lively verbs, interesting nouns, people's names or conversational style using contractions . . . " You get the point. Oh, and when you use spellcheck and tell the software to accept a word, you get to choose whether that word is a proper noun, a regular word, a specialty use word, etc.
    "Exclude Quoted text" actually WORKS in this software. It'll still highlight the problems in the quotes, but it will not calculate statistics based on quoted material. It also provides a nice big yellow line on the text so that you can easily find all your quoted material, and then make sure you've closed your quotes, used tags, etc.
  
  
  
• Editor's list In this frame, there are eight tabs, all of which provide a list of words that can be sorted alphabetically, or by frequency. Also, any word can be highlighted and traced back to the text:
  • Spelling: four panes are found under this tab: unknown words, questionable words, unusual words, and Added words. It's a nice view to what's going on with unique words.
    
    
  • Bog: three panes are provided here. Heavy words, style words, and specialist words. All these words supposedly bog the reader down. Examples of heavy words are: confusion, comparison, feroicity, discussion, etc. Examples of style words are: inform, acceded, disdain, suffice, etc. Specialist words may be: bowels, or coursed.
    
    
  • Wordy: three panes come up in this tab: Passive verbs, Hidden verbs, and Wordy phrases. Self explanatory.
    
    
  • Jargon: abbreviations, difficult words, and Jargon phrases show up here. Again, self explanatory.
    
    
  • Pep: this is the tab that gets my interest. The first pane is "interest words." Basically, it pushes a writer to not be so bland. The second is "names" and the third is "Conversational." This last pane is focused on both pronouns, but also other types of speaking in conversation, such as contractions, questions, catchy phrases, etc.
    
    
  • All: four separate panes are in this tab. First, a true "all" pane, with a frequency number for every word. Second, a pane for Glue words only. Third, a short list pane gives you all the words you use, except for glue words and "Odds and Ends." And, not so surpisingly, "Odds and Ends" is the fourth pane. Each of these panes also gives you percentage of total words in story that are contained in each pane.
    
    
  • User: self explanatory. See the words caught by your own style creation.
    
    
  • Graded: five panes here, graded from Easy to Difficult. Every word used in the document is distributed along this graded tab.
  
  
  
• Layout
  • The two sections above provide the backbone of the program, and their statistics are shown at the bottom of the software page: total words, bog score, pep score, passive use, style score, sentence score (length), jargon score, glue percentage, and grade.
    
    
  • Left side: a nice graph for total sentence lengths and also average length, along with a second graph for the same thing. It presents two nice, visually appealing ways to look at your work.
    
    
  • Along the top, besides the open and close folder buttons, you get a chance to isolate bog, glue, and style sentences (ones that are bad), and also any abbreviations that may be used. Ther are other buttons, but these are the ones with the high functionality for writing. There's another one, however, and that's statitical summary. It gives a breakdown of the above statistics, but you can save them, and then edit your paper and see how your scores have changed.
  
  
• Other things:
  
  • Fourteen day trial period; fully functional. It's a matter of keystrokes to bring up one of the three editions during the trial period. There is, however, no moneyback guarantee. They state on their website that they'd rather you try the software for free for the two weeks. They will, however, consider a request—though we all know how that usually goes. However, if you do buy the software, but don't register it, and then decide you don't want it, they WILL refund you your money in that case.
    
    
  • Cost:
    • Professional Edition: pretty much everything I've described above. $190 one time fee.
      
      
    • Standard Edition: missing the editor lists (full word, word frequency, spelling lists, bog lists, etc). $150 one time fee
      
      
    • Starter: leaves out the Jargon categories, high-bot sentences, glue sentences, pep category, statistics summary... basically, it's a powerful spell checker and statistic guide. $90 one time fee
    
    
  • You have the option to take all the comments, and load them into word in the Review Balloons. This way, you can work you way through the review features right in word to fix everything. It is not necessary to do it this way, but it can be done. I have found this to be a bit buggy, however, in that it won't always load up all the comments. I have to go a few pages at a time.
    
    
  • A plethora of options to chose from when it comes to audience, and whether that audience is public or in house (in house meaning you can set your own style manual vs. a regular style).
    
    
    
  • The software is downloaded, so no depending on servers (ahem, PWA). When you click to check your work in Word, you can either check a highlighted portion of text, or the entire text. Again, when the software rates your text, you can reimport it's notes, or do the work right in the software window.
    
    
  • One program, one computer. If you want to use it on multiple computers, you need to spend an extra $30.00 for the extension pack (up to three computers). I don't necessarily like this, but it's much, much better than depending on servers.
    
    
  • It doesn't run on mac, though the help file says that they have had people report using it without a problem on something like Parallels Desktop.
    
    
  • Uses three English uses: USA—Webster's Dictionary; UK—Oxford Dictionary; Australia—Macquarie Dictionary. If you're from Canada, it figures you're illiterate, so no dictionary for you.

All in all, I'm really liking it. I am findings a few holes that PWA fills, such as tags, easily identifying phrase repetitions by number of words as well as use, etc. Using these two together is working for me.

I would post pics, but the videos on their website do a better job of seeing how it works. Or, just download the software and give it a run.

 

I tried it on two chapters of a new story I am working on, and it tried to convince me to change "Mr. Potter" into "Mr Potter" (UK-Setting).

All in all it had a lot to complain but everything except "glue words" was excellent. It might help me improve but to use the features which would help me most I would have to buy the standard edition for $150.


Oh, yeah, after I checked my stuff, I testet it on some random fanfiction on ff.net. This is the result (the author's style is apparently better than Jon's above):

[IMGUR]IWNN2nl[/IMGUR]

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And this is the full screen. Does anyone recognise the fic?

[IMGUR]1NNc0DJ[/IMGUR]

 

So, this morning I decided to run my post through the software to give everyone an example of what it would and would not do. I didn't fix any mistakes that weren't highlighted, but some mistakes were part of larger issues (such as High-Glue sentences), and were removed.
First, I loaded it into Word, and then clicked on the program. Here's the result:


I worked through, and the following is the result (note, I didn't take the time to reformat it):

It is over two-hundred words shorter and reads much cleaner.

(EDIT: Damn! Can't remove the thumbnail and just use the larger pic. Sorry for the dup.)

EDIT: Yes, you can. Edit - Go Advanced - in one of the menues below is the button "Manage attachments".

EDIT: Saw that, but couldn't figure out how to remove it, but keep the screenshot. Color me stupid.

 

DM, make sure to switch the type of writing to "Fiction." It does change the filters some. But even there, it gives that wonderful piece of fanfiction a "fair" for Style.

That's funny, though. The software sure doesn't measure for taste, does it? I guess the problem is that, as bad as MI is, most of the sentences are syntactically accurate, easy to read, and overwritten. (outside of the ANs). In fact, giving this chapterette a glance, it makes me think that it really was a great piece of trolling, because the underlying English is pretty decent.

EDIT - just ran it through PWA and got about the same result.

 

Query-related bump.

1. Which software picks up minor context quibbles the best (for example, Luna's and Celestia's jewelry and Luna and Celestia's jewelry).

2. Which software, after trying them all, would you personally say was the most effective for general proof-reading?

 

My trial ran out so I can't go back and check it for you. At the very least, with a number of these programs, you can tell it to find all possessives and then check it yourself. Personally, I think that Stylewriter has a better possiblity of catching it. But I wouldn't guarantee it. There's a couple online free sites that I also run my stuff through as well. With all four of them, I tend to get a pretty clean product (as long as I don't go back and make changes, and then mess it all up again).

 

I also suggest this Grammar Check site.