Nine Great Tools and Programs to Help You Edit

Between the rough first draft and the finished, polished product lies a lot of editing.

Beta readers, test readers, critique partners, and/or professional editors are all very important. But before we pass our work to any of those people, we have to clean up that messy first draft. (Because yeah, it is a mess.)

Below are some cool features, programs, and site that can help bring order to the chaos.

Microsoft Word’s ‘find’ feature
This feature is great for finding overused words, pet words, and weak adverbs and adjectives. Plus you can catch any misspellings of names. You have to know what to look for, but once armed with a list of words, you can spend days playing search and destroy.

Wordle
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
This is also helpful for finding words you overuse without even realizing it!

Here are some other programs (and their official description) that can help with both grammar and style. Some are free and some are paid, so read the fine print.

SmartEdit
SmartEdit is a new, first-pass-editing tool for creative writers and novelists. It's not a replacement for a human editor. Neither is it designed to do your editing for you. It was built to act as an aid—a helper for when you begin editing your work.

ProWriting Aid
ProWritingAid is your free online writing editor and personal writing coach. Of course it checks your grammar but it does much more to help you improve your writing.

AutoCrit 
The AutoCrit Editing Wizard is an instant book editor. With the click of a button it shows you the problems in your manuscript.

Style Writer
Use it to edit advertising copy, business reports, contracts, manuals, newsletters or web pages. Even professional journalists and novelists use the program to polish their writing style.

PaperRater
Robust grammar checking allows you to find those pesky mistakes and correct them before turning in your paper. Find out if your paper contains plagiarized text before your professor does. We compare your text to over 10 billion documents. Our proofreading system alerts you to opportunities to improve your writing.

My Word Count
This writing tool is a standalone program that analyzes your Word document, text file, or Scrivener project for character, word, phrase, and sentence usage. It produces sortable tables of counts for all words and phrases, and graphs sentence length. It can analyze each sentence and assign a grade level difficulty, or help you find your long and hard-to-read sentences. Fine tune your writing and find overused words and phrases.

Grammarly
Grammarly is an automated proofreader and your personal grammar coach Correct up to 10 times more mistakes than popular word processors.

Who’s up for some fun editing?

What programs do you use?