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?

The Vulnerable Writer

Have you written the story that is close to your heart? It may be a sensitive or really controversial topic, that burning issue that requires you to dig deep and lay your soul bare. It’s the story that requires you to be open, honest, direct and vulnerable.

Many people associate vulnerability with weakness. But it actually requires a certain strength, because it involves putting yourself out there – exposing who you are. Being vulnerable means letting go, exposing your thoughts, ideas and true emotions to reveal your imperfectly perfect self. That’s scary. So maybe associating it with weakness is a way to avoid the issue? After all, vulnerability requires that you move outside your comfort zone. So we choose to err on the side of caution. Rather play it safe.

It’s been said that when you write and then you start to feel uncomfortable with the subject matter or your approach to it, that's when you are probably onto something really good. 

But it’s a tough call. From a young age, we're taught not to make other people feel bad/uncomfortable and then as writers we're supposed to do the exact opposite. We're supposed to talk about the tough issues, not avoid them. And we have to create conflict rather than solve it. 

It takes great courage to write straight from the heart, free from fears of anonymous others and what they might think. Exposing our innermost selves comes with the risk of being rejected or cast out, or being perceived as a failure. This is linked to our struggle for self-worth. If people approve of it, then we’re worthy. If people disapprove then we’re worthless. But that's a discussion for another day...

Thoughts to ponder:

In your writing, choose to be brave enough to peel back the layers, to reveal who you really are... 

Dig deep and write about that subject matter that weighs heavy on your heart...

Dare to be vulnerable... 

IWSG Post Day and Upcoming Guests with Awesome Writing Tips

It’s time for another group posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group! Time to release our fears to the world – or offer encouragement to those who are feeling neurotic. If you’d like to join us, click on the tab above and sign up. We post the first Wednesday of every month. I encourage everyone to visit at least a dozen new blogs and leave a comment. Your words might be the encouragement someone needs.

Our awesome co-hosts for today are Krista McLaughlin, Kim Van Sickler, Heather Gardner, and Hart Johnson! Be sure to pay them a visit and thank them for helping today.

This site continues to expand with more great links and guests.

We have some amazing guests lined up for the next three months:

Martina Boone from Adventures in YA Publishing will be here on July 16. She’s an agented writer and her first book, Compulsion, comes out this October from Simon & Schuster/Simon Pulse. She will be sharing tips on what to do pre-book deal.

Angela Ackerman from Writers Helping Writers will be here on August 20. Angela and Becca Puglisi are authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, The Positive Trait Thesaurus, and The Negative Trait Thesaurus, and they run an amazing site for writers.

Jessica Bell will visit on September 17. Jessica is a musician and writer, author of countless books, including her Nutshell series for writers. She also heads up the Vine Leaves Literary Journal and Homeric Writers' Retreat & Workshop.

Any rocking superstars you’d like to see?