Good morning, fair readers, and welcome to another episode of “Scott’s a ding-dong.” In this fun-filled and heart warming episode, we find a writer who lacks confidence, is convinced that his story is too short, and is still understanding his own voice. Yes, I have Impostor Syndrome, and it has dogged me through my career and hobbies. As I have stated before, I’m not being compensated for my opinions here; I’m not yet important enough to sponsor.
If you read my last post, you’ll know that I’ve been evaluating some tools to help me better organize my thoughts and simplify the authoring process. I’m finding that I’m enjoying Scrivener 3 more every time I use it, and it has been a real enabler for me. Good tools are those that amplify your performance and make you more effective at what you’re doing, whether it’s construction, sports, hobbies, or writing. As I was importing The Beautiful Island into Scrivener and was starting some content edits, I realized that it lacked one of the features I found most useful in MS Word: grammar and punctuation checking. I figured there must be a tool that not only does this as a standalone tool (of course there are many), but that may even play nicely with Scrivener.
The New Player
Enter ProWritingAid. I read the brochure-ware on all the feature sets and the almost absurd number of ways it checks your grammar and, most importantly for me, punctuation. What sold me on it was that you can directly open a .scrivx file and it will keep your binder format. It doesn’t do other format preservation really well, but that’s not really the point. I demoed it on the free web editor and immediately saw value. I’d recently gotten a nice little award from my company for my services (again, really messes with my Impostor Syndrome), so I dropped the coin and purchased licenses for both Scrivener and PWA.
Oh, there be dragons in this software. I fired up the Prologue of Her Violet Empire, and I was instantly sold on its capabilities. Right-click replacement of missing commas, comma splices, removes unnecessary words (I’m guilty of a lot of “that”), and even suggests some replacements for awkward phrasing. My wife is an expert grammarian and won awards for her writing in high school, but this caught things neither of us noticed. Then, I started reading some of the other reports and, when I loaded up the first part of Chapter 1, all hell broke loose.
Slow pacing, dialogue tags, so many adverbs, all of these things seemed to be laughing in my face. It showed 56% compliance in the top right corner and all I could see was, “You are failing as a writer.” It momentarily wrecked me. I came downstairs for dinner and had to have Liz talk me down. When I read back some of the changes I had made based on feedback from the app, she said it didn’t really sound like me anymore, and I found myself agreeing. I changed my mindset and tried again, this time understanding that the tool is not me and doesn’t speak like me. It’s a generalization of what makes good fiction, but not MY fiction. With that in mind, I was able to do some solid editing without changing the substance of my work.
Conclusions
Don’t misunderstand me: ProWritingAid is a great tool, and I’m happy that I bought it. I would caution anyone who plans to use a tool like PWA, Hemingway, Grammarly, or others: know your voice and know what you’re hoping to get from these applications before you start using them. It’s an oubliette waiting to happen and you could lose yourself in it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go play with my daughter on a lovely winter Sunday!