Sunday, June 10, 2012

A Virtual Free Editor

According to the designer's website, SmartEdit is "an automated tool that scans your finished novel or your work in progress and highlights areas that might need closer attention. It runs five individual checks, such as highlighting words or phrases marked by you for monitoring, counting the different dialog tags you have used, and searching out over-used phrases, words and clichés. It's not a word processor - its sole purpose is to assist you when you edit your work, much like a grammar or spell checker."

At present it's available as freeware for Windows 7, Vista & XP, so any of you with those systems who would like a free editing program might want to give this one a test drive.

10 comments:

  1. Interesting. Thanks :).

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  2. Oooh... makes me want to run the Fifty Shades trilogy through it, just to see if it keels over. Finished those a couple days ago, and while the characters (but mostly the hype) kept me reading, by the time I was done with it, I'd come to the conclusion it needed the tag line "Brought to you by the words whisper, mercurial, and the letter B... uh, behind."

    Fairly certain I've never read another book supposedly set in the Pacific Northwest that sounded less like the characters had ever set foot here. Add those annoyances to a definite lack of spice in comparison to titles from say, Samhain, and putting it through a virtual shredder might well be more entertaining than a reread. Wonder if I can figure out a way to do that... because there is no way I'm attempting to count!

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  3. Cool concept, Lynn. I'll check it out for sure.

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  4. Wow, this sounds great. Thanks for the heads up - I'm going to check it out today!

    Also, quick question: I know you use Red Notebook, did you choose this over Evernote? If so, what did you find in Red Notebook that was better than Evernote? Just wondering....

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    1. I tried to demo Evernote a while back, but once I downloaded it I couldn't get it to work (and this may have been my fault entirely.) Red Notebook has been so easy and fun I didn't bother with it again, but I know a lot of writers like the software. Maybe when I have time I'll give Evernote another go.

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  5. I'll try it. I've been trying Ginger, which is free.

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  6. For the past month, I've been researching for something like this. And it being a freeware is an added bonus. Of course, it won't be my end-all-be-all for editing, but to have the repeated words and cliches pointed makes it a great writing tool to have.

    Thanks so much, Lynn!

    And, by the way, I'm a huge fan of your Darkyn and Kyndred series. ;)

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  7. Very intriguing, but can it be tailored to one's own writing style?

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    1. According to the site you can tailor it to a certain degree, and I'll quote here: "Monitored words can be added or removed at any time by opening the Lists Dialog from the toolbar. Remember that monitored words are definable by you, and should reflect your own writing style and the common mistakes you yourself make. If you are a poor speller and a fast typist, you might decide to use it to highlight those words you most commonly misspell; if you are prone to confusing two characters' names, you might benefit from adding both names to the Monitored Words list."

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  8. Very helpful for dialog tags and repetitious stuff. I like software with minimal learning curves.

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