Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
[...]They look intriguing. Has anyone here actually used any of them? I'm sure they are not perfect but do they represent a big improvement on self-editing? Would be interesting to see if they pick-up the problems pointed out by HarryT and Cinisajoy.
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I have not used any of those four, but I did trial the
Editor program from Serenity Software. It was an interesting experience but I didn't find it a big improvement.
The software listed literally thousands of potential issues with my draft (when I had all the warnings turned on): commonly misused terms, empty intensifiers, contractions ... and lots more. It is certain to similarly list thousands of items on even professionally edited texts, because English is not a language of hard-and-fast rules: what's right for this character is wrong for that one, and so on. Even homophones can catch it out, for example this software warned about "stories" because in the context it is possible I may have meant "storeys". Useful to have it make you check, but this sort of thing means that even valid text will produce many warnings.
That doesn't make such software useless. You are going to have to check every sentence in your work anyway (many times), so why not have something that asks questions about identifiable issues? The fact that it identifies possible redundancies and colloquialisms is worth considering, even if you decide to keep what you have. Also, having the software count words and phrases, finding things that you may have over-used, was interesting.
But there's the thing: it offers suggestions based on rules, so it will offer the same suggestion over and over again, and it can get so that the warning becomes meaningless, but turn off the warning and you miss the instances where it would have helped you. A human editor, on the other hand, will see which are the invalid instances and tell you - so you know to take the suggestion seriously. That is: a human editor is usually right, this software is wrong so often that you can take it only as vague hints to which you must apply your own judgement. Which means that it doesn't solve either of the two central problems:
* If you don't know what the rules are then you won't understand what the software is telling you, or won't know when to ignore its suggestions. And they are only suggestions, taking each literally would be a huge mistake.
* It still doesn't find everything that a good editor (or experienced reader) will find. Even after going through the results of the Editor software I had someone else go through that found many more issues not discovered. A couple of examples to give some idea what sorts of things it missed from one of my drafts:
"time to finished getting" -> "time to finish getting"
"lounge" -> turns out I was using this in a way specific to eastern Australia.
I might summarise by saying: if you don't actually need the software then it may help a bit, but if you really need the software the chances are you won't be able to make effective use of it.
Such products are worth a look, especially if you want to teach your self about common potential problems, but a complete solution to self-editing they definitely are not - and my own experience was that it was not really a big improvement (but then I had other help).