I get asked a lot about writing and editing software. There are so many options out there, and some of them can be expensive. They all claim to “take your writing to the next level,” whatever that means. This is an unpaid and unsponsored review of all the tools I have used so far in my publishing journey.

As a little bit about me, I am a dyslexic author, meaning I need a lot of help so I often use layers of multiple tools in order for me to get the job done. I have used all of the paid versions of these services. I’m sorry in advance for getting a bit ranty at times.

So lets get into it.

Microsoft Word:

Unless you have been living under a rock or are just really dedicated to Apple/Mac products, you have probably used Word before. Yes, you have to pay for Microsoft office, so it’s not free, but I have a lifetime key to Office Home and Student 2019 and that hasn’t been rendered obsolete yet. They have an online app called 365 and a cloud, but honestly I don’t use these options. I’d rather save my documents on my PC. But they are options, and the only options I have found to compete with the versatility of Google Docs. Word also has convenient plug-ins for other editing services AND you can even format your entire book using Word. But there is a steep learning curve when it comes to using all of the features Word has to offer. This is the closest thing to a one-stop-shop I can think of.

Google Docs (Gdocs):

Yeah. Okay. Look. I know what I just said about preferring to keep things on my PC and not using the cloud and all that but… Google hits different. I write with a co-author and Gdocs is convenient for us to work on the same thing at the same time, to share it with beta readers and critique partners (CP), and to get and manage feed back in the form of comments. You can access it from both a PC or phone, and control who you share it with and what kind, if any, rights they have to leave comments, edit suggestions, or to view only.

But the comment sections slows to a CRAWL if there are too many. So I found that I could break up my document (which works nicely with the editing software) or just save multiple drafts in separate files which is a good process anyway. (draft.1, draft.2, etc) Always keep backups of your work.

Grammarly:

I used this back in college and at work. It catches many more misspelled words, repeated words, missing, extra, or wrong punctuation, and over all poor grammar than Word does by itself. This tool was a life save in college or writing work emails, or in my case clinical documentations. Grammarly plugs-in nicely with Microsoft and Google Chrome and is easy to use… until your document becomes too long. Then it breaks down faster than an elderly patient with dementia and a UTI (seriously, look that up its common for UTI’s to cause psychosis in the elderly folk and no one knows why). It seriously caused so many problems by inserting words in random places/random pages, and even garbling words so badly I no long knew what it originally said.

As a work around Grammarly suggests to either use Grammarly’s online app, which apparently you can only check up to 100,000 characters including spaces, or else break up your document into smaller sections.

Breaking up your manuscript becomes messy and as a writer and I don’t like it. You have to create a document hub then link the pieces to this hub, and I just don’t like it. So I moved on. But unfortunately, I will be circling back to the idea of breaking up your manuscript.

Prowriting Aid (PWA):

I paid for a year of PWA and I really loved it for the first four months. It plugs-in to Word and it does all the same things as Grammarly with the addition of: detecting weak and/or passive sentences, finding echoes within your writing, detecting pacing, flagging if you start sentences with the same word too many times in a row (like “I” or pronouns), and my favorite tool was the rephrase suggestions.

So you can use PWA for free but some of the more powerful tools like the rephrase suggestion (rephraser) will be limited (8 uses a day I think?) and some of the “premium” suggestions will be hidden.

At first I liked the sentence rephraser and found it helpful to add more sensory words into my writing. But once I figured out what it was actually doing and what kinds of words it kept suggesting to use I was able to wean myself off of this. The rephraser was making my writing different but not always for the best. I was just silencing my own tone and voice.

The passive/weak sentence suggestions were laughable. For example I have one character who said “both my parents are dead,” and it wanted to change the sentence to say “I/he/she/they killed both my parents.” And ALL of the suggestions followed that exact same format. If that’s all you got for me, I can just do it myself thanks. And All the other tools it offered wasn’t enough to keep me paying for the service. After 7 months I didn’t use it at all.

But again PWA is only good until your document gets too long, and if you are writing a book, that is easy to do. The suggestions are to use PWA’s online app, or break up your document into about 10-12 k chunks. Again I don’t like that.

I still use the free version on Word and I disable the plug-in once it gets too long being left to rely on Word’s built in spell check which is not dyslexia friendly.

Reedsy:

Reedsy claims its a one-stop-shop but only if you want to use their database to hire editors and stuff. Which you totally should hired an editor but I will get to that in another post.

They do have a free-to-use drafting software that is not bad. They do not grammar check. And you Can not add plug-ins to do so. They say you can share it with beta readers and CPs but… you can’t leave feedback like in Gdocs. All in all, I found it a waste of time.

I do like their user friendly interface and their drafting tools like setting goals and letting it calculate how much work you have to do daily to meet that goal. But that’s about it. I have one work in progress on Reedsy right now and I am going to have to copy and paste it chapter by chapter into somewhere else just so I can correct my many misspellings and work on it even more.

What they DO have is rudimentary formatting book templates that don’t look bad. And if you are on a budget you can make them work for you. I personally was not impressed.

When I uploaded my own book, all 95,000 words it decided I really only had one chapter giant title and it took me many many hours trying to sort that out.

Reedsy does allow you to add “parts” to your book, which is nice, but they don’t allow for special formatting like text messages, fancy chapter headers, or too much overall customization.

Atticus:

This is expensive. You have to pay a one time fee of $120 for the software to format your books. And to ONLY format. This has a very steep learning curve but it can be powerful in the right hands. Those hands are not mine though.

I did successful use this program to create a dyslexic friendly version of The Masks We Wear and was able to convert that to a PDF to be uploaded directly to KDP (Reedsy does this too).

Atticus only uses their online app. And they do do special formatting like text messages or callout boxes. But they do not allow “parts” (weird, right?) To achieve a “Part 1” or “Part 2” in your book you are left to add these as regular chapters, enter the title as Part 1 and leave the rest blank. If you want your Parts to look different than just regular chapter headers, this program is not for you.

There is another formatting program called Vellum that I have not used yet, but it is on my to-do list. I hope it strikes a better balance between Reedsy and Atticus.

Finally, Autocrit:

I Have a lifetime subscription that was $360ish. Do I regret buying it? Kind of. They only use an online app. They have NO spelling or grammar check (like Reedsy and Atticus). They do NOT do formatting. This is ONLY useful for drafting. But my goodness the tools are so powerful.

It does most of the things that PWA did (finding echoes, check pacing, readability, etc) without the simplistic suggestions of trying to rephrase your sentences for you that are all wrong. It lets you compare your work to genre standards or your favorite author (Like PWA does but more in depth). I compare myself to Brandon Sanderson because I like the pacing and readability of his work and would like to keep my pacing near his average instead of the general fantasy standard (which has a 5 times higher amount of slow paced paragraphs than he does).

But the most impressive features of Autocrit is the analysis tools. I didn’t know what to expect at first and I was blown away by how details and mostly spot on it was. It was able to highlight foreshadowing, character arcs, plot points, etc. And able to point to where I may be able to add more foreshadowing or potential inconsistencies in character actions, or make suggestions of how I can deepen arcs, or if I have a plot thread left dangling. It does sometimes get things wrong because it can’t tell if a character is behaving inconsistently on purpose or not, stuff like that. But I am amazed at how deep its goes.

It also has a tool to suggest what happens next if you get writers block. But I have not used that tool, so I can’t tell you if it works well and how close it is to just being written by AI at that point.

As with all of these tools, it is important to remember that just because it says there is an error you, the human and the author, may have done it on purpose and that is OKAY. It’s called style. It is when there is an error that was also an accident, that is where these tools give us the chance to fix them and make our writing better.

I know this was a long review but I covered a lot. Remember, if I can do it, you can do it. Now go drink some water.