Online Editing Helpers (Part I)

An Editor’s Review of Web-Based Editing Tools

Welcome to a Shelf Life the likes of which we haven’t seen round these parts in some time: A Shelf Life to help readers (readers of Shelf Life, that is, writers) evaluate online editing tools and choose the one that works best for their writing. For anyone who is in the market for such a thing.

This essay did a mitosis and turned into two essays (I love when this happens). It was written as one, got too long, and then unceremoniously split into two, so you can expect much preamble today and very little on Thursday. Just FYI.

There was a really interesting discussion on the flagging bird app today, or possibly yesterday, sometime recently, about garment making and tools. The crux being someone went and opened their mouth and let some nonsense fall out to the tune of “garment workers don’t really make clothes anymore, they use sewing machines.” If you have ever operated a sewing machine or observed someone do same it should be immediately apparent why this is a ridiculous statement: Operation of the machine is a skilled human task. The machine only makes stitches. It has to be fed pieces of a garment in a certain order with more or less precision (depending upon the sophistication of the machine) to produce a garment. A sewing machine is not the replicator from Star Trek. You don’t push a button and say, “Machine, high-rise denim jeans. Capri.” And then a garment materializes before your eyes.

“People don’t actually build houses anymore, they just operate hammers.” Our equivalent might be to say, “Writers don’t actually write anymore, they just use word processors.” Someone, somewhere, has forgotten what a “tool” is. (Spoiler alert: They themselves are, in fact, a tool [in the insulting sense].)

Everyone uses tools all the time for everything. You can’t really write without a tool. You need at least a writing implement. The best writing you can do with no tool at all is finger painting your story. And even then you need some paint and a surface to paint. In conclusion: All writing uses tools. One hundred percent of writing is done with some kind of tool.

Is there a difference between using a lead pencil or an ink pen to write down your thoughts versus asking ChatGPT to write a love story for you about a firefighter and a waitress? I think most people would say, yes, there is a vast difference. Most people at this point do not consider AI-generated stories the same thing as a story written by a human using a tool.

Is there a difference between using an ink pen versus using a keyboard to write down your thoughts? Technically, yes, still a difference—but a less significant difference. Are there people out there—luddites, purists—who will say using a keyboard isn’t really writing—that it’s not true human writing if you don’t use a pen or pencil? There might be, but that’s not most people. Maybe a few wingnuts.

Unless we’re talking about handwriting or calligraphy, however. I think everyone can probably appreciate the difference between calligraphy drawn by a human hand versus computer-generated calligraphy. The wedding industry certainly recognizes a difference and expresses it via price point.

Well, anyway, a tool’s a tool but not all tools are created equal. That’s what I’m getting at. It just took me a long time to say. (This is the norm for me.)

Most of us using word processors are used to seeing some level of suggested corrections pop up on the screen from time to time. Our writing suite will point out when it thinks we’ve misspelled a word, for instance, or when we’ve duplicated a word (few typos are more insidious than the old the the), or when it detects obviously incorrect grammar, like a subject/verb agreement issue.

In my opinion—and of course, as an editor by trade, I would say this—the automated tools that exist to help with editing do not approach the quality of a human editor, even a middling one. With natural language processing and AI getting more accessible all the time, undoubtedly people are wondering whether these can replace human editors. Publishers have long been using sophisticated natural-language algorithms and AI tools to manage a process called a pre-edit. 

During a pre-edit, formatting issues in a document are fixed. Grammar, mechanics, spelling, and usage are automatically checked and corrected using a publisher’s explicit guidelines (the rules are usually translated from a proprietary or commonly used style manual, or both). Style is applied (for instance, series of nouns will be found and series commas inserted, or deleted, per the style manual). References are automatically formatted and checked against online sources like WorldCat or PubMed for errors and fixed. 

Then, once the document has been pre-edited, it is circulated to a human copyeditor for a true edit. The copyeditor doesn’t, then, have to waste time on the little stuff and can instead address anything the pre-edit flagged for human attention and then attend to the items that are better suited to human intervention like tone, organization, flow, prosody, and so on.

Most of us don’t have access to these sophisticated editing algorithms; I don’t have access to them for my personal use although all the content at my job goes through them. That said, we can do a bit better than Clippy the annoying paperclip or whatever MS Word is offering these days.

The Contenders

For today’s Shelf Life I compared four freely available editing helpers: Grammarly, Hemingway, ProWritingAid, and Typely.

Grammarly feels like the market leader to me—having not done any research into market share, Grammarly is just the app I hear people reference the most and the first one that comes to mind when I think of these kinds of tools. Grammarly bills itself as AI-enabled communication assistance and offers multiple levels of account. With a free account users get access to a ChatGPT like AI text generator that can help with ideation, composition, rewriting, and other stuff, along with the editing tools users expect including basic evaluation for correctness, clarity, tone, delivery, and so on. Grammarly also offers two levels of premium account with richer features.

Hemingway Editor has a very simple interface and requires no account. Users simply navigate to a website and paste in text, which is then evaluated and editorial recommendations made on the fly. The Hemingway app bills itself as a spellchecker, but for style. It will assess the “reading level” of the writing (the name is a reference to Ernest Hemingway whose writing scores at a fifth-grade level of readability) and identify places where the writing is unclear or “too dense” and could be clarified or simplified.

ProWritingAid is a lesser-known online editing app that requires an account and offers both a free and a premium service. With the free account, users can evaluate up to 500 words at a time for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word choice. ProWritingAid also offers rephrasing help (up to 10 rephrases per day with the free account). ProWritingAid also promises advanced editorial help like sensory reports, pacing improvements, cliche alerts, dialogue tag checks, and more—though it was not immediately clear which were included with the free service.

Finally, I’m considering Typely. Typely is a bit of a different animal than the others and is new to me, whereas I’ve known about the other three for years. Typely doesn’t correct grammar. Instead, it focuses on usage and points out things like jargon, illogic, inconsistencies, oxymorons, and other writing gaffes of that nature. It also encourages users to write right inside the web interface (it’s account-free, like Hemingway) and has a few handy add ons like a pomodoro timer and a distraction-free window. It also has a text-to-speech reader in beta that will read your work back to you.

Methodology

To test these apps fairly, I used two sample texts: A sample of my own writing in the form of an unedited draft (554 words) and a sample text I found on the internet being offered as proofreading practice (429 words). 

Before beginning, I edited both texts myself with change tracking on so I had a visible record of the changes I had made. Then, I ran both texts through each online editor and compared the online editor’s suggestions with my own work. Finally, I ran my hand edited versions through each app to see how my “professionally edited” version scored with each app.

Grammarly

I downloaded Grammarly for Windows though it also offered a browser extension because I didn’t want it shouting at my ear whenever I’m writing in Google docs. But then it installed the browser extension anyway and also opened a web app (not a desktop app) so I was really annoyed right off the bat. I ended up using the in-browser web app and disabled the browser extension immediately.

In the first sample text, Grammarly detected seven “correctness alerts”: Four missing commas, two missing articles, and a missing hyphen. The hyphen was suggested to change the adjectival “common sense” to “common-sense”; actually both of these are wrong per Merriam Webster, which I always use—“commonsense” is correct (eg, “take commonsense precautions”). I was not able to find any documentation on which dictionary Grammarly is using, nor any way to change it in my account settings.

The two “missing articles” were unnecessary, in my editorial opinion; both the original text and Grammarly’s suggested fix were equally correct. There was no need to change the author’s voice here.

Grammarly had no suggestions for clarity or engagement and gave the text a high score in both. It warned me that the delivery was “slightly off” but would not cough up more information unless I paid for a premium account.

In total, Grammarly made seven corrections to the text. I made thirty. Grammarly missed some black-and-white changes, such as hyphenating adjectival “cold-weather” (eg, “cold weather hazards” should have been changed to “cold-weather hazards.” Grammarly gave this text a score of 84 out of 100. My edited version of the same text received an 86.

Grammarly found five “correctness alerts” in my unedited draft sample. Three were dead on: An extra space between two words (good job Grammarly); a missing hyphen in the adjectival “old timey” (ie, “an old-timey style”); and the use of awhile where a while was correct. Grammarly also tried to correct me on a person’s name (“this spelling is not correct, try our suggested spelling”) and on a made-up sci fi word for which it had no suggestions. I stetted (declined to make) both changes but I don’t mind that Grammarly brought them to my attention.

Grammarly found seven “clarity alerts” where it felt I had used adverbs redundantly; correct in all instances.

Grammarly also called my writing “very engaging” and gave the thumbs up to my “delivery,” which is good because those are premium features and I was not going to get the full report anyway. Grammarly scored my draft text 85 out of 100. 

In total, Grammarly suggested 12 changes to the text of which 10 were necessary and correct and none were straight-up incorrect. In my hand edit, I made several dozen. Grammarly missed many instances of redundant adverbs (“just” “away”) that I removed; these were likely missed because they don’t have an -ly ending and aren’t always used adverbially, so Grammarly probably didn’t notice them.

Grammarly liked my edited version less, giving it an 84. However, Grammarly found four “correctness alerts” and five “clarity alerts” in the revised version, versus five and seven in my unedited version, while engagement and delivery still had green checkmarks next to them and no suggestions. I’m unclear how Grammarly is calculating that score given it found fewer items in my revised text than in my draft text but scored it lower.

Check back on Thursday for my evaluation of Hemingway, ProWritingAid, and Typely, plus a comparison of all four.

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