Posts Tagged ‘tips & tricks’

My good friend, romance and erotica author & editor Sascha Illyvich, pointed out this cool tool to me a few months back. I’ve since used it on RPG projects, including the upcoming New World Order book, to help me out. But here I am, burying the lede[1].

Pro Writing Aid’s free editing web app allows you to paste in text and have it analyze the writing. You can look at the site and text it for yourself by pasting in a couple pages of your last project. It’ll tell you things it detects, including (at time of posting):

• Overused words
• Sentences that slow the reader down (or “sticky sentences”)
• Adverbs & passive voice
• Vague & abstract words
• Check your US/UK spelling consistency
• Sentence variation, etc.

It’s not perfect — when we used it on NWO, Leonard Balsera said that it was almost insulting at some of the stuff it flagged[2]. I figure it’s around 50% right, and 50% robot bullshit. Still, it points out things worth noting, like overusing words or vagueness. And it updates from time to time; last time I used it, it didn’t have the sentiment or time reports.

You can also tweak the report after being generated, if you want to have a copy mailed to yourself. Things like unchecking one of the overused words so that that word doesn’t flag any longer, stuff like that.

Like I said, it’s not perfect, but it’ll make you re-eye some of your work, and being able to do that is the key to successful revision and self-editing. (And real editing, of course, if you’re working on someone else’s document.)

- Ryan

[1] I just wanted an opportunity to spell “lede” correctly.

[2] See Lenny’s first comment below.

Say you’re working on someone else’s manuscript, either as an editor or as a peer reviewer, and you’re marking it up to give back to them. And let’s further say you’re using something like Track Changes in Word on InDesign, where your alterations & comments will be visible. Here are some things to consider when you’re doing so:

Establish yourself as the writer’s ally. You cannot predict the mood that the writer will be in, so don’t be a cockbite about your edits. Be clear, but also speak to the writer as if you were sitting right next to her. Make it clear you’re on their side.

When you point out confusion, try rephrasing. To highlight something and say “confusing” can work, especially if you have a working relationship where you expect that to start a conversation with the writer as she reads your comments. However, if you can, try to rephrase what’s being said. That makes the form of confuse more clear to the writer.

Point out the good stuff, too. This isn’t just to make the writer feel good (though that can help with the first point), but also to show your frame of mind and highlight things that you would like to see preserved during revision. Sometimes whole lines or paragraphs will get cut during revision because the writer is re-examining the text, and if you don’t call something that, that could get the axe.

Don’t be shy about changing text. Part of your gig, unless you’re just proofreading, is to rework things. It’s up to the writer to approve them, so don’t be shy. Maybe what you did is what the writer meant to say, or close enough and better enough to just need some tweaking. Maybe it’s off, but it shows where you were confused and didn’t realize it, pointing out a place where changes need to happen. And maybe it’ll be reverted — that’s part of why we use Track Changes.

Substantial changes should include comments. Did you move paragraphs around? Comment as to why. Are you adding in entire sentences? Comment as to why. Explain to the writer what was going on in your mind when you made these changes, and that helps show the writer where deficiencies lie, not just that something was clearly wrong to you.

Be open to dialogue. Edits are opportunities to learn & grow. Sometimes you’ll make a comment that confuses a writer because your understanding of the craft is different from hers.

Include high-level notes. At the end, at the very beginning, or separately in email, discuss the work as a whole. That’s a good place to talk about structure and things to consider throughout the entire process of revision (rather than just line-by-line processing).

These are some tips off the top of my head. If you have some to share, please comment!

- Ryan

My very patient friend, Minerva Zimmerman, is working with me to revise, or as I like to say, unfuck a short story I’m working on. Her and the other alpha readers I handed the story to complained about my passive voice. This amuses me, because I catch the passive voice in others’ work, but not as much in my own until after it’s handed back to me.

(Oh, and if you like amusing fiction about how dangerous being in a museum is, her current series is up your alley.)

Passive Voice Words

She collected some passive voice words from some different sites, as her list to check off when she’s revising. She sent me this note:

They are huge indicators of passive voice and are like the tofu of verbs. A good rule is to try limit your use of them to only where they need to be, you need a strong sauce around them to flavor their tofu nature. If you can use a stronger tasting verb, always use one.

And the list of tofu verbs she’s gathered:

(Edit: Yes, it’s been commented that there’s more to passive voice than your verb. We should all know that. There is still merit in highlighting your to-be and similar verbs in drafts, to see how excessive you may be using them.)

The Time and Place for Passive Voice

Note that passive voice is generally weak construction, but is not in and of itself grammatically incorrect. Here’s a great site covering that.

Macro to Automatically Highlighting Them in Word

Minerva went through and manually highlighted a number of problem words, which made me think: wait, I remember some VBA from back when I was forced to deal with that. (I was, long ago, a ASP/VBScript guy for hire. And occasionally dealt with VBA.) I could write a macro for this!

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, just read it as “blah blah blah hey a macro to highlight stuff!”

There’s one macro for highlighting all of the words I listed above, called HighlightPassiveVoiceMacro. There’s another that removes all the highlighting from the document, DehighlightMacro. Note that I’m running Word for Mac 2011. Your mileage may vary.

Now, this will highlight all of them, including those that aren’t actually passive voice. Still, I see that as a feature; that also points out other, related opportunities to clean & tighten language. There’s more to shitty writing than just passive voice.

Due to time constraints, I’ll have to leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how to add macros to your document, and how to have them persist when saving. (Seriously, five minutes playing around and I couldn’t remember that last part.) If you don’t know how and want to learn, start by googling “making a word macro”.

Warning: as with all things in life, no warranty is implied. You should make a copy of your file before screwing with it. Unless you love that moment of agony as you discover a drastic error cannot be undone.

Sub HighlightPassiveVoiceMacro()
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("be")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("being")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("been")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("am")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("is")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("are")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("was")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("were")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("been")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("has")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("have")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("had")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("do")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("did")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("does")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("can")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("could")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("shall")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("should")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("will")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("would")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("might")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("must")
	HighlightPassiveVoiceWord ("may")
End Sub

Sub HighlightPassiveVoiceWord(sWord)
	Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
	Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
	Selection.Find.Replacement.Highlight = True
	With Selection.Find
		.Text = sWord
		.Replacement.Text = ""
		.Forward = True
		.Wrap = wdFindContinue
		.Format = True
		.MatchCase = False
		.MatchWholeWord = True
		.MatchWildcards = False
		.MatchSoundsLike = False
		.MatchAllWordForms = False
	End With
	Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

Sub DehighlightMacro()
	ActiveDocument.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
End Sub

What I leave to other VBA geeks out there: making this more accessible to folks, making a version that lets you quickly highlight what you want, whatever other tools you feel like coming up with. Feel free to post links to ‘em in the comments!

- Ryan