Via Galleycat, I was introduced to a new online text editor, EditMinion. According to EditMinion, it is a “robotic copy editor to help you refine your writing by finding common mistakes.” So, how good is it? I took a chunk of text out of my vampire novel and ran it through to see what it might find that I missed. Bear in mind, this is still rough text, and desperately in need of revision.
“I need an assistant, someone to take care of things during the day for me.” He started walking again, and without thinking about it Melanie followed.
“Are you kidding?” she said.
“No, not at all. My last assistant retired.”
“Retired?” she repeated sarcastically, almost trotting to keep up with him. His longer legs caused her to have to take two steps for every one of his.
“Yes. He was with me for a long time, but he decided to leave and start a small shop, something that wouldn’t keep him on the move so much.”
“So he’s still alive? I thought you meant…”
He grinned. “No, I didn’t kill him.”
It found no cliches, 1 adverb, 1 weak word, 0 ‘said’ replacements, and one passive voice construction.
Relatively good news, although granted this is very small sample. Its capabilities are somewhat limited yet, it can’t do much more than a paragraph at a time so it would be hard to do an entire novel manuscript this way. For now it seems better suited to randomly checking yourself. It does seem far more helpful than a word processor’s grammar checker (which are notoriously bad). It’s kind of fun to run some text through and see what it comes up with.
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