When it comes to producing great works of fiction, there should be no technique better than comparing your book to the most popular ones in history. Knowing where you currently stand against the best shows how far you must go to get or come close to their level.
That is just one of many of AutoCrit’s selling points. This online editing tool also helps identify mistakes in your writing, such as repetitions, POV inconsistencies, and overused words.
As great a fiction tool as this software is, it’s not without its flaws. In fact, to give you more control over your writing, AutoCrit is programmed not to consider the context when providing suggestions.
That can be particularly problematic in the “overused words” tab, which highlights words or phrases used multiple times regardless of whether you’re being deliberate in your usage. That can give you a dizzying amount of highlights to review! Your solution: turn off highlighting.
Table of Contents
How To Turn off Highlighting
You don’t install AutoCrit on your computer; you open the website and copy and paste your work to the window. You then click the button to analyze the text and go through the reports provided.
Now, turning highlighting on and off only applies to the “overused words” section. This report compares the prevalence of cliche words in your text vs. their frequency of use in commercial-market fiction. It then offers suggestions for bringing your content in statistical equivalence with this benchmark.
As helpful as this is, not all instances of repetition are the result of redundancy. An author may simply be trying to make a point or being deliberate with his or her word choices. As such, you may want to turn off highlighting for some of these expressions, so you don’t end up confused with your own analysis.
Basically, turning highlighting on and off for overused words involves checking and unchecking the boxes beside the words. That way, only the words with ticked boxes are spotlighted instantly. This keeps you from confusing expressions used deliberately for the ones used redundantly.
Why Use AutoCrit?
Now that we’ve gone over AutoCrit’s one “major” flaw and its solution, let’s tackle the software’s benefits. Why should you use this online platform for editing your work?
Gives an Impartial View of Your Novel
One of the reasons it’s difficult for authors to edit their own work is their depth of involvement in the story. They know it by heart, which sometimes blinds them to the technical errors of their draft.
AutoCrit allows you to overcome this familiarity with your work, removing you from the story and giving you an impartial perspective of it. One of its main features is highlighting all sorts of writing errors on the spot and offering suggestions for improvement.
Focuses on What You Consider Mistakes
Not all “overused” words highlighted by AutoCrit are mistakes. They could be words or phrases placed by the author deliberately that factor in the story’s integrity. You can prevent the spotlighting of these specific expressions by unchecking the boxes next to them.
If you’re trying to check for pacing and momentum, there’s a separate tab for those. The same goes for the strong-writing, word-choice, and dialogue sections.
These reports help pinpoint specific areas in your work that need improvement. In reviewing these tabs, you can address writing aspects by order of priority and get your draft done without too many hiccups.
Helps You Grow as a Writer
One of the best things about AutoCrit is that it helps you recognize substandard work and veer away from it. Regularly comparing your drafts to some of history’s best works of fiction is bound to boost your writing standards in a lot of ways.
It becomes easier for you to identify common mistakes and avoid them. You also develop a deeper understanding of what strong writing is about and work hard to give your readers consistency.
Allows You To Work Faster
Drafts can sometimes go through countless rounds of copyediting. That’s because human eyes aren’t normally as efficient at detecting errors as machines. AutoCrit can help you cut back on the copyediting passes, which could get your manuscript published earlier.
Saves You Money
With AutoCrit, you might not need to hire an editor from the get-go. You can run your initial draft on the software and edit it yourself. That means by the time it goes through a human editor, there might not nearly be as much editing required. This saves you both time and money.
Edit Fiction With AutoCrit
Where AutoCrit excels is in fiction editing. That’s because works of fiction are prone to having words repeated multiple times throughout the story. If you believe the repetition of specific words is critical to the story, you should bypass preconfigured programs that will report these repetitions as mistakes. By unchecking the boxes before the expressions under the “overused words” tab, you can do just that with AutoCrit.
