If you’re a novel writer, you know the time and effort it requires to finish a whole first draft. Then it’s more backbreaking work to refine, revise, edit, proofread, and all that, before you even get to the stage where you can feel confident getting your work out to beta readers. From there, you need more scrutinizing, picking, and fixing before you even think of finding an agent.
Expert authors recommend hiring a professional editor for this process, since a fresh set of eyes, and more experienced ones at that, can spot an error that you may have just skimmed through a dozen times already. But not everyone has the budget to hire a professional editor for several rounds.
This is where tools and software like AutoCrit comes in. In this post, we hope to take a look specifically at this online software to see if it can be any help to you as a fiction writer.
What is AutoCrit?
AutoCrit is designed to identify the strengths and weaknesses of any given draft, while also offering practical suggestions to improve it. It’s intended for fiction writers, with its marketing hook as the “fiction writer’s secret weapon.”
How does it do that? Looking at the behind-the-scenes, the programmers essentially input countless number of fiction books into AutoCrit, so that it can make an accurate judgment and offer you constructive criticism—something that not all human editors can even give you.
Here are some of its main functions: a fully-featured word processing suite with unlimited word count, grammar and spelling checker, editing suggestions based on real publishing guidelines, secure data saving online, and a special critique function for works of fiction.
Clearly, most of these are pretty straightforward. In our opinion, AutoCrit’s critique function is what sets it apart from other grammar and style software. And to clarify, it’s definitely geared only towards fiction writing, since its entire programming is based on literary works.
So how does it offer you constructive criticism? It can help scrutinize your work along the following areas:
- making your writing stronger, including identifying cliches
- removing filler text
- replacing redundant words
- identifying dialogue problems, including dialogue tags
- keeping consistent in point of view and tense
- highlighting problems with story pacing
- comparing your word choice to those of literary greats like James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, and Daniel Steel, among others
- giving you an AutoCrit Summary Score to help you see your progress
AutoCrit offers different pricing plans, starting at a free plan that lets you access basic critique components such as grammar and spelling check, Word Choice, Readability, and Adverbs checks.
AutoCrit Pro goes for $30 a month, and it already includes the AutoCrit Score, Summary, and Editing Recommendations, as well as direct comparison with other authors, a voice reader, and many other interactive editing tools. If you feel like you want to go long-term, you can go for the Annual Professional rate, at $297 per year, giving you two free months.
Is AutoCrit any good?
One self-published author put AutoCrit to the test, especially after receiving an AutoCrit Summary Score of less than 65%, roughly equivalent to a D. This was an actual book that boasted of 4-5 star ratings on Goodreads and other avenues. To make sure it wasn’t just a fluke, the same author also plugged in a literary classic into the software, and it churned out a good score of roughly 90%!
Looking into the nitty gritty of things, she found that AutoCrit gave her the low score primarily because of pacing problems: it identified 19 of her paragraphs as being slow-paced. This was exactly the same issue that human critics had voiced out about her book! That’s quite a feat for something that’s merely doing what it’s programmed to do, wouldn’t you say?
The good thing was that not only did AutoCrit identify the problem, it also highlighted each paragraph that fell under this category, helping the author see how these passages affected the entire narrative. It shows this in a visual chart to show which parts of the novel suffered that poor pacing, so that the writer can work on fixing it.
Other areas that AutoCrit can help improve are the challenge of weak writing. When a passage has many sentences written in the passive voice, it points these out and suggests you to change them. This is very helpful because sometimes we may not be conscious of how often we revert to the passive voice. Of course, it may not identify them perfectly, because it’s designed to highlight past-tense passages in general. But still, we consider this very helpful.
A good way of using AutoCrit’s editing reports is to look at trends instead of focusing on details. Treat it as an indication of areas that your work tends to be weak in. For example, does it highlight a lot of pacing problems? Repetition? Inconsistent POV? Taking this with a grain of salt might result in much improvement in your future writing.
The Challenge of Using AutoCrit
While AutoCrit clearly helps in identifying areas where you can improve your writing, it still is, essentially, an automated tool and not a human editor. This means that it may not always highlight issues based on context—something that a human editor automatically does.
For example, sometimes as writers we use words repeatedly to emphasize a point. In AutoCrit, this will most likely be flagged as a repetitive word and advise you to change it. This is where human discretion comes in, because clearly, if that was your intent, you don’t have to take AutoCrit’s suggestion.
The good thing is that the AutoCrit team is transparent about its limitations—and in fact, it seems that these limitations are meant to give you greater rein over how you want to edit your work. As a case in point, its support section actually includes this disclaimer, for example, in the case of how it identifies the passive voice:
When running AutoCrit’s Passive Indicators report, you will… be given highlighting to draw your attention more closely to the past-tense passages you’ve written.
The intention behind this report is to give you greater control over your editing experience, and make you think more deeply and professionally about your writing. It should not be treated as a strict passive phrase detector.
Should I Get AutoCrit?
Perhaps the key to remember is that AutoCrit is a tool designed to help you improve your writing; it’s not a catch-all fix-all for all your writing problems! Making your writing stronger and clearer is still your responsibility!
But if you would like some help at identifying issues that you may not be conscious about, consider trying out AutoCrit and see if it highlights areas that you believe can help improve your work.
Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!
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Yen Cabag is the Blog Writer of TCK Publishing. She is also a homeschooling mom, family coach, and speaker for the Charlotte Mason method, an educational philosophy that places great emphasis on classic literature and the masterpieces in art and music. She has also written several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her passion is to see the next generation of children become lovers of reading and learning in the midst of short attention spans.
