SmartEdit is an editing app for creative writers. It reads your novel or short story and extracts information that helps you as you work through the early stages of the editing process. While it was not designed to replace a human editor, it is an ideal tool to help you edit your novel before you pass it on to a professional editor.
The app runs over twenty-five checks on your document and highlights potential problems such as word and phrase repetition, excessive use of adverbs, flowery dialogue tags, overly long sentences, crutch words and commonly misused words. It also shows you how you are using punctuation, helping you to identify over-use of exclamation marks, mismatches between smart and straight quotes, and a host of other issues.
SmartEdit works best when run against a completed first-draft of a novel. While it’s relatively easy for a writer to spot repetitions, inconsistent proper nouns or dodgy punctuation on a single page, it’s near impossible when those problems are scattered across a three-hundred-page document.
This is where SmartEdit comes into its own, highlighting repeated phrases that may be a hundred pages apart and spotting mismatching acronyms or proper nouns between chapters three and twenty-three.
SmartEdit never makes changes for you or suggests changes to you. It highlights sentences, phrases or words that might be worth a second look. It’s then up to the writer to decide what change — if any — should be made. SmartEdit takes the heavy lifting out of what many consider to be the less creative side of creative writing.
The software sits inside Microsoft Word as a fully integrated Add-In, showing results alongside your document and allowing you to run individual checks and edit your work simultaneously.
For writers who do not use Word, a version of SmartEdit exists inside the free writing app Atomic Scribbler — a light weight app similar to Scrivener where writers can plan their novel, build up research material, then write their novel scene by scene. SmartEdit for Atomic Scribbler is an optional Add-In with all the capabilities of the Microsoft Word Add-In.
Both versions of SmartEdit come with ten-day trials, plenty of time for you to test drive the app and put it through its paces before deciding if it’s for you.
Darren Devitt is a software developer and writer — a combination that led to him developing a number of apps for writers. He divides his time between working for big corporate clients, improving his software for writers and finishing his next novel — with the help of SmartEdit and Atomic Scribbler.
