Everybody Helps: I Am A Mac Also
About Carla King Carla King has written 4 posts in this blog. Carla King was turned down by big publishing in 1994, so she self-published her guidebook to bicycling the French Riviera. She made enough money to return to France twice more, which helped her fall in love with the self-publishing process. In 2010, she founded Self-Pub Boot Camp, a program of books, workshops, and virtual classes that step authors through the publishing process. Carla is a frequent speaker on adventures in travel, writing, and publishing.
The 3rd edition of her Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Authors, released in March, has been downloaded over 30,000 times. I have a 435 page treatise on Naval History about a famous naval battle of WWII that is so complex that it might otherwise be a problem for me to edit 100% myself. Even after being a Senior Technical Writer for 21 years, some things are bound to still slip through the cracks that I might not otherwise catch. Think I’ll be looking into that Consistency Checker for sure.
Try getting names like Tassafaronga, Surigao and Ngella Sule past a Spellchecker! Thanks for the insights though; as usual you guys are simply great! This is a great post and you provide an overview of each edit software. However, it still leaves me confused and I hope you will give me some directions. Currently, I have Hemingway (upgraded version) and I import my work from Word. It works good for me and finding those pesky adverbs and adjectives that we don’t necessarily need. I object to the complex sentence when it is no more than a certain number of words.
I have the free version of Grammarly. I like that it loads anytime I’m on the internet. I also import from Word with Grammarly. It is great finding those misused words and unnecessary or repetitive usage. Now my question.
I’m a novice writer and can use all the help I can get, yet I’m on a budget. If you had to recommend one of these, which one do you think delivers the best ‘band for the buck’? I use a Mac also and an old (2011) version of Word. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. To all my writing friends, My wife and I are leaders of a writing group with many members. Quite a few have asked for our help getting their finished work up on Amazon.
Everybody Helps: I Am A Mac Alson
A couple have used Grammarly and loved it. I must, however, provide a word of caution. Some of these programs use incompatible metadata in their formatting.
Simply put, a computer must use a symbol for the space bar. It’s a symbol you cannot see (ergo, space).
Book database for ms office for mac. If these symbols are not compatible then you can end up with jumbled text, text without spacing, no indents, no paragraph breaks, no text modifiers (e.g. Italics, etc), and a plethora of issues that a live person will then have to correct manually.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the programs. In fact, my minimal experience with them has proven quite positive. I’ve enjoyed the productiveness and sophistication of these programs. If not for these compatibility issues, I would be hard pressed to find anything negative. All the best with all your writing endeavors in the future, Al Musitano GothMares series.
Great resource, thank you, Carla. I’ll definitely share it.
I did try Grammarly a while back as I was doing a lot of writing jobs, but it drove me nuts so I had to let it go. For me, the problem with many auto-edit functions is that they don’t leave a lot of room for the vernacular or chatty writing. However, AutoCrit interests me as I can see this would help me improve my writing overall. As an editor and writer, I know how easy it is to get stuck in a rut using the same words, sentence constructions and phrases so I can see this would be invaluable. I think Grammarly lies.
Caveat: I didn’t even give it a free trial. I plugged in my own original copy ( I assure you it was very original) and it accused me of misplaced punctuation and plagiarism.
So I moved some punctuation according to its suggestions, and it then claimed I had even more punctuation errors. Not a question. Given my experience I am not keen on taking any of the advice in this article, though I admit to being tempted by Consistency-Checker. It may help me be lazier than I already am. Please feel free to check my veracity.