National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) concluded a month and a half ago and I have not written a blog post since. I guess that level of daily output burnt me out. I finished the month with 75,100 words. Added to the 20,000 I had before NaNoWriMo started, the novel is over 95,000 words. It needs a major edit, including some fundamental changes. All of that will come later, though. I am letting it sit for now while I work on other things. Chief among those is editing Neyuki, trying to cut it by 20 percent before it goes to my editor in early March. In December I cut it from 145,000 words to 134,500. That leaves me 18,500 words shy of my goal. This may simply be a goal I don’t reach, although I am trying hard to cut at least another 10,000 words.
As I looked at the various sponsors of NaNoWriMo, one that intrigued me was AutoCrit. They offer an online editing program on a subscription basis ($30/month for the Professional plan, $80/month for the Elite plan). This week I signed up, since they offer a two-week trial for just $1. Knowing how lame online translators are, I was skeptical that an online, algorithm-based editor could be worth the money that AutoCrit is charging. That skepticism was well founded. While AutoCrit’s algorithms seem to be surprisingly sophisticated, they cannot begin to match the usefulness of a human editor. I think that might be true for even a poor human editor—and I have good ones. I have written about them before. The first one, my wife, is quite accomplished and does editing part time in addition to her day job as a teacher. The second, Fran Lebowitz, whom I found on Reedsy, is a professional with truly enviable client comments. (One of those is from me.) Compared to either of them, AutoCrit fails miserably.
I am not saying that AutoCrit is not useful. It told me that I start too many sentences with “and” and “but,” which is probably true. It also says that I overuse the words “just” and “even.” But it also told me about useless things, such as my use of clichés. For example, it said I use “on the table” too much. How else do you say, “She put her purse on the table”? That’s where algorithms fail. Language is far too complex for today’s algorithms to effectively understand or classify. Where AutoCrit fails, though, is not just its identification of writing problems using too-simple algorithms, but then using those results to give writing an overall score. Under Shōko’s Bed scored 74.9. Being a professor, I can’t help but see that in letter grade terms, and I refuse to believe that my novel rates nothing more than a C. AutoCrit needs to give up on the meta-analysis and just stick to the stuff where it’s actually useful, like counting sentences that start with “and” and “but.” Unfortunately, the simple stuff isn’t worth $30/month.
In conclusion, don’t spend $30/month for AutoCrit. Spend $1 instead and try it out. Do it because it will make you all the more thankful that there are talented human beings in this world who are actually willing to edit another person’s work. Then find one of those people. You won’t be sorry.