No words today, but I made hella progress. More on that in a minute.
Last night, some of you asked me what I meant by my “automated editing engine.” I forget that many of you are new, so let me explain without (hopefully) getting too into the weeds. Give me feedback in the comments.
I noticed that I kept making the same mistakes over and over again when I sent my manuscripts to my editor. A lot of the edits my editor suggested were repeats. I’ve always wanted to fix that as much as possible because it doesn’t do her or me any good if I’m making the same mistakes and not growing.
I asked: “How can I prevent repeat mistakes in my manuscripts?”
The usual answers are “study a grammar book or the Chicago Manual of Style.” I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t remember all the rules of the English language. Plus, consider this:
- I make new mistakes with each new book
- I can’t remember every single mistake I’ve ever made, plus the entire English language
So I asked whether this issue could be fixed with automation. What if there was such a thing as THE ULTIMATE EDITING WORKFLOW that would help you spot all those issues that your editor is going to catch before your book goes to your editor?
I developed a killer workflow that reduced the number of typos in my books in a big way. It uses a mix of already-available tools plus a few useful ones of my own.
#1: Microsoft Word Spellcheck. Yes, I know, I know…this isn’t exactly an earthshattering revelation, but Word does catch some legitimate errors.
#2: Grammarly. Grammarly is great for catching comma errors. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and has one of the best models in the world. I only use Grammarly Basic (Free). Grammarly catches things that Word can’t.
#3: ProWritingAid. Most people usually say “ProWritingAid” OR “Grammarly” but I’ve learned to use them both. PWA catches things that Grammarly does not. I have PWA lifetime but the checks I use are mainly its spelling, grammar, and missing quotation checks.
#4: PerfectIt. Some of you didn’t like PerfectIt when I featured it on the YouTube channel, but it’s amazing for internal consistency and you’d be surprised at what it will catch. It’s not a spelling or grammar checker like Grammarly or PWA. It’s proofreading software so it looks at different issues. PerfectIt helps me catch some very obscure errors that even my editor might miss, like inconsistent hyphenation or acronyms usage.
/#5: Microsoft Word Macros. Microsoft Word Macros would put most people to sleep, but this is the secret sauce…
Any time my editor recommends a spelling or grammar error, it turns out that I can “teach” a macro to spot that error in the future.
- My editor told me that I used “cadence” incorrectly in a sentence once. For future manuscripts, I can train a macro to insert a comment every time I use the word cadence with a message “Check usage.” This way, I’ll NEVER use cadence incorrectly ever again.
- I once used “stormwater” instead of “storm water” and my editor corrected it seventeen times. I can use a macro can use track changes to correct this any time I accidentally use stormwater. Better yet, I can train it with as many words as I want, and Word will track the change.
It takes a little while to build these type of rules into macros, but it’s not hard. In fact, it’s so easy you’d be shocked. I use FREdit by Paul Beverley, which is a (free) advanced find and replace macro that you can use WITH NO CODING REQUIRED. Look up FREdit, watch the free instruction videos on YouTube, and thank me later. I’ve yet to hear a single person talk about FREdit, but it is probably the most underrated editing tool out there.
#6: Microsoft Word (my home-brew macros). I created macros based on my own needs and feedback from my editor. I hired people on Fiverr to do these for me, so again, no coding. One of these macros is a “repetitive word” macro. Any time I use the same word within a certain radius, it will highlight that word. For example, if I use “certainly” twice within a 500-word radius, it’ll flag it. This type of error is hard to spot and sounds terrible in audiobook form. The macro helps me eliminate this issue. I have a few others that I built for myself.
I have used this workflow for the last few books to help me reduce errors in a pretty big way.
(I call it an automated editing engine out of bad habit. Only parts of it are automated, but the parts that are are really cool!)
TESTING IT ON MY WORK-IN-PROGRESS
I ran my current WIP, Indie Author Confidential Vol. 5 through this workflow. Here’s how many (correct) errors it caught. I didn’t count false positives.
- Microsoft Word: 36 errors (16% of total)
- Grammarly: 90 errors (39%)
- ProWritingAid: 61 errors (27%)
- PerfectIt: 18 errors (8%)
- Macros: 24 errors (10%)
- Total: 229
Word caught more than average this time, and my macros caught a little less.
“But Michael, I already use Microsoft Word and Grammarly (or ProWritingAid).”
Yes, I recognize that. But look at what happened when I used Grammarly and ProWritingAid together. Also look at how PerfectIt improves the numbers.
If I had just used Word + ProWritingAid, I would have only caught 97 errors, which less than 50% of what I could have caught otherwise.
That’s why I chain everything together.
My macros just help me catch even more targeted errors that are specific to my writing style. Every error my macro catches is one my editor won’t have to worry about, which means that she’ll be able to focus on other stuff instead of repeat mistakes, which gets back to my original problem.
My macros will get better over time as my editor identifies more and more errors. It’s possible that I could see a day where my macros account for around 20-25% of the total error count, and that’s a beautiful thing.
So to put this all together:
- I self-edit my book to the best of my ability.
- I use this ultimate editing workflow to catch even more errors using existing tools and automation.
- I send the work to my copyeditor.
- I send the work to my proofreader.
How much time did this take me to review errors and make corrections using this workflow?
Word: 5 minutes
Grammarly: 30 minutes
ProWritingAid: 15 minutes
PerfectIt: 10 minutes
Macros: 5 minutes
Total: 65 minutes
Let’s say I only used Word and ProWritingAid. That’s 35 minutes. If I add in all the extra steps from my workflow, that’s an additional 45 minutes. Would you spend 45 minutes to catch 2x more errors and therefore have a cleaner manuscript for your editor? You betcha!!!
Anyway, hopefully I explained this well. This stuff is usually boring for most. Nothing puts authors to sleep like Word macros. I do intend to write a book about this for beast mode, though.
Have a good night.
