Edit pass and then Grammarly, or Grammarly and then edit pass?

[TadOverdon]

I use free Grammerly as I go, then do an overall editorial pass, and then run Grammerly again as a last pass.

 

[alohadave]

Balabolka for text to speech is free, doesn't send your work to "the cloud" and directly reads MS Word and many other formats.

In many ways, the crappy default voices it provides makes it easier to notice errors and poor wording than the slicker natural voices in Word and other newer software.

I downloaded and tried it out. Looks like it works well. I ran it through one of my older submissions and it found 2 errors right away, or rather I heard them.

 

[SyleusSnow]

I downloaded and tried it out. Looks like it works well. I ran it through one of my older submissions and it found 2 errors right away, or rather I heard them.

Glad it worked for you. It's amazing how effective "proof listening" is for catching things. I used Balabolka for years and only stopped when MS Word added text to speech.

I've also used it to save epubs to MP3 for a (really robotic) audio book when a professionally read one wasn't available.

 

[HeyAll]

Grammarly is the final before submitting.

Otherwise you might tinker around with it and make a new mistake.

 

[sister jenny]

Dont even know what Grammarly is

I just write, then read it through two times and fix spellings or errors.
If I read it again after that I will get so bored of it that I will probably never work on it again.
I am very impatient.
So if it gets rejected, I have someone else look it over and then I send it in again.
If if gets rejected again there is a huge chance it will go in a drawer.

There is a reason my stories get a lot of criticism.

But I am working on getting better.

 

[SimonDoom]

I hear you on finding proofing and editing exhausting and tedious, but I agree with those who have said it's worth the effort. You seem to put so much effort into your stories anyway that it's worth the time to get it right. It makes a difference to some readers' ability to enjoy the story. It makes a difference to me.

I like to edit and proof a lot as I go, so usually by the time I'm done the draft is fairly solid. I then do a manual proof without tools. My grammar is solid, but I have a tendency to brain fart, or perhaps finger fart, as I type, so I get homonyms mixed up: waist/waste, its/it's, their/there. In all these cases I know the right word, but my fingers don't type it. So a sounding out tool isn't necessarily going to help me. I have to see the words to get them right.

I use Word's editing tools at the end, and I've used Grammarly, too. I find its main use is simply calling something to my attention so I can decide whether to fix it. I never follow these tools automatically. I always think carefully about their recommendations. That's one of the reasons I prefer to use Grammarly near the end of the process.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Certainly on one had, editing - and especially proofing - is more of a chore. It's grunt work. The rush of the ideas flowing onto the page is over. You've sawed all the wood and nailed the pieces together. You're admiring your new table and the last thing you want to do is sweep all the sawdust off the floor. But on the other hand, when I do catch something and fix it, there is a real satisfaction in that. It is[/i] totally worth it.

If one is serious about their craft, neither editing nor proofing can be taken lightly.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Pro Writing Aid and have it yelling at me the entire time I’m writing.

 

[djrip]

Pro Writing Aid and have it yelling at me the entire time I’m writing.

I would hate that. Constantly distracted from the story by disagreements with the grammar software. No, computer, I said what I freaking meant. Get that underline outta my face.

 

[EroticCupcake]

Not sure if you know this already, but Scrivener supports read aloud. You may have to update it, and it's not as painless as other programs, but is "easy" and free.

I wish I had done read aloud far earlier. It would have caught so many stupid mistakes.

I've not used Grammarly, but I'm generally against it. I'm going to literally speak from ignorance. I spent most of my prime learning years with technical writing. It took me quite a few words to get a feel for how I want to break the rules with sentence fragments (and to some degree misuse commas).

It's possible that people find this annoying in my writing, but I'm more and more chopping out <subject> <verb>, and then <subject> did <another verb>.

It's reasonable to want a mix of long sentences and short ones, but I feel like "technically correct" compound sentences are often clunky.

This is not right or wrong per se, but it's something like a language style I am leaning into as I write more and more. Getting something like Grammarly too early would stunt this. I wonder if this is the root issue of why people are getting AI rejected.

 

[Rollinbones]

Grammarly destroys style. Do you all want to sound the same?

 

[alohadave]

I would hate that. Constantly distracted from the story by disagreements with the grammar software. No, computer, I said what I freaking meant. Get that underline outta my face.

I use Grammarly, but I only turn it on when I'm actually editing. I don't need it running all the time, just for the editing phase.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Okay, a little bit less of a joke answer. I'm a pantser, too, so YMMV.

I use ProWritingAid, tuned to the "Romance" setting with some custom choices in the advanced settings. It's similar to Grammarly, except that it only defaults to a sort of general business flow, but you have plenty of easy ways to customize it. I leave it on pretty much all the time, and it uses different colored underlines to complain as I do so: yellow for overly complex sentences or "sticky" words (lots of yellow in my stories), red for misspellings, blue for punctuation and grammar errors, purple for passive voice, etc. I think a lot of this is standardized; Google Docs uses some of the same scheme, and I think Word does, too.

It's a great tool, but it's like any other tool: I decide how to use it. The way that it typically rates my work, I rarely get out of the 70-80% zone for what it considers improvement. I like my sticky words, especially in dialogue. Passive voice IS the better option a lot of the time, especially in dialogue. And I usually write a lot of dialogue. So I leave it on all the time; it's good for making me aware of things as I go, so that I have to do less editing later.

When it's time to edit, I'll save a spare copy of the document, then fire up the "big" PWA tool, the one that evaluates the whole document at once. Their Google plugin (I write mostly in Google Docs) has a flaw where it doesn't handle page breaks well due to memory limitations. They have their own website, though, and for the "real" edit, I can easily transfer the doc there for a whole-body evaluation and see if I've done anything I didn't mean to: reuse of words, awkward phrasing that only becomes clear as I re-read it in full, etc.

So the short answer, I suppose, is that I use it in a limited form when I'm writing, then let it fully loose when I'm editing. But even then, I rarely don't make it "happy," just content.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

It's not clear to me which way is best. What are people's thoughts?

Whichever way gets the job done fastest and gets you released to worry about your next story. That one you just wrote has already been told!

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I just can not understand for the life of me why anyone would use a cloud service to write their fiction on.

People say that it's really easy. What could be easier than saving a file on your own computer??

People say that they don't have to worry about storage. It's TEXT! The files are tiny!

People say that they write at work and the cloud gives them access. You write at work?? So, you get paid to not work? You're paid too much. You can afford a proper device to write on. Get a cheap laptop to write on. It's just text. Literally any computer will do. Do all of your writing on it. Still want to write at your desktop when at home? USB your laptop to your desktop. I've done this many times. I go out of town for a few days. Get some writing done on the laptop while I'm away. Come home and in five minutes my files are all merged from the laptop to the desktop. It's not hard at all.

People say that it's an automatic backup. Just copy your shit to a data stick every couple of weeks. Not often enough? Just how often does your system fuck up and crash? Weekly? What the hell else are you doing on your computer to cause that? Get a separate laptop for your scabby virusy porn sites. Laziness isn't even an excuse as there are dozens of automatic backup software options out there, often included in your OS that will do it every night while you sleep. Come on, my brother is a software developer. He has multiple computers and runs emulators constantly (computers within computers) and saves entire system snapshots multiple times per day. Massive amounts of data and everything automatically backs up each night, and keeps the last 7 or 14 or 30 backups or something. If all that can be done in his own home, saving and backing up your own folder of stories once in a while is a such a breeze, it's a joke, a snap of the fingers. Don't be lazy.

Then there is the whole issue of trust. Companies like google are horrible and have no scruples whatsoever. They willingly do censor work for China and who knows who else, with no qualms at all about aiding a horribly oppressive regime. They use your stuff to train AI, which we all hate here since so many of us get rejection notices because the site thinks our work is from AI. Well as our stuff on google docs is used to train AI, the AI will look more and more like our stuff and the site will reject more an more stories as it can't tell the difference.

Then there's access to your stuff. Personally speaking, I recently lost my gmail that I've had for over ten years because I refused to let them have my cell number which is none of their fucking business. All of those contacts gone and no way to tell them that I've lost them. They cannot be trusted to store your shit.

Then there is the subject of anonymity. If you upload your smut to gmail, it has your info on it. Even if you can fake it, they know your IP and save it forever. That is google's business, collecting and selling information. That's why they want your cell number. It has nothing to do with your convenience. They want your info. They make billions, and they know who you are. Some of us could lose our jobs or friendships or families if our smut became public knowledge. Google and many other data hosts have been hacked and leaked before over the years. Don't think it will never happen again. Then also, when you think about how more and more fucked up our politics are getting by the day, don't think that some time in the next 10 to 20 years smut gets banned - by the left OR the right. Now all of your stuff is out there with your name on it, held by a company that wouldn't think twice of profiting on sharing it with authorities.

If it really really really was five or ten times more convenient to cloud save I could understand it, but it's not more convenient - at all! Saving and backing up on your own system is as easy as a well-lubed trailer park skank. It's a piece of fucking cake.

 

[alohadave]

People say that it's really easy. What could be easier than saving a file on your own computer??

I'm writing on my phone when I'm not at home, so a cloud service works for that use case.

People say that they write at work and the cloud gives them access. You write at work?? So, you get paid to not work? You're paid too much. You can afford a proper device to write on. Get a cheap laptop to write on. It's just text. Literally any computer will do. Do all of your writing on it. Still want to write at your desktop when at home? USB your laptop to your desktop. I've done this many times. I go out of town for a few days. Get some writing done on the laptop while I'm away. Come home and in five minutes my files are all merged from the laptop to the desktop. It's not hard at all.

That sounds like a whole lot of none of your business how and when people write their stories. You are very confidently incorrect about your assumptions, and we know what that means...

People say that it's an automatic backup. Just copy your shit to a data stick every couple of weeks. Not often enough? Just how often does your system fuck up and crash? Weekly? What the hell else are you doing on your computer to cause that? Get a separate laptop for your scabby virusy porn sites. Laziness isn't even an excuse as there are dozens of automatic backup software options out there, often included in your OS that will do it every night while you sleep. Come on, my brother is a software developer. He has multiple computers and runs emulators constantly (computers within computers) and saves entire system snapshots multiple times per day. Massive amounts of data and everything automatically backs up each night, and keeps the last 7 or 14 or 30 backups or something. If all that can be done in his own home, saving and backing up your own folder of stories once in a while is a such a breeze, it's a joke, a snap of the fingers. Don't be lazy.

Stop preaching.

Then there is the whole issue of trust. Companies like google are horrible and have no scruples whatsoever. They willingly do censor work for China and who knows who else, with no qualms at all about aiding a horribly oppressive regime. They use your stuff to train AI, which we all hate here since so many of us get rejection notices because the site thinks our work is from AI. Well as our stuff on google docs is used to train AI, the AI will look more and more like our stuff and the site will reject more an more stories as it can't tell the difference.

You can be sure that there are already spiders grabbing stories here to train AI. As well as the more mundane grabs to post your work somewhere else. This isn't new.

You seem to have no trust in Google, so you won't believe that they have a policy that Google Docs isn't used to train AI.

Then there's access to your stuff. Personally speaking, I recently lost my gmail that I've had for over ten years because I refused to let them have my cell number which is none of their fucking business. All of those contacts gone and no way to tell them that I've lost them. They cannot be trusted to store your shit.

Then there is the subject of anonymity. If you upload your smut to gmail, it has your info on it. Even if you can fake it, they know your IP and save it forever. That is google's business, collecting and selling information. That's why they want your cell number. It has nothing to do with your convenience. They want your info. They make billions, and they know who you are. Some of us could lose our jobs or friendships or families if our smut became public knowledge. Google and many other data hosts have been hacked and leaked before over the years. Don't think it will never happen again. Then also, when you think about how more and more fucked up our politics are getting by the day, don't think that some time in the next 10 to 20 years smut gets banned - by the left OR the right. Now all of your stuff is out there with your name on it, held by a company that wouldn't think twice of profiting on sharing it with authorities.

Guess what? If Literotica is served with a warrant for your data, they will hand it over. If you can't afford to be found out, then maybe writing erotica is not the right thing for you to do.

If it really really really was five or ten times more convenient to cloud save I could understand it, but it's not more convenient - at all! Saving and backing up on your own system is as easy as a well-lubed trailer park skank. It's a piece of fucking cake.

Your experience is your own, not any one else's, so don't presume to tell the rest of us the way it is.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I'm writing on my phone when I'm not at home, so a cloud service works for that use case.

I already answered that.

People say that they write at work and the cloud gives them access. You write at work?? So, you get paid to not work? You're paid too much. You can afford a proper device to write on. Get a cheap laptop to write on. It's just text. Literally any computer will do. Do all of your writing on it. Still want to write at your desktop when at home? USB your laptop to your desktop. I've done this many times. I go out of town for a few days. Get some writing done on the laptop while I'm away. Come home and in five minutes my files are all merged from the laptop to the desktop. It's not hard at all.

 

[alohadave]

I already answered that.

That's not an answer. It's you talking down to people.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

That's not an answer. It's you talking down to people.

I write green. You read red. I can't help that.

 

[dmallord]

Back on the subject ...

I use Grammarly Pro. As noted by others, it is business-focused and tends to produce 'vanilla' re-write suggestions. I take those in stride and ignore or accept them at whim. It isn't particularly good for writing on Lit, except it stokes my ego periodically to tell me, 'You used more unique words than 99% of Grammarly users,' etc. [I don't know which words those are, but I suspect they are the spicey ones for Lit audiences. ] Pro has a few features the free version doesn't. Still, I find it isn't spectacular in nature, just useful for me given my propensity to mess up homonyms, homophones, commas v. semi-colons, and subject-verb agreements. Its yearly subscription cost is reasonably priced, about three dollars per week. Writing is something I waited until I was very, very elderly to start - so those points are pretty rusty.

Grammarly is on as I type this. I ignore the errors until I see it has flagged around fifty or so 'corrections,' then run through those. By then, my neuropathy is tingling as I two-finger-type my way forward. I need a coffee break at that point, sit and sip, and work on those corrections.

I don't mind the red lines or pop-up whole-line re-writing suggestions it offers. I let them wait as long as my mind is focused and the words are flowing; I keep typing – until that magic, 50 or so words catch my attention. Sometimes, it's 75 to 100 before I give in and reach for coffee. Often I like my lines just as I wrote them - other times I take the proffered responses. I would say it is about 75% my own versus using the suggestions from Grammarly. As noted earlier, it does okay for that, but it generates 'vanilla pudding' content corrections - put another way it sucks at suggestions for Lit.

In this reply, I hit 50 flags and stopped to correct what I wrote extemporaneously. That's my approach, I hope it offers some insight. If I wait until the end to correct, as I started using Grammarly, I would be rubbing my head and gritting my teeth at having hundreds of those pesky things to review. So, a few at a time is the way I roll.

 

[intim8]

I have the free version of Grammarly installed on my computer. It doesn't work with Scrivener, which is what I use to write my stories. Instead, I have to hop through some hoops to get my story into a Wordpad document before Grammarly will provide feedback on it.

I've got a story where I've finished my rough draft. So I have the choice - do I read through my story slowly and catch all the errors I can, and then hop through the hoops to have Grammarly provide feedback on it, or do I hop through the hoops to get Grammarly's feedback, and then slowly read through my story to catch the errors that Grammarly missed?

If I use Grammarly first, it's going to quickly catch a lot of errors. When I do my slow read, I'm correcting fewer errors. But then I have writing that hasn't been reviewed by Grammarly. If I do my slow read first, then the version of my story I wind up with has been fully reviewed by Grammarly.

It's not clear to me which way is best. What are people's thoughts?

I save those kinds of tools for the last steps of the process, once I know that the story itself, all the scenes and dialog, etc., are the way I want them. No point in proofing it if you might still be rewriting parts of it.

I've found that I have to reject quite a few of Grammarly's suggestions. It's tone-deaf.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Grammarly continually wants to rearrange my sentences and put my opening clause at the end of the sentences. I never let it do that. If I fing wanted it at the end, that would have been how I wrote it in the first place.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Grammarly continually wants to rearrange my sentences and put my opening clause at the end of the sentences. I never let it do that. If I fing wanted it at the end, that would have been how I wrote it in the first place.

This is a slightly older thread, but I just noticed it. Grammarly requires some judgment calls because of the way its programming works. One can't just blindly follow what it suggests because sometimes it's misleading or just plain wrong. It's rearranging of text can be annoying, and I sometimes just ignore it.

To answer the OP: one can't do too many editing passes I suppose, but there has to be a reasonable limit. So I do some passes in the writing program, then make my own content changes inside Grammarly (plus the grammar corrections). Then I make more editing passes, usually within the Lit submission box. I've also taken to the idea (originally suggested on AH) of proofreading the document using a different font and color. (That would be inside Word.) There is no point in rushing a submission.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Have a real-time plug in(ProWritingAid) for Word that gives me immediate feedback. Some I accept, some is too literal and messes up the voice I want to convey, so nope. I also use the Immersive Reader to read the story back as a sort of final edit. It catches word choice, things the spell check let through that are just wrong, i.e. car instead of can.

Probably the best thing i do is , Once I've done all that, I out the story on the shelf for a while. Than I go back through it with fresh eyes. Sometimes I do this several times. My latest story was on the shelf for I think six months before I let it go.

 

[BobbyLaker]

Thanks for all the input.

Sadly, the version of Word I have is Word 2010, so I don't have any means to have my computer read my story to me.

I'm a big fan of beta-readers. Two have already read this story, and the results of this editing session will go out to some more beta-readers.

I find Grammarly very helpful, but it has lots of false-positives for me. For example, I use "really" a lot as an intensifier, and Grammarly wants me to take it out every time.

I write big stories. What I'm working on currently is 22K words. I find close reading through the whole thing exhausting, so I'm not up to doing multiple readthroughs. I'm only going to do one full readthrough in this editing session, so the question is when is the best time to do it.

@8letters NVDA is an excellent, free screenreader that might do the job for you.

https://www.nvaccess.org/download/