E57 – Using AI Editing Tools

Show Notes

In the Revision Wizards podcast episode E057, co-hosts VE Griffith and Catherine MH discuss AI editing software specifically beneficial for writers. They focus on Grammarly, Autocrit, and ProWritingAid, sharing their personal experiences and highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. The conversation covers features, pricing models (including free and paid versions), and integration capabilities with other writing software like Scrivener. Ultimately, they conclude that these AI tools are valuable for catching errors and improving writing style before involving human editors, but are not a replacement for the nuanced feedback a person can provide, especially in fiction.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com
Lon’s Twitter/X: @lonvarnadore1
Lon’s Instagram: @lon_scribbler

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2633

Transcript

VE:
[0:00] Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m V.E. Griffith, and I’m joined by my sore and tired co-host, Ms. Catherine M.H.

MC:
[0:07] Today’s episode is 50 and 7, and we’re going to be talking about AI editing software.

VE:
[0:14] Just a heads up on this one, we are not sponsored by any of the products we’re going to talk about today.

MC:
[0:19] So, with that said, I think we’re going to just stick to the AI editing software that we personally know the best. so this way we’re not trying to talk about any that we don’t personally use.

VE:
[0:32] Yeah, I have experience with all of the products we’re going to talk about today, and I have at one time or another paid for all of them.

MC:
[0:39] So let’s get into what are the kinds that we are talking about today.

VE:
[0:43] Okay, the big ones. There are three big ones that most writers go for. They are Grammarly, Autocrit, and ProWritingAid.

MC:
[0:54] Yeah. So Grammarly, as of March 2025, is a free version, which I use quite often, or there’s the $12 a month annual rate. Autocrit has a free version, or a 15-month annual, with an option for a one-time payment, which can range a little pricey for some people. ProWritingAid has a free version, yet one, or is a $10 monthly billed annually, with also an option for a one-time payment.

VE:
[1:29] So tell us about what they do.

MC:
[1:31] So personally, I use Grammarly. I have it hooked up to my Google Docs because it works with my Google Docs. And it really helps me with, just as the name says, grammar. Now, it’s not making it perfect, for me, but it does help me catch those little pesky little bits that honestly, I wouldn’t need.

MC:
[1:57] To waste an editor’s time on. I can go through and look for, oh, I forgot to put a period here, or this comma really should be here in this sentence. I didn’t put an end quote on the end of this character topic. So it’s really catching those little things for me. That’s how I use grammar. So some people will use it to help them reorganize words, restructure an entire sentence. It really depends on which version you’re using too. If I only use the free version, I only have access to a smaller portion of what Grammarly can do. With Autocrit, I love Autocrit. It’s the one that I really prefer to use. I’ve done it in the free version and it does help you with trying to figure out your pacing. It gives you like a scorecard. It will help you with small little bits. If you have the paid version, then you have access to a lot more stuff. They will help you with trying to figure out word choices. They will help you out with how many times do I repeat this in an entire zone. So it’s a lot more in-depth look at your writing with a critical eye that’s not human yet. As for ProWritingAid, I didn’t like it when I tried using it. So I’m going to turn this one over to ve because ve i know you do enjoy using this one.

VE:
[3:24] I do enjoy using pro writing aid the primary reason that i do is because it integrates directly with scrivener ew.

MC:
[3:31] Gross i mean oh that’s great for you.

VE:
[3:33] In the integration with scrivener it does things like identify misspelled words which scrivener will do it identifies repeated words if you start your sentence with the same word three times in a row which is an easy mistake to make it will flag that for you so that you can vary your sentence structure and vary your word choice. It will identify passive voice for you. It will try and automatically rewrite, not automatically, but it will try and give you a suggestion for rewriting sentences if you want to. In its monthly form or in its higher tiered lifetime form, you can have AI generation or prompting for yourself. I find it to be the best of sort of Grammarly without the cost. It’s less expensive than Grammarly. And there is a one-time payment option. So that’s what I selected. Over the many years that I’ve had pro-writing aid, I’ve been able to save money relative to the amount that I would have spent if I were just monthly.

MC:
[4:38] So do you think it’s good for writers to use these AI softwares?

VE:
[4:45] I do. They help writers catch stuff that you don’t want your human editor spending time on. You want your developmental editor or your line editor catching the big stuff. You don’t want them spending time looking at periods and looking at commas and looking at question marks. You want them looking at your story, which is a different thing than looking at commas and periods and question marks. One of the other things that these tools will do is you can upload your manuscript into their web interface or into their program interface. And run other sorts of comparisons. For example, you can run passive voice comparisons. You can run comparisons against big name authors or genre conventions. They don’t look at genre conventions in terms of your story because they can’t understand your story as an overarching arc. They do have a word limit so you can paste in like 30,000 words or 50,000 words. But if you’ve got an 80,000 word manuscript, they’re not going to be able to hold all of it at once.

MC:
[5:53] Actually, I think Autocrit just put out something to try to do that. I think they’re still in the beginning phases of that, but I think it goes up to about 100,000 words.

VE:
[6:06] Yeah, they are constantly improving their stuff. And many of them are integrating back-end tools like OpenAI for larger kinds of analysis. The OpenAI interface is not directly visible to the user, but they use those tools, Claude and OpenAI and some of the others, to provide additional services for your money.

MC:
[6:34] Why would someone try using this?

VE:
[6:39] The primary reason is to get a look at your manuscript from the perspective of a tool that is looking word by word and sentence by sentence at your writing. It’s in some ways the same sort of thing that a line editor does, but it’s not a replacement for a line editor. Instead, it’s a tool that you can use to speed up your line editor’s work. If you do that, you’re going to pay less to your line editor. You can pay $15 a month for ProWritingAid, or $10 a month rather for ProWritingAid, or you can pay me $50 an hour. What do you want to do? Which one is going to be better for you?

MC:
[7:30] Yeah. I think also another benefit of it is it helps you with your writing. You’re learning about your writing. That’s what I like about the auto-crit version, that it will… Score me and give me like a report card on my chapters. And so each time I’ve gone in with a new draft, I can compare what kind of writing style and how much I’ve improved since that other draft. So it’s really nice for me to be able to learn and to take those pieces and be like, oh, hey, I now can really recognize passive voice. I don’t have to write it in there as often. or I can really catch when I’m having these really long run on sentences or if my sentences are itty bitty tiny and I need to give them some more space. So that’s helped me become a better writer before handing it off to someone else, because I prefer to run it through a computer system first before running it under another set of actual eyes.

VE:
[8:38] The other thing that’s nice about them is that they are honestly non-judgmental. They do have reports that give you scores, but they don’t have the, well, your story sucked element to it, which is nice because it’s both objective and it’s, without a doubt, it’s constructive.

MC:
[8:57] So a question for you. Do you think certain genres benefit more from an AI editing software than others?

VE:
[9:09] I think only if you’re doing the author comparisons, because authors tend to write in genres, but every genre can use looking at the structure of your written English.

MC:
[9:20] Yeah, I think nonfiction might have a higher benefit to it, just because nonfiction is written very different from fiction. And I find that, at least for me anyway, when I’ve worked with AI, writing nonfiction with AI and editing it with these softwares has been much easier than trying to go through and be like, okay, how does this work for a fiction writing?

VE:
[9:49] They do usually have settings in them that will let you select what kind of writing you’re doing and in some cases, what genre of writing you’re writing toward.

MC:
[10:01] And it depends on the price you’re paying, too, sometimes.

VE:
[10:05] They do have tiers and they do have additional features at a higher price point. So you sort of have to weigh what kind of tools you want. To run your writing through versus what your pocketbook can afford.

MC:
[10:19] Here’s a fun one for you. When you were editing Scandals Pen, I was running each section through Autocrit before giving it to you. So one of the ways to work with your editor, I think, is to try to run the section you’re about to send them through there because that’s going to catch any last-minute things that your eyes didn’t catch, possibly. It’s going to catch those little, like, again, oh, that period is over there. Or, man, that paragraph takes up an entire page. Like, what was I thinking? So it’s going to catch those small little things that I think made your life a little easier than, you know, having a page full of passive voice.

VE:
[11:02] It did make my life easier, and I could tell that you had run it through AutoGrit. And I appreciate that. That was not a problem. them. Sometimes when I do client work, I can tell that they have not used tools like that. Or in our initial conversation, I’ll ask them, have you used tools like that? And I’ll run it through one of them, depending on the manuscript. The reason that I do that is it speeds up, again, my looking for those little kinds of things. But it is a tool that I have to use. And so I have to charge for that time.

MC:
[11:39] When did you use it in your editing process?

VE:
[11:42] I use it after I’m done with each draft. I go through with ProWritingAid directly in Scrivener, and I have it highlight everything that I need to highlight. So that gives me small chunks of text to work with, which means that it doesn’t take forever analyzing the text, which is important. And it gives me the ability to see my entire section on the screen at once because I write in short little sections and they’ll mostly fit on a single screen.

MC:
[12:12] Grammarly I use throughout. So because it’s hooked up to my Google Docs and if I’m working in Google Docs, it’s helping me out as I write through there. If I’m not writing in Google Docs, then I’m probably waiting until the first draft. And then the first draft, I’m going to run each chapter just to see what my first draft score is. So this way I’ve got that said and done. And then depending on how I’m scoring, like I know that as I’ve written more, I’ve gotten better at storytelling. So my each editing phase is a little different from how I used to do it, but I’ll use it probably about for three other different editing passes for me.

VE:
[12:54] Yeah, the way I do it, nothing leaves Scrivener without having been run through ProWritingAid. And then usually after I export, I’ll run one time through Autocrit. It is not a violation of ethics or any rule that you cannot use multiple tools. So I have a lifetime license to Autocrit and to ProWritingAid since they both offer them. So I go ahead and use them both. The only thing that I haven’t found in Autocrit that I would like is a desktop application so that I don’t have to copy and paste my manuscript into their web page. The last time I used Autocrit, you still had to copy your text and then dump it into their web page to analyze it. And I really dislike doing that.

MC:
[13:42] Yeah, I know that you can start writing in it like it’s Google Docs. Um, so you could write your entire manuscript in it and edit it as it goes. But, uh, I think it’s, yeah, it’s still copy and paste or you can upload the file to it.

VE:
[13:56] Yeah. You can upload a word doc. So it would accept that. But that meant that I had to take it out of Scrivener, which I did not like.

MC:
[14:06] It’s because you like Scrivener.

VE:
[14:08] I do like Scrivener. I want Scrivener to be the one source of all truth of my manuscript. So if I take it out of Scrivener and into Autocrit, that means that I have to take it back out of Autocrit and paste it into Scrivener. And I just, the back and forth is hard for my simpleton brain to keep track of. And I don’t like doing it.

MC:
[14:31] Because everyone’s always going to ask, what do you think is going to happen with these AI software? Do you think we’re going to get better editors or editing software with AI? Or do you think we’re at a good spot?

VE:
[14:46] I think we’re at a good spot right now. But I think that we are going to see additional features added to these tools. You’re already starting to see some of these tools add backend integration into things like Claude and ChatGPT, OpenAI, and you’re starting to see the ability to do larger rewrites and deeper analysis based on those integrations. I’m undecided about whether I like those or not. My experience with OpenAI, with ChatGPT, pasting my manuscript in there and then having it analyze it is that it’s good for some stuff, but if I’m looking at dialogue, I really need the human touch. If I’m looking at the overarching story, I really need the human touch because chat GPT simply can’t hold a hundred thousand word manuscript in its memory, especially not with the free version. It’s okay at rewriting stuff, but where it shines is in nonfiction and in tightening nonfiction prose. I’ve written a tiny bit of nonfiction that I, thank God, have not published, but I found that for fiction, it simply is not up to the job. I really still need a human touch for fiction.

MC:
[16:03] Fiction and i think that’s that’s going to be a thing still is that we we want to hear what other people think of our book like that’s the thing we want to know what they think you can get an ai to give you some but you also know it’s not a so i think that while these softwares are really great and they’re really helpful, it’s the human touch of reading that makes it, I think, fun. And you anticipate it. You wait to hear that feedback, that fear, but that adrenaline and that fun of getting feedback from someone.

VE:
[16:44] And in the end, we write to tell stories to people. We don’t write them to tell stories to chat GPT.

MC:
[16:52] So yeah, I think what would be really cool is that eventually we talk about the other kinds of editing software that would come for writers, like people who have to do audiobooks and stuff like that. Because I’m sure that’s a whole different class, but it would be a lot of fun to do something on.

VE:
[17:11] Yeah, there are a lot of tools to help you do things like audiobooks and podcasts and stuff like that. They don’t help with fiction.

MC:
[17:21] No, not quite. But I think that about does it for our AI editing software, at least the ones that we personally use.

VE:
[17:30] Yep, I think that about covers it.

MC:
[17:32] Well then, until next time, stay magical.

VE:
[17:35] Bye.