SmartEdit - Scan your work for Monitored Words, Clichés, and Overused Phrases and Words
SmartEdit is an automated tool that scans your finished novel or your work in progress and highlights areas that might need closer attention. It runs five individual checks, such as highlighting words or phrases marked by you for monitoring, counting the different dialog tags you have used, and searching out over-used phrases, words and clichés. Download Now >>
It's not a word processor - its sole purpose is to assist you when you edit your work, much like a grammar or spell checker.
The example used in the above screenshot is The Wizard of Oz, available to download for free from The Gutenberg Library.
What exactly does SmartEdit do?
1. Highlights every instance of a word or phrase you have previously told it to monitor
Examples might be form which is often incorrectly typed in place of from, and is never flagged as misspelled by a spell checker, or loose and lose, two more words than often slip through when writing and editing.
All instances of these words or phrases are presented to you in a list for examination, along with a short extract of the sentence for context. This sentence extract is usually sufficient to allow you to decide if there is an error that needs correcting. Double clicking will bring you to the instance in the SmartEdit window.
Monitored words can be added or removed at any time by opening the Lists Dialog from the toolbar. Remember that monitored words are definable by you, and should reflect your own writing style and the common mistakes you yourself make. If you are a poor speller and a fast typist, you might decide to use it to highlight those words you most commonly misspell; if you are prone to confusing two characters' names, you might benefit from adding both names to the Monitored Words list.
2. Dialog Tag Counter
The Dialog Tag Counter counts each instance of a particular tag you use in your dialog. Its purpose is to flag over use of unusual tags. Most published novels that have been run through SmartEdit show a rate of use for said to be about three times as high as any other tag, and in some cases even more.
Only you can decide whether the tags you are using are suitable or a little too colourful, or whether you are using one tag too often, but unusual tags is something you might want to look at, and SmartEdit highlights them for you. As with Monitored Words, they are fully customisable.
3. Cliché Counter, Over-used Phrase and Word Frequency Counter
The Cliché Counter, as the name suggest, scans your work for clichés and tells you how many of each it finds. The cliché list is not comprehensive and on occaision throws up false positives, but the numbers of clichés found is usually quite low. If it's not, you might want to look into the reasons why - maybe you are working on a novel about a man who speaks only in clichés!
The Phrase and Word Counters pull off lists of phrases and words that appear again and again in your writing. The purpose of this check is to highlight those phrases and words that you might be using too often. A recent popular novel from a New York Times best selling author (which I am not going to name), had over one hundred and fifty instances of the phrase on the other hand. The book itself drove me almost crazy while reading it and it wasn't until running it through SmartEdit that I began to realise why.
The Phrase and Word Counters are fully configurable. As well as being able to edit the list of words and phrases that are not included when scanning, you can specify what constitutes a repeat. For example: a phrase that occurs more than four times and contains more than three words.
The results of a scan can be saved to an external file and referenced later when you are editing your work in MS Word or some other writing software. SmartEdit itself is not a word processor and does not allow you to save any changes you make in the main window. The text that appears in the main window is for reference purposes only.
SmartEdit is free (for now). Why is it free? It's an offshoot of PageFour, which contains some of its functionality. It may be expanded on in the future to include more automated editing functions, at which point I might decide to charge for it. For now, it's free, can be installed on your PC or on a thumb drive, and contains no licensing or phone home functionality.
