I’ve covered a couple of editing software—mostly grammar checkers—on this blog, but now I’m covering something a little bit different—Autocrit.
And boy am I excited!
AutoCrit is an online book editing tool committed to helping fiction and nonfiction writers seamlessly and perfectly edit their way into authorship.
There are lots of writing, editing, and plotting software you can choose from—Grammarly, Scrivener, ProWritingAid, etc.—but what sets Autocrit apart?
Before we answer that, we have an urgent question, what is Autocrit?
What is AutoCrit? Who Is It for?
Autocrit is like a writing coach, way better than a standard grammar checker and more like a developmental editor.
As a book editing tool, Autocrit—apart from grammar and spelling checking—identifies repetitions, sentence monotony, dull adverbs, passive voice, slow or uneven pacing, unnecessary dialogue tags, and many other problems.
It also compares your text to previously published fiction works to determine how good your writing is.
So what it really does is prevent you—the writer—from putting the cart before the horse.
Any writer can use AutoCrit, but its features are best suited to editing books (fiction and nonfiction). So, the book is for aspiring authors, published authors, and book editors.
AutoCrit Pros
in-depth Genre-Based analysis
Autocrit analyzes your work based on its specific genre to make it unique and befitting that specific genre.
The tool offers plenty of reports, but the summary reports furnishes the writer with a much-needed overview.
AutoCrit recognizes that Tom Clancy would be a better editor for a political thriller than Danielle Steele and Danielle, a better editor for a sizzling romantic piece.
Progress Tracking
The Score and Fingerprint features give authors an eyeshot of the progress they have made.
They let the writer know whether they are making strides or regressing in their writing.
Edits Chapters Separately
When you start a chapter with the heading “Chapter,” AutoCrit automatically recognizes this and lets you analyze your work, chapter by chapter.
Stores Revisions Online
When you are done editing, you can choose to save up to 50 revised works—novels, screenplay, etc.—online.
When you surpass the saving limit—50—the tool automatically deletes the earliest saved files. To avoid permanent loss of revisions, use the export feature and store your files offline or on the cloud.
Has a Free Version
People love free things, not because they don’t have the money, but they want to know what or how good something is before spending their hard-earned cents.
Conveniently, Autocrit offers a free plan alongside its two paid plans. The freebies don’t end there; the annual professional plan also offers two months of free full-house features—and they’re way better than the features in the “free-free” plan.
AutoCrit Cons
A Basic Grammar Checker
The grammar checking feature Comes Up Short Against Natural Grammar Checkers.
Obviously, the tool wasn’t designed to primarily tackle piddling grammar and spelling mistakes, so it performs better in editing your book manuscript and not a natural grammar checker.
A Couple of Features Perform Similar Tasks
Tools like Redundancy, the Filler Words, repeated words, Phrase frequency, Repeated Phrases, and the Repetition tool all try to untie one knot—redundancy.
But, if one looks closely at what parts of the text they are all trying to mark and correct, they will realize that these tools work similarly with minute variabilities.
Therefore, these redundancy reduction tools are redundant themselves.
Does Not Support Multilingual Editing
AutoCrit supports American, British, Australian, Canadian, and South African English.
It’s good for English writers from different parts of the world, but the tool does not support other languages; hence it’s an English-only tool.
How Much Does Autocrit Cost?
Basically, AutoCrit offers two plans—they have a free plan and a paid solution called professional.
The professional plan is further divided into Professional and Annual Professional (according to the subscribed period).
The monthly professional plan costs $30/month, while the annual plan is billed at $297.
Autocrit Review: Key Features
To get a good picture of how good this book editing tool is, let us look at its major features and what they do.
Dialogue
The developers of this great editing tool realize that a manuscript has to have compelling dialogue.
To achieve this, the author needs to ink dialogue that sounds natural rather than forced and insincere.
The Autocrit dialogue editor analyzes your text’s dialog, gives feedback, and prompts changes.
Refine your prose by dropping or replacing (where necessary) bland, unnecessary dialogue tags and adverbs.
Pacing and Momentum
Lack of pace can make your writing an insipid and boring read.
Readers might find themselves stuck in thick slow-paced passages, dragging themselves onto the next page.
AutoCrit helps create real high-paced reads; the software analyzes your sentence structures and identifies the pieces or sections of your writing that are making the page-turner a slow read.
This feature shows you details like the number of slow-paced paragraphs in your text, the percentage of slow-paced sections, et cetera.
Strong Writing
For a bookworm, there’s nothing more annoying than a gooey and unoriginal read.
Text that is littered with clichés, filler words, too much passive voice, or too many adverbs is often uninspiring and unappetizing for avid readers.
The Strong Writing tab tries to fix those icky elements and make your writing stronger and impactful.
The tool comes equipped with a couple of reports that help make your writing stronger—the clichés, the passive voice, and adverb tabs.
Word Choice
For me, the onset of writers’ block is signaled by poor word choice. It’s always the same thing; I fail to get the right words.
And I use the same words over and over, and over…
This happens to most of us, but AutoCrit has a Word Choice tab that helps you cut down on these nibbling issues.
This tab has a very helpful report—Sentence Starters—which analyzes your passage and offers you a breakdown of all your starting words.
For example, if you have used the word “The” as a starting word, the tool will prompt you to cut down on its usage as a starting word.
Repetition
Variety in writing is just as important as it is in a pizza.
Take for example, a pepperoni pizza. There’s a tomato there, pepperoni there, cheese, etc. and all that engulfed in the dough.
Whether it’s in the pizza or your writing, this variety makes your serving juicier, savory, and unique.
Conveniently, AutoCrit has a repetition tab that analyzes your writing and identifies the frequently used phrases and the ones you’re using excessively.
Therefore, the repetition feature helps you use varied expressions and unique descriptors to make your text a little bit fresher.
Compare to Fiction
This is one of the features that sets AutoCrit apart from normal grammar checkers like Grammarly and ProWritingAid.
The Compare to Fiction tab compares your writing up against millions of fiction works in AutoCrit’s database— Daniel Steel, Suzanne Collins, Michael Crichton, Tony Robbins—and lets you know how good your writing is.
This is like using the industry-standard to gauge your progress. Through the tab, you get insights on how you used passive voice usage and generic descriptors, among other things.
Tense Consistency
Now and then, we might get away with incorrect shifts in verb tenses that we use in our effete tittle-tattles.
These shifts can’t be tolerated when writing stories and novels for wider audiences.
The only acceptable exception is when a verb tense shifts to indicate a shift in the timeline of the story—for example, the verb tense shifting from present tense to past tense when the MC recounts an event that occurred in the past.
But unintentional and inconsistent shifts only end up confusing the reader and disrupt the flow of your story.
AutoCrit helps you catch these shifts by highlighting the use of past, present, and future tenses with red, green, and blue colors.
There’s an option to toggle on and off past-tense verbs and redundant “-ing” verbs so that you are able to detect the tense of your passages.
POV Consistency
This is a helpful feature for fiction writers. Again, a feature that places AutoCrit above basic grammar checking tools for fiction writers.
When you’re writing fiction, one characters’ perspective needs to be consistent.
You need to make a point of using the proper pronouns and make sure that you carefully jump from one character’s perspective to another.
By utilizing the POV consistency report, you can produce fiction that a reader can read swimmingly. It does the job by checking pronouns for consistency, slips into 2nd person point of view, and flagging needless POV shifts.
AutoCrit identifies the type of person of view used within your text. It highlights the use of 1st person with green, 2nd person with yellow, and 3rd person with blue.
Spelling and Grammar
Although spelling and grammar checking are great selling points for editing tools, I put it last on this list because I believe that AutoCrit goes far beyond the two.
However, the tool is still an excellent grammar and spell checker.
When you’re reading through your text, it is easy to miss one or two mistakes—even the bestselling authors are liable to make such errors.
Luckily, using this report, spelling errors are highlighted in red while grammar errors painted with blue.
If, however, if you would like a highlighted word to be left as it is—maybe a fictional character’s name, invented language or slang, or a non-English city (fictional or real) in your story.
This editing feature offers two convenient options: exclude from all reports and remove current highlighting.
- Exclude from All Reports: If you want the tool to stop flagging all nonexistent or fictitious names and words, you can choose the option “exclude it from all reports.” This means that the next time AutoCrit runs any report, these words won’t be marked. Giving you the freedom to use your character names or locations.
- Remove Current Highlight: Let’s say you want to use a flagged word or phrase just once—in the current open file, you can choose to select “remove current highlighting.” The feature will not highlight this word or phrase again in the open document. But, the change is temporary and only restricted to the current document. And if you rerun the spelling and grammar report (in another document), the same word or phrase will be highlighted again. So, if you have words and phrases—like slang terms, fictional names, and cities, etc.—you want to be used in one file, but not any other, this feature is ideal.
What Can an Autocrit Membership Get You?
The free plan is quite impressive. If you register using this plan, you will get access to a word processor and editing suite; a spelling & grammar checker; Adverbs, Repetition, and Readability checking features; and online storage for your revisions.
The free plan has no word limits.
That’s a good package, but when upgrading to the professional plan, you’re going to get everything in the free plan and much more.
You will get access to the full suite equipped with over 30 interactive editing reports!
The tool will help you do away with weak writing, useless filler words, repetitive words and phrases, unnecessary shifts in tense and point of view, and slow-paced writing.
The professional plan also comes with genre-specific guidance for both fiction and non-fiction—whether you’re writing Sci-Fi, Romance, or Memoirs.
You also get to compare the word choices within your text to the style of best-selling authors, including J.K. Rowling, Danielle Steel, Stephen King, and many others.
The benefits don’t end there…
But to save your time, how about I give you just one more important benefit you enjoy when you make use of one of AutoCrit’s many helpful features—the AutoCrit Summary Score. With this feature, you’re able to track your progress.
Is AutoCrit Right for You?
If you’re looking for a raw grammar checker, this isn’t for you.
If what you’re looking for is a virtual writing mentor that can take the shape of a bestselling author in your genre, then this is for you.
My Verdict on AutoCrit
So now that we’ve come to the end of this review, I’d like to say what I think about this tool.
One thing I’ve learned about this is that it leans heavily towards fiction writing—most of its features are designed to primarily tackle aspects of writing that are usually used in fiction writing.
Unlike other editing tools, it’s better to purchase AutoCrit’s plans after your manuscript is finished and ready for editing.
Although AutoCrit is able to catch Grammar mistakes, I’d advise you to keep your Grammarly and ProWritingAid close because AutoCrit’s grammar checking feature is basic.
You can use the other grammar checking tools to complement the book editing software and conjure a well-cooked fiction piece.
So, are you ready to ink and edit that best seller?
