The manuscript I sent out for feedback was far beyond my first draft. I am forever grateful for the time and attention they put into the feedback they provided. I asked them to be candid about whatever they thought would make it better. I asked them to write comments about what resonated, what was confusing, what was boring or repetitive, what made them laugh. But no longer than a typical process to complete a book.Īfter two years, I sent a manuscript and red pen to nine people (my first readers).
Sure, it takes a lot of time alone to write a manuscript that becomes a book.īut the more I write, the more I play it as a team sport.įor three years, I spent countless hours alone in my office writing Losing Your Job & Finding Yourself. Maybe locked away in a room or an isolated cottage on the beach.
We envision authors writing in seclusion. If you pay an editor by the hour, these plugins soon pay for themselves.Want to Write a Book (or Anything Else)? Don’t Do It Alone! Human editors will always have the edge, but writers create less work for editors using tools like WordRake and StyleWriter. Writers of all kinds can use these simple tools to clarify and tighten their prose (presuming that the writers know what clear and tight prose can look like, and they value such prose). Whether writers also use human editors depends on how important it is for their prose to impress readers. Otherwise, it costs more to develop and support these tools.
#Wordrake write to the point mac#
Put another way: a developer creates one ribbon and it ought to be usable in both Windows and Mac versions of Office software. It’s for Microsoft, which ought to support the same third-party ribbons in both the Windows and Mac versions of Office software. My one criticism isn’t directed at the software.
#Wordrake write to the point software#
Also, to quote from the review I wrote, both pieces of software “will teach you to write in a clear, concise and readable style - but if you write crap, … (they) will teach you to write clear, concise readable crap.” In short, neither tool can replace the services of good editors or writers. The “Reject” options matter since WordRake doesn’t always pick up on the nuances of a sentence. I love the fact that it flags overused cotton candy modifiers like “very,” “quite,” “indeed” and “actually.” Once you eliminate these, you’re left with writing consisting mainly of “meaty” words that take readers to your point more quickly.Īs I continue to use WordRake on the things I write, I find that I commit fewer of the types of errors WordRake points out. The next suggested change would not work, so I chose “Reject and Go To Next.” In this case, I can replace two words (“start using”) with one (“use”) so I’ll click the convenient option “Accept and Go to Next.” Helping writers quickly navigate to the next thing they need to fix is a thoughtful touch.
WordRake adds four options to Word’s context-sensitive (right-click) menu. click the Rake icon in the WordRake ribbon.select all the text (the leftmost button in the WordRake ribbon).To “rake” needless words out of a document, you: The article was in praise of the Palm Pre, a potential challenger to other smartphones (that was ineptly handled and shut down… but I won’t grumble about that here). I’ll show you why I like WordRake using an article I wrote years ago, well before I learned of WordRake or StyleWriter. (The other one was StyleWriter from Editor Software.) I could accomplish similar ends using features built into Word and a little elbow grease, but I keep returning to WordRake, one of the two Word plugins I checked out for the aforementioned article. (Editors at the magazine I wrote this for came up with a witty title for the resulting article.) Earlier this year, I reviewed software that plugs into Microsoft Word (for Windows only, not available for Mac) to help writers sharpen their prose.
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