Sites like Auto-Crit?

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Fruitbat

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For those who don't know, Auto-Crit is a nifty site where you copy and paste your story and it does a computerized thingie on it and tells you where you have more than the suggested number of certain words, your sentence lengths and some other stuff that helps you clean up your stories in a jiffy. I think it's free to do up to 300 words at a time but you have to pay for more than that. Here it is:

http://members.autocrit.com/editing-wizard/

Now, my question: Does anyone know of any other sites like it?

Thanks.
 

Fruitbat

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Thank you, Wendy. :)
 

Wilde_at_heart

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Fruitbat

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Thanks, everyone. Much appreciated.
 

thothguard51

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Not sure how any automated critique site takes the place of a human and their skill.

There is a lot more to a useful critique than just pointing out the average word length of a sentence, or paragraph, or page. So much more...

I'll keep to my human partners, thank you...
 

Old Hack

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Word can do a similar thing, I think.

But I'm not sure how useful Word's facility is, or how useful these sites are, either. You want your work to be readable by humans, not correct according to computer software.
 

Fruitbat

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Those are good points. I run almost every story I write through Auto-Crit and find it very helpful. It spots overuse of certain words, overly long, unwieldy sentences and other things I didn't notice. But you still have to use your own judgment. Also, I use it in addition to human critters, not in place of them.
 
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Torgo

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These things are always terrible. Computers can't parse natural languages yet, and the algorithms used always smuggle in a bunch of unexamined assumptions about stuff which probably are also terrible.
 

Fruitbat

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Torgo, the one I use (Auto-Crit) doesn't attempt to do anything all that advanced. It's really just more of a convenience than counting up a zillion little things yourself, like how many "was" "there" "it" you have and how close together they are, phrases you've repeated, how long each sentence is, etc. You decide if you are going to change it or not. As I said, I use it with almost every story and I find it very helpful. Which ones are you talking about?
 
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slhuang

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Not sure how any automated critique site takes the place of a human and their skill.

There is a lot more to a useful critique than just pointing out the average word length of a sentence, or paragraph, or page. So much more...

I'll keep to my human partners, thank you...

I use Pro Writing Aid. But I absolutely don't use it to replace betas! *shudders at the idea*

It tells me useful things like whether I've mixed British and American spellings or capitalized words inconsistently. It also points out a lot of the words I already know I commonly overuse, and that I'd be using Ctrl+F to go through and check myself on anyway -- the tool basically gives me convenient shortcuts to all the self-editing I'm already doing. I completely ignore the categories I don't find helpful or anything I feel my style is justifiably contradicting.

Tl;dr: The tech improves my ability to self-edit and polish my ms to a reflective shine before I inflict it on my betas. It absolutely doesn't replace a human editor.
 

Cranky

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I don't think I'd rely on one to finish a piece, but I'm gonna be a bit contrarian and suggest that it's another way to skin a cat. I used one of those here on something I'm working on at the moment. It *did* pick up a couple of things I've missed, and pointed out some interesting quirks in my overall writing. It was great for nitpicking, but I would never send out work for submission using only this and my own eyes to review it. I think it's good for pointing out obvious errors, but not much else. Since there's a lot of emphasis here (rightly so!) on not putting anything in SYW that is unedited, it can be a useful tool to get your work ready for critique by others. Simple grammar and spell check are good too.

Just my two pennies.

ETA: I didn't see that slhaung had posted while I was dithering around with this post. So, yeah. What slhaung said. :D
 
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Torgo

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Torgo, the one I use (Auto-Crit) doesn't attempt to do anything all that advanced. It's really just more of a convenience than counting up a zillion little things yourself, like how many "was" "there" "it" you have and how close together they are, phrases you've repeated, how long each sentence is, etc. You decide if you are going to change it or not. As I said, I use it with almost every story and I find it very helpful. Which ones are you talking about?

Ah, I was feeling grumpy. Whatever works for you is fine, of course.
 

Fruitbat

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Torgo, LOL! :)
 
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