Next Noble Pen Meeting
June 30th, 2016 at 7 pm
Scott’s Family Restaurant
1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids
News
When sending submissions, be sure to click REPLY ALL. Your moderator may not always catch when you reply only to him so other people do not receive your submissions.
Victories
Ciuin wrote more on Chessmaster. Her client for Writing Fairy service has finished the story and Ciuin is finishing her critiques.
Dylan got over setbacks to make progress in publishing Sand and Blood. A reader for one of his alternate byline stories liked it so much they commissioned a short sequel.
Aime was in a newspaper article because of her discussion in the city council.
Stacie got promo material for her book and a Square app so she can take credit cards when selling it.
Education
Many tools can help with the initial editing of your story by pointing out things a human might miss. MS Word includes a grammar checker. As with any tool, it isn’t always right but will point out things to consider. A quick on-line search finds many tool offerings, free or for sale.
ProWritingAid offers free registration for their on-line proofreading tool that checks many aspects of your writing. They also sell tools. You paste a section of your text into the free version window, click submit and analyze, and it reports over-used words, sentences of monotonously same length or excessive length, cliches, repeated phrases, alliteration, and other things you may want to consider changing. It also highlights dialog tags so you can see at a glance what you used.
It helped me a lot, but became tedious after I changed the major offenses. My biggest complaint is that it reports too much. I even tried a better writer’s material with the same result. The highlighting of repeated common 2-word phrases, 2-word alliterations, etc. (like “to town” or “an apple”) results in clutter that hides the things I want to find and change. The homonym finder is a nice idea but appears to have no context sensitivity so you see ALL of them.
The author of Writer’s Diet offers a free on-line tool for evaluating your writing. While not as extensive as Pro Writing Aid, another view is often useful.
Grammarly is a free browser add-on that says it checks whatever you type in your browser and is context sensitive. One of our members uses it and finds the free version somewhat helpful but it has aggressive nagging to buy the upgrade.
There are also on-line forums where you can post work for critique by others, gain experience in doing critiques, and discuss writing topics. One is writingforums.org where you have to do some critiques during a waiting period before you can post your own work. An issue with such forums is that postings may be “publication,” so it is best to only post small samples.
Does anyone have recommendations for other tools?
Upcoming Schedule
June 30
Ciuin
Aime
Randy
July 7
Nick
Aime
Stacie
July 14
Ciuin
Mark
Open slot
July 21
Randy
Ciuin
Laura
July 28
Open slots
Keep Writing,
Bill