Websites for Writers – AutoCrit
A writer needs to hand his or her best work to a reader – even if the reader’s role is to improve your work. Good feedback raises your personal best. Writers who pass around substandard work find the suggestions tell them basic stuff, instead of giving them information that stretches their technical skills and improves their writing.
AutoCrit, one of Writer’s Digest‘s 2007 top 100 sites, allows you to dump your prose into a text box and run an analysis of common errors: overused phrases, repeated phrases, sentence length variation.
Writers, who find the tool useful, can pay to get increased functionality, like a cliché finder, dialogue tag checker, and a redundancy locater.
Given the usefulness of Word’s in-built grammar checker, you may doubt the effectiveness of a computer program to pick up these things at a standard necessary for published writing. For this reason, test-run the free section before you think of signing up for any of the paid areas.
Whether you use the freebie section or join, please post comments here so other BIW-ers and browsers can here your thoughts on AutoCrit’s usefulness.
Update: I pumped this entry through AutoCrit and it provided me with useful feedback for revising and polishing before posting. I also learnt through doing this that non-members are limited to five submissions per day. Bummer! (I also learned nothing beats a good read through.)