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Losing the glue from my writing

Yesterday I received an email from BookBaby with a link to an article on their site (An Editing Tool Helps You Polish Your Manuscript | BookBaby Blog) about editing tools. The article was written by Lisa Lepki, a staffer at ProWritingAid, and the article focused on what ProWritingAid can do for writers. The ProWritingAid site can be found at (ProWritingAid - Grammar Checking & Manuscript Editing Software).

ProWritingAid can be used for free, but is limited to 500 words at a time unless you pay for the premium version. I ended up going the premium route, because I wanted to have it analyze entire chapters at once, and BookBaby offered a promotion code. Still, some people here might find the free version helpful for short, problematic passages.

One thing I've discovered through use of this tool is my tendency to use too many filler words, what the tool refers to as glue. These are the common words: of, and, the, back, down, etc. They recommend not having more than a 40% ratio of filler words to total word count, and the tool displays this ratio for analyzed text. The tool shows "sticky sentences" in the text, sentences with an overabundance of filler words. I've found this of tremendous value to my writing, just in the few hours I've been using it. The hard part comes when you've fixed all your sticky sentences, but your ratio is still a bit over 40%. To bring the ratio down, I've had to do a harder analysis of my writing than I'd typically do, so it's a good thing.

The tool gives more reports on analyzed text than the glue ratio and what sentences are sticky. Check out the BookBaby article and the ProWritingAid site if you want to know more.
 
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