Free stuff for writers at our fingertips!

 What's the favorite price for valuable items? How about -- free! I was reminded of this recently when a writing group member mentioned using a really helpful program. I have no idea how much it cost and won't mention the title (except it's named for a famous author!). But as the group member extolled the program's benefits I thought, wait, that's all available free online.

The benefit of buying a program is the labor-saving cost of not having to conduct the research alternatives. But for the exceptionally thrifty, here's a peek at some of the things I've found. Including stuff that may even be in the word processing programs we're using right now.

First up: Among the most anguish-inducing writing issues is one that has nothing to do with our writing skills. It's what number of spaces to use following the end of a sentence. Writers who learned to type on a computer can skip this point. But for anybody who learned to type on an actual typewriter, then got dissed by fellow critique group members, it's agonizing.

We know the answer. In order not to look like dinosaurs, we should only leave one space after a sentence. One of the clues of the college entrance scandals a few years back was that essay writer spaced TWICE after each sentence. This automatically signaled the writer as older than the average first-time college applicant. In this case, most likely a parent.

If this sounds like us or anyone we know and love, there's not even a need to break that two-space habit. We simply click on "editing" in our machine's toolbar. The tell it to "find" (space space). And "replace with" (space.) If this seems spooky, be assured our machines know what to do.

Our writing looks thirty years younger!

I once heard an editor at a conference say cleaning up the spacing was the first thing she did after receiving a manuscript. Although, for that, of course, she used a program.

Next up: Excessively long, complicated sentences/words. The ones our fellow critique members may describe as "run-ons" (although that's another story). This time, the fix isn't quite as simple as the space bar one. It's possible our writing programs already include it as well. But years ago, I learned to love the free Flesch-Kincaid grade level calculators. There are several of these, sometimes found under such titles as "readability calculators. 

They're also free at Grammarly but for those who want freedom from passwords, grab any available.

All iterations focus on how easy the text is to read. As a former reporter/city editor for a small-town newspaper (remember newspapers?) I click along at a level supposedly easy reading for a 7th to 8th grader.

This rating includes such factors as length and complexity of sentences, and number of syllables in words. A lower grade level doesn't reflect badly on a writer's intelligence, vocabulary or imagination. In fact, my writing has about the same Flesch-Kincaid rating as Lewis Carrol's imaginative poem, "The Jabberwocky."

That said, such readability statistics aren't a huge issue except in writing for very young readers. Although keep reading here for some other suggestions for their use in story character development.

What's next? How about passive voice? Is it a holdover from bad academic writing habits? Or maybe a cultural issue? I've seen and heard it most frequently in writers with backgrounds in former commonwealth countries. 

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that at least one BBC site notes passive voice can be used to make writing appear more formal and objective. So, it's not always a bad thing. Except in the sense that too much of anything can be.

Image: Sidney Paget at Wikipedia

What, exactly, is passive voice? And how do we fix it, if it even needs fixing? Passive voice is writing in which the subject (supposed actor), instead of acting, is being acted upon by the object (receiver of action).

If that sounds confusing, here's my go-to example: "There will call upon you tonight, at a quarter to eight o'clock. . . a gentleman who desires to consult you upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all quarters received. . . "

As readers will recognize, that's a quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle's inimitable, "A Scandal in Bohemia." Doyle's hero, Sherlock Holmes, notes the convoluted grammar to deduce, perhaps unfairly, that the writer's first language is not English.

Readers will use it to deduce that the writer is a self-absorbed ass.

My normal word processing software will sometimes catch instances of passive voice. But in other cases, it can be dead wrong. All I can say is, practice. Pay attention to the squiggly lines. But use judgment.

By the way, Flesch-Kincaid rates "Scandal" overall at a 6th grade reading level but jumps to 8th grade when only assessing the note from the king of Bohemia. Because he's the kind of guy who wants to show everybody that he finished middle school!

I'll end with an easier issue. The last one I remember the writing group member mentioning was the use of adverbs. Adverbs are those parts of speech that modify verbs as well as their fellow modifying words, the adjectives.

However, most of the angst about their use focuses on adverbs ending in -ly. That's the low-hanging fruit. 

Again, go to the toolbar's "editing" and ask for "-ly." In this case, the solution may be as eliminating the word with that dreaded ending. Or we may need to consider substituting a stronger word for the verb being modified.

Or the writer may want to retain the word ending in -ly if it suits the character being described. Such as the king of Bohemia. Considering his note again, why not eliminate words such as the word "safely" in his phrase "safely be trusted"? If someone may be trusted, may they not also be safe to trust?

Not if the character in question is not himself trustworthy!

***

I noticed in my last post a promise to blog about comparative titles in literary query letters. However, I am still researching that. Will return when I have more answers!

The thrifty writer’s guide to more readable writing

The email in my inbox touted reviews of four editing programs. With spelling and grammar checks already available in my software, what I wanted was a program that will tell me how to, i.e., force me to, write better. And then my eyes went straight to one with that promise. OK, it was Hemingway, which promised to locate all those too-long sentences, pesky passive constructions, and convoluted wordings guaranteed to trip readers.

Oh, and it was free, the reviewer said! Apparently, what he meant, I realized after several minutes of Googling, is that there’s a free trial offer. But I wanted something not only magically delicious but also completely free. And I realized I already had what I longed for—in the readability statistics on my version of Word. Free, that is, because it’s included in software I’ve already paid for.

A writing friend introduced me to these statistics years ago, under the terms Flesch Reading Ease Test and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test. After that introduction, I spent many obsessive lunch breaks running every scrap of writing I could find through these tests, which analyze sentence structure, sentence length, word and paragraph length, and that dreaded issue of passive construction. 

image: wikimedia commons

Rudolf Flesch first developed his reading level test to determine how hard (or easy) written English documents are to understand. Later, he and J. Peter Kincaid developed the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test for the U.S. military’s technical manuals.

At approximately the same time, as a journalist I was being told to keep my writing at a sixth-grade reading level to avoid straining the attention spans, not to mention educational levels of readers. (The Wikipedia article, “Flesch-Kincaid readability tests,” rates sixth-grade level writing as “conversational English for consumers.”)

However, nobody ever told me how to write at a particular grade level. I must have managed, since I keep moving up all the way to editorship at the city desk, but I longed for tools to quantify the process.

With the Flesch tests, I had those tools.

I copied my own writing, emails from co-workers and bosses, even legal decisions into the program and chortled inwardly upon finding a federal judge’s ruling reach a level good ol’ Flesch rated as only likely to be understood by post-doctoral graduates. (By the way, multisyllable words affect the scores more than sentence length. Short, punchy words are Flesch and Kincaid’s darlings.)

My writing was at the desired sixth-grade readership. Its level actually decreased since I first discovered Flesch-Kincaid. I can now write about murder and mayhem with words and sentences comprehensible by a third-grader, and usually with zero percentage passive sentences. (This post, however, clocked in at a ninth-grade level, considerably above my usual. Blame it on those multisyllabic repetitions of Flesch-Kincaid.)  

Then I changed computers a few times, and Flesch and Kincaid disappeared somewhere in the depths of my software programs. 

However, determination not to pay for what I already had led me to unearth it from the depths of my Microsoft Office Word software. The process wasn’t quite what I remembered. Depending on your own version of Word or similar programs available for Macs, you may need to tweak my instructions. But here are the basic steps:  

·       Highlight the passage you want to edit

·       Click on “file”, then “options”, then “proofing”

·       Check to be sure you’ve enabled “grammar and spelling” and “show readability statistics”

·       Hit OK

Once you’ve toggled back to your writing sample, you may need to click on the “home” tab to bring up the results. After I did this several times, Word got grumpy and required me to click on “search” to locate the program in my history. But once all the spelling and grammar checks are run, a box will appear with the Flesch-Kincaid results.

These tell us, among other things, our average sentence length and what percentage of our sentences are in passive voice.

(A secret: if passive sentences comprise less than 1 percent of the sample, Flesch-Kincaid gives you a break and marks the total as zero. So, if every 150-200 sentences you feel compelled to throw in one in passive voice, feel free. Just don’t tell anybody I said so.)

Unlike Hemingway’s software, Flesch-Kincaid doesn’t highlight these areas in your writing sample. If you see a problem, it’s best to work with small batches at a time until you feel comfortable with sentence length and non-passive writing.  

Of course, neither Flesch-Kincaid nor Hemingway or any other program can make our writing fascinating. Or create unforgettable characters. Or thrilling plots. Only we can do that.

If you’re afraid using short words, maybe even sentences short enough for a grade-schooler to read means your writing will be boring, consider this. “Life” and “death,” “love” and “hate,” “war” and “peace,” “he” and “she,” “we” and “they” are all short words. But the concepts they stand for have kept human beings intrigued for millennia. 

And although I’ve sometimes heard writers dismiss a book as “readable,” no agent, editor or publisher ever has refused a manuscript because its writing was too clear and easy to read. Readers have enough reasons to throw books down without being kicked in the teeth by unreadable prose.

(And a final tip of the hat to the [Electric Speed] newsletter of Jane Friedman for bringing the software topic to my attention!)