Editing software for a finished book
Editing software that counts, rather than opines
Point it at a manuscript and it reports the countable problems: misspellings, mechanical errors, words repeating too close together, phrases recurring across chapters, and how much your sentence length actually varies.
- Repeatable
- Same manuscript, same figures, every time you run it.
- No ghostwriting
- It cannot write prose. There is no such feature.
- You approve everything
- No change is applied on your behalf.
Editing software falls into two camps. One camp grades your writing and hands back a number without telling you where it came from. The other rewrites your sentences and hands them back improved, which is only useful if you wanted a different book. This is neither. It counts specific, checkable things and shows you where each one is.
What it counts
Misspellings, doubled words, dialogue punctuation errors, unbalanced quotes and brackets, inconsistent dash and ellipsis use, spacing mistakes, adverb density, estimated passive voice, sentence-length variation and reading grade.
What it finds across chapters
Phrases that recur throughout a book rather than within one chapter. These survive every read-through precisely because they are spread out, and no per-document tool can see them.
What it leaves alone
Sentence fragments. Dialect. Characters who speak ungrammatically. Sentences starting with "And". A general-purpose grammar checker underlines all of these, which is why authors stop using them.
What it refuses to do
Write a chapter, continue a scene, or suggest what should happen next. Those features do not exist in this software and are not on a roadmap.
How it goes
- 1
Upload the manuscript
Word, EPUB, PDF or plain text. Chapters are detected from the document’s own headings and chapter markers.
- 2
Work through the findings
Each one names the rule it came from and the paragraph it is in, so you can judge it rather than trust it.
- 3
Export when you are done
Your text comes back out whenever you want it. No lock-in.
Questions
What file formats does it accept?
Word (.docx), EPUB, PDF, and plain text or Markdown. Chapters are split using the document’s own headings or chapter markers; when there is no clear structure it imports the manuscript in one piece rather than guessing at breaks.
Is this a grammar checker?
Partly. It checks spelling and mechanical correctness, but it is built for fiction, so it deliberately ignores the stylistic rule-breaking that novels depend on. A general grammar checker flags fragments and dialect; this does not.
Will it rewrite my sentences?
Only if you ask for a specific suggestion, and then only as a proposal you accept or reject. It never edits the file on its own, and it has no ability to write new prose.
How is this different from ProWritingAid or Grammarly?
Grammarly is built for business writing and flags most of what makes fiction work. ProWritingAid is a mature checker with a critique layer, and it is stronger than this on integrations, which it has and this does not. Where this differs is that the analysis is computed rather than generated, so results are stable and comparable between drafts, and it looks across the whole manuscript for recurring phrases rather than at one document at a time.
Does it work for non-fiction?
The mechanical and readability checks apply to any prose. The repetition and dialogue-specific checks are tuned for narrative writing.
What does it cost?
The measurements are free to use.