AutoCrit Editing Wizard Review

Hi, here is my review of the AutoCrit Editing Wizard.

The AutoCrit Wizard is an online program that critiques your manuscript, providing over a dozen different reports identifying potential problems. It is specifically designed for fiction writing.

In this review I'll cover:

Getting the software: how easy was it to access and start using a trial version of the software.
Understanding the results: how easy was it to "get" what the program was telling me.
Usefulness of the results: did the suggestions improve my writing?
Price & Guarantee

I don't bother repeating the marketing blurb from the product's websites. You can go read about that on the individual websites (links are given). I focus solely on how well the software worked for me as a fiction writer trying to edit my manuscript.

Free Trial

Autocrit offers a free trial of the software. It is much simpler than the WhiteSmoke or StyleWriter trial versions (see those reviews), because you don't need to download or install any software. I had my first results within two minutes - just like the site claimed!

The AutoCrit trial version will only analyse 800 words at a time and limits you to 7 submissions per day. This is enough to get a good understanding of what the software can do. Once you exceed your daily quota, it shows you the report you requested with some sample results. Again, this is sufficient to get a good idea of how the program works.

Understanding the Results

I started at the top with the first report, which was "Overused Words". I submitted the same 750 word sample text as I used in my reviews of WhiteSmoke and StyleWriter. After a few seconds the results report appeared.

It took me a few minutes to get the hang of the information in the report. It firstly provides a table showing how often you use a variety of typically overused words. It highlight in red those classes of words where you have in fact exceeded the recommended amount.

Below the table your text is provided with the overused words highlighted. You can click and unclick the different classes of words to see just those you have overused.

Each of the remaining twelve reports shows results in a different way, depending on what report was selected. In each case, help was provided to aid in understanding the information.

Usefulness of the Results

Of all the software I evaluated, I found AutoCrit the most useful. It took a "big picture" look at my manuscript instead of simply evaluating "micro-level" issues -- like using "however" instead of "but" (as WhiteSmoke does).

For example, after analyzing my test sample, AutoCrit told me that I overused "LY-adverbs" in compared to the amount found in typical published fiction. After I edited my text, I resubmitted and AutoCrit left that issue alone -- because it was no longer a problem. In other words, it didn't insist I get rid of ALL "LY-adverbs." It just let me know when I used far more than other, published, writers.

AutoCrit offers fourteen different reports, some more useful than others. The dialogue tags report didn't help me because I rarely use dialogue tags. For someone who overuses tags like "muttered", "shouted", etc, this report would be very useful.

On the other hand, the pacing report was fantastic. For most of my test sample I had a good mix of narrative and dialogue, but AutoCrit Wizard showed me when I had an extensive dump of back-story. Oops!

Comparing to other Software

The AutoCrit reports take a little more attention at first to understand the information they contain. But the effort was worth it as I found the results more useful than StyleWriter or WhiteSmoke.

Price

AutoCrit is the most economical of the three editing programs I reviewed. It is $47 for a year's membership, and you get access to nine of the most important Wizard reports. If you'd like to spend more, you can get access to all of the reports for $77 (still cheaper than WhiteSmoke). There is a deluxe "Professional" version for $117 (still cheaper than StyleWriter).

AutoCrit offers a 100% money-back guarantee.