Prose Editing

[PJPS]

When all is said and done, I take it Scrivener will not incorporate the option to seek out the various (not just passive voice) items I listed.
Oh well.

[Kinsey]

Do people actually use the Hemingway app . I experimented with it recently having read about it elsewhere, and couldn't believe what it was suggesting. Its sole purpose, from what I could see, is to reduce English to a pidgin language.

[Ahab]

Do people actually use the Hemingway app . I experimented with it recently having read about it elsewhere, and couldn't believe what it was suggesting. Its sole purpose, from what I could see, is to reduce English to a pidgin language.

These tools seem most popular with folks who wish to BE writers without learning to write.

[nontroppo]

What a snobbish bunch! Not everyone who writes has to be some yellow-fingered wizened prose master whose only purpose in life is to shine their literary pearl to syntactic perfection. If there are tools which may help people improve their written work, especially those who are non-native and write because they must (workers, academics etc.) not because an oracle prophesied they would win the Nobel Prize in Literature, then more power to them...

[Kinsey]

But that's the point. My brief experience with the Hemingway app (which is the only tool I mentioned) is that it will not improve anyone's written work. And it is marketed as an artificial 'yellow-fingered wizened prose master'. At least I'm pretty sure that's its tag line.

[vic-k]

Passive voice is like saffron, in my opinion. It doesn't take much to markedly color and flavor the whole dish.

Dev baby! Coloured and flavoured with this...

http://www.webmd.com
SAFFRON OVERVIEW INFORMATION
Saffron is a plant. The dried stigmas (thread-like parts of the flower) are used to make saffron spice. It can take 75,000 saffron blossoms to produce a single pound of saffron spice. Saffron is largely cultivated and harvested by hand. Due to the amount of labor involved in harvesting, saffron is considered one of the world's most expensive spices. The stigmas are also used to make medicine.

Saffron is used for asthma, cough, whooping cough (pertussis), and to loosen phlegm (as an expectorant). It is also used for sleep problems (insomnia), cancer, “hardening of the arteries” (atherosclerosis), intestinal gas (flatulence), depression, Alzheimer’s disease, fright, shock, spitting up blood (hemoptysis), pain, heartburn, and dry skin.
Women use saffron for menstrual cramps and premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Men use it to prevent early orgasm (premature ejaculation) and infertility.
Saffron is also used for to increase interest in sex (as an aphrodisiac) and to induce sweating.
Some people apply saffron directly to the scalp for baldness (alopecia).
In foods, saffron is used as a spice, yellow food coloring, and as a flavoring agent.
In manufacturing, saffron extracts are used as fragrance in perfumes and as a dye for cloth.
How does it work?
There isn't enough information to know how saffron might work.

...is surely all you require to knock out a Worldwide Best Selling, Bodice Ripping, Bonkbusting, Shades of Grey challenging Bestseller!!
'ere y' go pal!
Don't have t' bother including me in the books acknowledgement.
Good luck
Vic

[Jordi Mora]

But that's the point. My brief experience with the Hemingway app (which is the only tool I mentioned) is that it will not improve anyone's written work. And it is marketed as an artificial 'yellow-fingered wizened prose master'. At least I'm pretty sure that's its tag line.

I must admit to having only limited experience of these apps, but as a non-fiction editor I have occasionally been asked about them and what has worried me is that many of my favourite non-fiction authors apparently `fail'. Something which rejects aspects of the writings of, inter alia, Didion, Lopate, McPhee, Malcolm, Ozick, and Robinson is clearly a tad too tightly formal.

Having said that, for those that need sentence length checking and such-like, I think the way that this is implemented in Brett Terpstra's *Marked 2* is pretty good: and it can read native Scrivener files without format conversion.

[gr]

When all is said and done, I take it Scrivener will not incorporate the option to seek out the various (not just passive voice) items I listed.
Oh well.

Pretty much. But it is always exhilirating to toss a fresh hunk of grammar into a tank full of writers.

[KB]

There are no plans for anything like this, sorry. When it comes to spell- and grammar-checking (and parts-of-speech highlighting in the next major update), I only include those tools that are built into the Apple frameworks. It's just not an area I'm particularly interested in incorporating into Scrivener - and it's not something I believe we could do as well as dedicated third-party tools anyway.

The thing to remember is that Scrivener doesn't have a big team behind it - one person developing the macOS and iOS versions (me) and two people running to catch up with the Windows version. The implementation of tools that check for the passive voice* would require expertise in linguistic analysis. The third-party tools that allow for this have such experts on board - indeed, they are built around such experts, I believe.

I admit that I'm not a big fan of such tools, either (hence Scrivener's grammar checking is off by default). I can certainly see the appeal if you are writing an essay the night before the deadline and want to check you haven't made any silly mistakes, but a world in which no sentence ends in a preposition is not a world I want to live in.*

All the best.

* See what I did there?

[PJS]

a world in which no sentence ends in a preposition is not a world I want to live in.*

To quote Churchill, "This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."

ps

[vic-k]

HEY!!! THIS IS THE WISH LIST .... NOT THE HISTORY LIST!!

[PJS]

HEY!!! THIS IS THE WISH LIST .... NOT THE HISTORY LIST!!

You just wish it was.
I mean, you wish it were.
No, wait, "wish it was" is the way to go.
Damn, I just can't decide which of those to go with.

phil

[Jordi Mora]

a world in which no sentence ends in a preposition is not a world I want to live in.*

To quote Churchill, "This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."

ps

I remember Anthony Sher, in something Shakespearean donkeys years ago that gave him some improvisational room:

"He is a Lord, up whose shoelaces I am not worthy of doing."

[xiamenese]

Then there is the old story of the aged, now blind, pedantic Professor Emeritus of English who used to get his housekeeper to read to him every evening … until the occasion on which the housekeeper ended her reading with the question, "What did you choose a book like that to be read to out of for?", which prompted a fatal heart attack.



Mark

[lunk]

(Reading, amused, in a passive fashion...)