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“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

— Robert A. Heinlein 

New Editing Features in Writing Analytics

A few days ago, I posted a preview of a feature I was working on. I’m happy to announce that highlights are now live and ready to use 🎉.

Just choose which words or phrases you’d like to be highlighted, and Writing Analytics will do that as you type. This has a number of use cases, particularly when you’re editing something and want to target specific issues in your draft. 

Stuff like weeding out adverbs, cleaning out unnecessary words, passive voice etc. You can also use these to highlight the names of your characters and their pronouns to visualise better how much space they’re getting in the narrative. 

You can do anything you want — that’s the best part!

How it Works

1. Click on Highlights in the main menu.

2. Add some highlights. You can also click on them to choose a different colour.

That’s it. You can close the widget and go back to writing.

One cool thing is that star works as a wildcard. It will match any word or part of word. So if you want to highlight problematic adverbs use *ly like so:

Colour-coding and visualising what you’re looking for in the text makes revisions so much easier —instead of having to read the whole thing over and over again, you can focus on specific areas and issues.

The highlights show up as you type so you can also use this to break down bad writing habits. Just set up highlights for words or phrases that you’d like to stop using, and you’ll be alerted when it happens.

It took me a while to build this, and I’m very excited to finally see it in the wild — one of my favourite features for sure.

Wanna give it a go? Sign up for a free, no-commitment 14-day trial.

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”

— Maya Angelou

“It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.”

— Douglas Adams

“Just be fucking honest about how you feel about people while you’re alive.”

— John Mayer

“Fantasy is about making a metaphor concrete.”

— Neil Gaiman, MasterClass

“And so it seems I must always write you letters that I can never send.”

— Sylvia Plath 

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

— Ambrose Bierce (via quotemadness)

The best advice really is to just write. Write badly - purple prose, stilted conversations, rambling descriptions. Don’t delete it, pass go, take your $200, save all your garbage in a big folder. Look at how much you’ve made - it doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect, isn’t polished, it was practice. Every time you write you learn a little more, and find another piece of your voice.

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

— Louis L'Amour (via quotemadness)