Because professional editors are so expensive (and worth every penny), the purchase of electronic editing software can be a smart investment. Here’s a review of the four best tools for authors offering “first-pass” or “last-pass” editing to clean up mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. These tools do much more work than the built-in spelling and grammar checkers in your word processor. They alert you to overuse of adverbs, clichés, redundancies, overlong sentences, sticky sentences and glue words*, vague and abstract words, diction, and misuse of dialog tags, to name just a few.

If you’re a writer, you know that critiquing is one of the many important steps in the process. Having a fresh pair of eyes reading your work helps to pick up on plot holes and grammar mistakes. Critiquers can point out when something doesn’t make sense even if, in your mind, it does. It’s not that your critique partners are trying to be mean. No, they want to help you make your work the best it can be.

Plenty of articles tell you what to expect from an editor, and even what to look for when hiring one. What are their qualifications? Do they have references? What level of editing are they experienced in? And those are all good questions. But there’s a more personal side to working with an editor, and I hope my quick tips help you avoid disappointing experiences with professionally well qualified but personally inept editors.

One of the keys to holding a reader’s interest from beginning to end is mastering the skill of writing in the “active voice”. It isn’t that difficult, actually – you do it all the time – but it’s very easy to make the mistake of slipping into passive voice throughout your work. Passive voice, left unchecked, slaughters reader interest more efficiently than a glaring typo.

Recently, I’ve been trying to reconcile the different ways talk about revision and understand the differences. It seems to me that there are several distinct differences, each with its own strengths.

I realize that my timing isn’t perfect for this post. At least, not for all of those WU-ers who are participating in NaNo this year– which after all is largely an exercise in letting your creativity and your story flow by NOT thinking about editing. But it’s been several years since NaNoWriMo fit into my writing schedule, and since for me this month happens to be largely devoted to edits, I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been thinking about the process. If you’re in the process of an edit, maybe some of my strategies will work for you, too. And if you’re NaNO-ing, maybe it will come in handy once the month is over and you’ve (hopefully) got a solid part of your first draft down.

Ever wondered how other writers go about revising that draft? Not polishing or tweaking, but the big changes – those whopping great plot holes or characters that disappear half-way through. This article gives you several actionable tips on how to get this part of the process done.