As a graduate student, my supervisor sat me down one day and confessed to me that he used WordPerfect’s spell-checking window because it helped him find passive voice. He, like I, overused it.
From that moment, over the years, I’ve found many ways to automate the flagging of passive voice in my writing. I’ve written scripts to find it in Tinderbox and BBedit. I’ve written scripts to find words I don’t want or that are redundant. But, with those scripts, it means I have to read and remove the words by hand. Sometimes, this forces me to think to find a better way of saying something. Sometimes, they can deleted without much care.
WordWright.py is a collection of python scripts that automates these editing steps, the ones I use on a regular basis. It’s a variation on what I described a few years ago in Writer’s Diary #09: On Freewriting a First Draft.
Simply. I free-wrote > used ChatGPT to fix typos > used DeepL to make minor changes > used ProWritingAid to remove adverbs and redundant expressions and make minor stylistic fixes.
WordWright automates this process, except for the ProWritingAid step. With a keyboard shortcut, I can write a paragraph, then use wordwright to grammar check the text and remove stylistic bugaboos.
It’s not so different from what John McPhee describes in his New Yorker article on Structure, or in the book Draft No. 4. He uses tools to find duplicate expressions.
Writing is not one step; it is many steps. Hundreds. Wordwright helps make a few of those steps easier, but it won’t help you with figure out what you think, make your ideas your own, reworking them, or make them sing. That takes time, at a desk, doing the work.
WordWright doesn’t fundamentally change this process, I don’t find.
But, it is a little easier to get into a state of flow, because I don’t have to stop and go to different apps to fix typos, grammar, adverbs, or overused expressions.
In fact, it’s the case that prolific writers have wonderful editors—sometimes it’s a spouse, an assistant, and publisher.
What WordWright gives offers is not so much a first reader, but a first editor. Never the last, mind.
Using AI this way is, in my mind, not so different from a spell checker or WordPerfect’s passive voice checker. Just more powerful.