The Hemmingway App is a free editor designed to make your prose clearer. As you can tell from the name, it does have a stylistic bias that prefers the sharp bold directness of Anglo-Saxon root words as opposed to the languid elegance of the Romantic root words. It uses formulas to determine how easy a passage is to read. Generally, the longer the sentence and the more polysyllabic words, the harder it is to read. Note that this a contextless survey, as many clear and grammatically correct devices of rhetoric get flagged. Hemmingway also searches for adverbs and passive verbs. While it doesn't have the bells and whistles of the paid editing software services of AutoCrit, Grammarly, or Pro Writing Aid, I have found Hemmingway useful in aiding my own writing. Just keep its bias in mind.
If you are going to drop the coin, I recommend Pro Writing Aid as the most powerful and cheapest of the three services. I do like AutoCrit, but its new pricing model is prohibitive for a system that only checks 1000 words at a time. I remain unimpressed with Grammarly as a service, as it trips up on certain simple and complex grammars that the other two services do not. The free plug-in, however, is useful as a slightly more powerful spell-check.But mindful of the popularity of such services, and the distressing tendency to convert them into pricey monthly services, I have continued to play with various editing tools out there. I have found three more free services I like.
The first, and most powerful, is Slick Write. Per the site, it is "a powerful, free application that makes it easy to check your writing for grammar errors, potential stylistic mistakes, and other features of interest." It comes the closest to the paid services in power and variety of features. In addition to the common spelling, adverb, and readability checks, it highlights "weasel words", excessive prepositional phrases, weak descriptions, and repetitive sentence starts. It also offers visual representations of sentence and paragraph flow as well as a determination of word variety in a particular passage. Some of these tools display the information with a clarity that beats the paid services, and when it comes to catching repeated sentence starts, Slick Write is the best tool I have encountered. I often run a story through Slick Write after completing an editing pass through Pro Writing Aid because of it.
EditMinion is the second service, offering thirteen tests from the practical (cliches, adverbs, passive voice), to the amusing (words originating from Shakespeare, Greek, or Latin), to the stylistic (weak words and a "said" test that seeks to replace said words like this list with the currently preferred simplicity of "he said".) Since Conan and Solomon Kane don't agree with some of these stylistic conventions, a writer can select as many or as few of these tests as possible. Perhaps the most unique is the Ambrose test, which compares your document's word usage to that set out in Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right, a useful corrective to many popular and incorrect turns of phrase.
Finally, Analyze My Writing offers six tests that give a detailed examination of the types of words used, passive voice, readability scores, and lexical density, examining many on a sentence by sentence basis. This one's more for the quants, but it can also help pinpoint where in your document the readability spikes and other issues.
Once again, these are machine editors, so a writer must keep in mind the various biases of each program--many of which include the annoying imposition of Latin grammar onto English. But, as with any editor, the choice of wordings ultimately is in the hands of the writer. Perhaps these tools might help you make a more informed choice.
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