You’ve written your book, polished it to the best of your ability, and ran it through Word’s Editor or maybe you’ve used a tool like ProWritingAid or Grammarly. You’re finished, right? Editors cost money and margins are thin as it is. Is it even necessary to use a human editor with all of this technology at hand?
I’m here to give you three strong reasons why it’s vital you use a human editor for your work. Granted, I suspect if I sat down and made a list, I could come up with a lot more than three, but these are the top reasons that come to mind when I think about this topic.
Context and Meaning
Most programs, and I’ve found this to be increasingly true with Word’s Editor, which I use to spellcheck, only look at words in connection with the words around them, so maybe three or four words at a time. This was one of the biggest issues I found when I tried ProWritingAid when it first came out. Because the program cannot grasp the meaning of an entire sentence, let alone what you meant by it in conjunction with the entire paragraph or scene, the suggestions are often incorrect in terms of grammar and jarring at best in terms of context.
I use Word’s Editor to spellcheck, and I agree that we all need something to check spelling because typos happen. However, one of the biggest issues I’ve had with this feature is that it seems to be getting worse, not better. And it seems to be making incorrect suggestions more often.
“Helping” You Write Better Often Isn’t Writing Better
AI loves shorter sentences. I once had a writer’s group where the rule of thumb was no sentence over twenty words, which seems fair enough really. I mean there are Tolkein-esque long sentences, and then there are sentences so short that the entire story reads like a stacatto drum beat. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that good prose has a melody to it. It ebbs and flows with a variety of sentence structures.
AI doesn’t make music. It’s like a three-year old banging on a pan with a wooden spoon and calling it a symphony. All you hear is clamor, and there’s a good chance you’ll end up with a headache.
AI only knows what’s “good” writing because people have told it, or programmed it, to believe that is good, and I’m afraid those people are not authors, nor are they particularly skilled at making good value judgements about what’s good art. One would imagine that given the variety of works that have been used to train AI that somehow, it might figure out what is good writing. Alas, it has not. And it will tell you to break up a perfectly good sentence because it feels that a shorter sentence is “better”.
Going back to the first point, only you, the author, know what you’re trying to accomplish with your writing and if you’re using specific types of prose or prose styles to do it. A machine isn’t going to understand, nor care.
Machines Aren’t Passionate About Books
I think this point is the most important. Your editor (I hope) is passionate about books and about the genre in which you write. This means that a human editor will have a depth of knowledge, of past trends and what might be a current trend, within that genre and will be about to point out when you are either being too derivative or too outside the bounds of trope and genre.
An editor who loves the genre and books in general will be able to help guide the story, point out what works really well and what needs strengthened. They’ll get excited for your book and for you as you release it. And they’re going to want to make the book the best possible. They’ll collaborate with you; they won’t just be doing a job they were programmed to do.
I’d be honored if you would check out my pricing and editing services. I’d love to help you make your book the best it can be.