Fantasy Writing Week...
I’ve started my second week of furlough, and I’m using the time to attend ProWritingAid’s Fantasy Writing Week Workshops. The sessions are free, and while they have been a mixed bag, the solid sessions were very informative/helpful. Even some of the weaker ones gave me information about resources I wasn’t familiar with. For example, Inkarnate’s map-making software looks hella cool and like it doesn’t have the steep learning curve of something like Campaign Cartographer.
ProWritingAid runs conferences like this one to get more eyes in front of their product and to upsell free users to a paid Premium tier. The AI-driven software seemed like a robust grammar checker with some style stuff built in, so I didn’t really expect their presentation to make me consider buying the package. However, I have to admit, I was impressed by the AI and the more style-driven rules/goals they provide. Along with the ability to turn them on/off and make customizations. You can also generate reports of the analyses the program does. That appeals to my geeky little data-nerd heart.
They have a variety of document types from academic non-fiction to romance, and AI “reads” each differently and applies different parameters to them. In the fiction area, you can even do stylistic analyses where you can ask the program to compare your writing to a list of authors they have preloaded into the program. Again, my data-nerd heart was made happy by this.
I ran some of my fiction and academic papers through it to give the free version (i.e., fewer features) a test drive, and while some of the things it flagged were stylistic choices I’d made, it did pick up wrong (but correctly spelled words), areas where I could say things more vividly/concisely, and a few things suggestions in phrasing that I’d never thought of but agreed with.
I’m not sure it’s something I need to have in my life, especially in tough economic times, but since I’m making the “why you should get it/not get it” lists, I suppose I’m at least considering it.
ProWritingAid runs conferences like this one to get more eyes in front of their product and to upsell free users to a paid Premium tier. The AI-driven software seemed like a robust grammar checker with some style stuff built in, so I didn’t really expect their presentation to make me consider buying the package. However, I have to admit, I was impressed by the AI and the more style-driven rules/goals they provide. Along with the ability to turn them on/off and make customizations. You can also generate reports of the analyses the program does. That appeals to my geeky little data-nerd heart.
They have a variety of document types from academic non-fiction to romance, and AI “reads” each differently and applies different parameters to them. In the fiction area, you can even do stylistic analyses where you can ask the program to compare your writing to a list of authors they have preloaded into the program. Again, my data-nerd heart was made happy by this.
I ran some of my fiction and academic papers through it to give the free version (i.e., fewer features) a test drive, and while some of the things it flagged were stylistic choices I’d made, it did pick up wrong (but correctly spelled words), areas where I could say things more vividly/concisely, and a few things suggestions in phrasing that I’d never thought of but agreed with.
I’m not sure it’s something I need to have in my life, especially in tough economic times, but since I’m making the “why you should get it/not get it” lists, I suppose I’m at least considering it.