LEE HALLISON

Cool Tools for Self-Editing

I spend a lot of time tweaking words in my stories – perhaps because in my heart I am a poet. I probably need to spend more time tweaking plot and character development! Be that as it may, here are three fun tools I like to use:

Word Frequency Tool

This tool will give you either a cloud of your most used words or a graph. Then you can visually see if you’ve overused any one particular strong word (especially problematical in very short stories) or if you have too many prepositions or passive language. I like to see many 1-count words, and I find it helpful to skim down and see my words as a list by frequency, rather than in sentences. (Free)

Wordle

This tool is similar – paste in your text and you get a cloud of your words – but this generates ART. Yes, a pretty poster image of your story’s words – hit randomize a few times to see the various styles. I thought one story I pasted in generated a fabulous image of the story’s themes and feel.

You can even link to your website (or a single post) and perhaps get a sense of your personal theme, or the tone of your site. (Free)

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

I love this interactive thesaurus. You get a branching map of related words that you can expand by following the branches. You can also check the specific definition of each related word. (Free trial, then $20 per year)

Reviewing Conundrums

One of my goals this year was to begin reviewing published books by the writers in my writing group, and writer friends, and writers I know. I have reviewed books I own on LibraryThing, where I sometimes get free books and sometimes get ARCs. The motivation to review (honestly) is to get more freebies! And, it does help organize my books and my thoughts about them.

But reviewing on Amazon and Smashwords and commenting on Weightless books can pose a bit of a conundrum.

Sometimes it is obvious that a reviewer is just putting up a positive review to help their buddy – they don’t have any other reviews. So if I’m going to review, I’d like to be a real reviewer, with helpful reviews of many books. I began by putting some reviews up that I’d done on LibraryThing, classics and books by writers I don’t know.

But.

I came to a book I’d really not enjoyed and had put up a strong negative review on LibraryThing. Many of the other readers had also disliked the book. On Amazon, there are only positive reviews – 4 or 5 (perhaps friends?). My ethical conundrum – do I put up the negative review and one star or do I just skip reviewing that book? I feel uncomfortable because whoever this writer is, how helpful is the negative review? Clearly with so few reviews, this book is unlikely to be a big seller, so it seems that low stars would only be personally hurtful to someone I’ve never met or interacted with. Feels like anonymous aggression, I guess.

Currently my thoughts are that I would only post a review for books that I thought were 4 or 5 star, and simply not post for ones I thought were poorly written. If I dislike the book for content, perhaps, where I can speak well of the writing or some aspect, so that other readers might truly enjoy the book (ie it is just a personal taste issue) then perhaps I would post a lower star review.

I guess my goal is to give reviews that other people would believe. If all of one’s reviews are positive, do readers discount your opinion of a particular book? Would my reviews still be of value to my writer colleagues and friends?