SmartEdit for Word

Get a Head Start Editing Your Draft Novel

$67

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v4.041 for PC Download Trial

Platforms: Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 365 (Windows Client) - 32 and 64 bit in all cases and Windows 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP (SP3)

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SmartEdit for Word, Word Processing Software Screenshot

SmartEdit for Word, Business & Finance Software Screenshot

Word Processing Software, SmartEdit for Word Screenshot

Business & Finance Software, SmartEdit for Word Screenshot

Business & Finance Software, Word Processing Software Screenshot

SmartEdit for Word, Business & Finance Software, Word Processing Software Screenshot

So you’ve finally finished the first draft of your novel! Now what? Send it off to agents and publishing houses? Not so fast – now comes the hard part, editing! But before you inflict your first draft on a real live editor, you should run it through today’s discount software promotion, SmartEdit for Word!

SmartEdit for Word is a first-pass editing tool and Microsoft Word plug-in designed to aid creative writers and novelists. With SmartEdit for Word, you’ll be able to get a head start on editing, and deliver a much well-thought out, put-together draft for your real editor.

So what does SmartEdit for Word do? It’s simple – the program runs 20 checks on your work and automatically detects areas that may need improvement. Stuff like repetitious phrases and words, overuse of adverbs, frequently mis-used or misspelled words, and sentence structure. You’re then free to make the suggested changes, or wait for your human editor to yell at you for leaving them in!

Review Written by Derek Lee

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“The freeware version of SmartEdit was a useful editing tool; the pro version is even better, and I think every serious writer should take it for a test drive. You simply can't compile this much information on your own without a great deal of tedious searching and list-making. Even with close attention you will probably miss half of the data SmartEdit can compile for you with a single click... The nice thing about this program is that it's a good teaching resource for new writers who want to learn what to look for as well as what to think about when they are writing in order to get their manuscripts up to professional level.”- Lynn Viehlhttp://pbackwriter.blogspot.ie/2013/01/smart-edit-goes-pro.html
“I have never been impressed with the idea of using a program to edit your book for you. Editing involves too much creativity to be left up to the mechanical algorithms of a computer program. But Smart-Edit is different. It doesn't edit your work, but what it does do is take the grunt out of the grunt work of copyediting by helping you track down overused and misused words and phrases.”- K.M. Weilandhttp://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2013/06/smart-edit-software-video-tutorial.html
“There is a huge number of applications for writers, and I've tried quite a few over the years. Some are difficult to use, some get in the way of the creative process, and some just don't work the way I want to. SmartEdit is firmly in the category "Very helpful, easy to use programs"... Overall, SmartEdit has made a huge difference to my manuscript … and I suspect it's picked things up that a human editor wouldn't. There is still a place for human editing … getting tenses, points of view and grammar right. But, I shall be using SmartEdit on every piece I write in the future.”- West Oxfordshire Writers' Grouphttp://www.wow-group.org.uk/smartedit-from-bad-wolf-software/
“With this self-editing program, my writing is tighter. I can find those overused words. It picks out the 'ly' words that sneak in far too often... SmartEdit 3.0 is more robust than the original and easier to use than ever.”- Cat Johnsonhttp://catjohnson.net/2012/12/27/product-review-smartedit/
“SmartEdit leaves all of the true editing work for you. The detailed lists are generated, but no suggestions are given. You won't see a pop-up list of options along with scan results. You have to think about and decide what to do with the results. And that's the smart way to do it, if you want to become a better writer.”- Darla McDavidhttp://www.darlawrites.com/smart-edit-review-writers/
“Amazed by the value of this program, I decided to sweep it by the non-Marla mystery I've been working on. Oh, my. Did I realize I'd used the phrase "my cell phone" 23 times in this 67,000 word manuscript? Yes, the program checks for repeated phrases along with repeated words.”- Nancy J. Cohenhttp://nancyjcohen.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/self-editing-software/
“[SmartEdit] is also considerably more intuitive than most other editing tools on the market, with a strong focus on pointing out unintentional cases of repetition—frequent sentence-starting phrases, for example—or illuminating inconsistencies in punctuation.”- Craig Manning (Independent Publisher)http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1667
“I love SmartEdit. It's the perfect program to help your polish your manuscript. It will definitely be part of my editing process.”- Stina Lindenblatt

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Michael R. This is useful for englsh-only texts, isn't it?

Oct 31 2014 at 1:39am Copy Link

Darren Yes, it's English only.

Because it breaks down sentences, phrases and words, it's tied very closely to the language. This means handling other languages is not as simple as renaming menus, and as a result is not something we're planning at the moment.

Bad Wolf Software - Oct 31 2014 at 1:43am Copy Link

peter schleifer Some remarks.

SmartEdit (not for MS Word) had been on offer some time ago; there also was a cut-down free edition available, which does not seem to be available anymore.

I quickly disenchated from my trial; in fact so fast that I even had time to decide I finally did not want to buy even at the very low price for the full version, and afterwards, I never used the free version either - but this is all me, you mileage might grossly vary.

It's understood SmartEdit does not offer spelling correction, so you need some dedicated tool for that, or you need that functionality to be integrated within your main program; fortunately this is the case with MS Word.

At the time, the developer spoke of his intention to cut his program into two: One for helping editing fiction and such, and one for textbooks and such; this would have been devoid of sense. So he obviously cut his program into the stand-alone tool, and a MS Word add-in, which obviously DOES make a lot of sense, not only commercially, but also for the user, three quarter or more of prospects certainly preferring the MS Word add-in now.

From the stand-alone version, though, you can deduct that "major" (which means: paid) updates are quite frequent, so holding your version up-to-date could become quite onerous, and here it becomes evident that developer's and users' interests might not be entirely consistent in the long run.

Anyway, most/lots of SmartEdit's functionality (both stand-alone and MS Word add-in) is about list making, which from a coding point of view is rather easy, but which for editing is not as wonderfully helpful as you might think beforehand; on the other hand, integrating more interactivity would mean lots more of coding effort, so...

From two very recent (Sept and Oct, 2014) discussions over at donationcodercom (just search their forum for "smartedit") re SmartEdit I deduct that even now, some major = paid updates far from 1.0, the standalone version (and by extension, the MS Word spin-off) does not offer any functionality yet that will check repeated use of meaningful words (i.e. instead of using either a synonym now or rephrase the wording altogether) within a sentence or two or three consecutive sentences, i.e. some sort of "progressive vicinity search" for words (let alone radicals: such a function would signal, e.g. different forms of the same verb following each other, as presumably unwanted) from word 1 of a text down to the last word of its very last sentence, for each of them checking any other word / phrase in the current sentence and in the next two sentences for possible unwanted repetition - hint: the coding would not be too difficult here either, even though such functionality would indeed comprise some exception tables, and even individual ones for this subject range or that one (in medical texts, for example, it's evident that the very same Latin expressions would be repeated over and over again, without such a tool harassing you with "Do you really want to use this term again here?" dialogs).

Also, it's clear as day that such functionality would be so much more handy in an add-in tool like the one on offer here, than in a stand-alone tool, since only the add-in version (if correctly programmed that is) would enable this check functionality in real-time, i.e. within Word when you type the original text, and yes, mid-term, there should be some integrated learning functionality grasping and correctly processing your reactions to these "Do you really" pop-ups for further interaction with the user; for example, there could be an "intermediate" reaction from the program, which for some things would not pop the dialog up anymore, but would indicate some POSSIBLY unwanted repetition by highlighting the previous occurence of some word or phrase with some background color for some seconds or as long as your continuation of typing exceeds the sentence in curse.

Thus - but that's just me - it seems to me that both/all versions of SmartEdit, of all possible, imaginable functions out there, lack the most important, needed and helpful one of them all, this word / phrase repetition check (the overall word frequency list (where the frequency of 1 is left out btw, or has it been integrated in the meanwhile?) very probably being a useless gimmick for most users (or then, tell me why we would need it in real life, except perhaps for 1 user in 100?).

As it stands, I thus do not see much interest for me in this program; for MS Word users, this would be quite different indeed once SmartEdit got the above-described, so much needed functionality. Btw, and as for text expanding, such functionality should be integrated not within an MS Word add-in, but within some dedicated tool, running in the background of ANY word processor and other text program (outliners, screenplay software, and so on), just as any text expanders does; technically, it would be quite easy for any such expansion / macro tool running in the background anyway to be spiced up this way: I just would need its own, dedicated memory for the very last 3 sentences, and it would do its repetition checked within that memorized text; accordingly, whenever you edit some other, non-current-writing text, the tool automatically would fetch the sentence you edit, plus two sentences before and after, and work on that text compound.

In a word, it's clear as day that "run-time" text edit (i.e. in the curse of actual writing writing) is even more useful than after-the-spot editing (especially because the same corrections there are much less time-demanding than the same corrections here, afterwards, and also bec/of a learning tool not even presenting you repetitions and such anymore as possible candidates for correction once it will have identified them as presumably not unwanted), so the idea to integrate SmartEdit into MS Word is to be followed... but then, please offer more really helpful functionality! Wherever really needed functionality is left out, much less needed functionality becomes auxiliary and sometimes to the brink of irrelevant.

Oct 31 2014 at 5:50am Copy Link

Darren Just to respond to a couple of issues you've raised Peter. Firstly, We've never yet charged for an upgrade to any version of SmartEdit. Will we in the future? Possibly. If version 5 implements many new features, then sure. But so far, no one has had to pay for an upgrade to the standalone version of SmartEdit. And the Word plug is less than two months old, so there haven't been any major upgrades there in that time.

The limited, free version is still available for anyone interested, though its functionality is about one tenth of the commercial versions: http://www.smart-edit.com/help.html

SmartEdit is a first-pass editing tool. As in, you've completed your 80,000 word novel, and now you're starting the editing process. Some writers edit as they type, in which case SmartEdit would be of less benefit. Other writers write like Stephen King and edit after a first pass - these writers would benefit more from SmartEdit. Every writer writes differently.

Bad Wolf Software - Oct 31 2014 at 9:09am Copy Link

Gde Swart Very nice. I tend to write in a 'stream of consciousness' manner. Just get started and edit later (great way to get past writers block). Since most of the documents I work on originate in Word, I expect this plugin will prove very helpful.
The trial version gave me better results than I had expected. The expanded feature set and the 3-PC license made this purchase an easy decision.
Thanks Bad Wolf Software and BDJ.

Nov 3 2014 at 2:17pm Copy Link