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People often wax poetic about the smell of books—the scent of old ink and paper is so eternally popular and beloved that you can even get it in perfume form. But Adam Levin’s upcoming novel Bubblegum is trying something a little different—the dust jacket of this book smells like bubblegum. This, of course, raises the question: what if all books were scented to reflect their contents? Kind of like smell-o-vision, but for reading. This could be the next big trend in literature, so here are some classics reimagined with smells.

Moby-Dick

Smells like the sea, but a very specific, terrible sea scent: low tide. A cross between a dying animal left out in the sun, plus salt, plus farts. The stench of man’s hubris and man’s homoeroticism (plus farts). Apparently it’s a great read if you can get past the smell, but many people can’t.

Little Women

Only the warmest and most nostalgic smells: gingerbread, pine trees, fresh snow. The scent of a warm fireplace and drying flowers and wind floating through an open window. Smells that make you feel emo about your picturesque childhood in 1800s Massachusetts with your three talented sisters and⁠—oh that wasn’t actually your childhood? Bummer for you.

Mrs. Dalloway

Right away, you catch the scent of flowers but it’s suddenly obscured by… gasoline? Or gunpowder? Or maybe an obscure smell from your youth that you barely recognize but brings strong emotions? The smell is hard to put your finger on because it keeps changing, and every time you think you’ve got it, it becomes something else.

1984

Smells like rats!

The Picture of Dorian Gray

This book is wearing a whole bottle of perfume, so much that it makes your eyes water (but it still smells kind of good). However, underneath all the perfume you can make out the smell of decay, something sweet and gross. Carry this book with you for a day and you’ll be smelling like expensive perfume (and a constant reminder of your own mortality) for a week.

Wuthering Heights

Ah, the crisp scent of the moors. Smells like dirt and heather and the air before snowfall. The kind of smells that really get you amped, like just completely full of unstoppable chaotic energy, energy that most people will rightly fear. Some people love this smell, but others think it’s confusing and a little much. Both are valid.

Les Misérables

Smells like bread you can never have, which is to say it smells like particularly delicious bread. Bread you’d be tempted to ruin your life over. Also, a hearty dose of the mid-1800s French sewer system. You might wish there was a little less of the French sewer system, but Victor Hugo would strongly disagree. In fact, he’d probably argue there could be a little more sewer. 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

A delicious home-cooked meal. Roasted spring lamb, mint jelly, potatoes, peas, and salad fresh from the garden. And for dessert? Blackberries sprinkled with sugar. What could be more pleasant than that? Actually, I’m feeling a bit odd now. Everything is going dark. I’m starting to lose consciousness, I’m⁠—.

The post What Should Classic Books Smell Like? appeared first on Electric Literature.

The opening of Tiffany Tsao’s The Majesties does not let you get away with murder: “When your sister murders three hundred people, you can’t help but wonder why – especially if you were one of the intended victims.” Dying in a hospital bed, Gwendolyn Sulinado recounts how her sister Estella enters the hotel kitchen in her gorgeous cheongsam to poison their whole family. One can imagine mystery and a femme fatale with a chignon, but the novel, despite being a page-turner and longlisted for the Australian Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction, transcends the boundaries of genre (“crime”/ “thriller”) or category (“Asian family drama”).

First published in Australia as Under Your Wings, The Majesties is a journey to unearth past events that led to Estrella’s monstrous act, a haunted world filled with secrets, deceits, destruction, and family bonds thicker than blood, prompting us to question: Who are the real monsters? As we track the sisters’ footprints from California to Melbourne, we uncover more layers, including a tale of two sisters and gender expectations in a morbid family web as well as the complex position of the Chinese elites within Indonesia’s violent history.

Born in San Diego and raised in Jakarta and Singapore, Sydney-based writer and literary translator Tiffany Tsao brings reflections on her cosmopolitan background and Indonesian heritage into the dark, rich story of the Sulinado family. The theme of in-between-ness was explored in her previous The Oddfits novels, a fantasy series set in Singapore about a boy who does not fit in. In the international sphere of global publishing and literary translation, Tsao is known as a staunch supporter of underrepresented voices in literature. When I first met her in Sydney in 2016, she was the Indonesia-Editor-at-Large at Asymptote, actively seeking and promoting writers from Indonesia, a country that is relatively marginal at the global literary stage and a home she has been increasingly attached to. Since then she has been involved in various translation and curatorial projects, including A World with a Thousand Doors, an Asymptote Translation Tuesday series showcasing Indonesian writing, and Intersastra Unrepressed series, which presents translations of works that are often sidelined or suppressed. Her translation of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry collection, Sergius Seeks Bacchus was the winner of the English PEN Presents and English PEN Translates awards.

Prior to the publication of The Majesties in the U.S., we conversed about the themes of family secrets, monstrosity, and history, why she chose to portray the wealthy Chinese Indonesian family as villains instead of victims of anti-Chinese prejudice, the problems of the Anglophone literary standards and what we can do to disrupt power structures.

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Intan Paramaditha: The Majesties is a gothic family drama, a thrilling page turner, and a cultural and political critique. Tell me a little bit where the idea came from. 

Tiffany Tsao: Wow, where do I start? My first book, The Oddfits, was set in Singapore, where I spent a lot of my childhood. But for my second novel, I wanted to draw on the Chinese Indonesian side of my identity, which I really only began to recognize and connect with quite late in life, in my early twenties.

Interestingly enough, in the very initial stages of writing, I intended to use wealthy Chinese Indonesian society simply as a backdrop. My desire was to focus mainly on the issue of familial secrecy—whether keeping unpleasant facts hidden might in fact be kinder than exposing everything and everyone for what they really are. But as I began fleshing out the novel’s thematic concerns and narrative structure, I rapidly realized that it was impossible to ignore the social and political issues influencing the characters I wanted to write. After all, the domestic sphere is an extension of the political and social and economic realm—what happens outside the home directly affects what happens inside it.

So while the novel is certainly about a family’s dark secrets, it is also about how this particular family’s dark deeds are partly an outgrowth of the darkness that surrounds them—corruption, anti-Chinese prejudice, and conditions that have given rise to an immense divide between society’s richest and the poorest. 

The Indonesian historian Ong Hok Ham once observed that the anti-Chinese policies of the Dutch colonizers and New Order government were responsible for molding the ethnic Chinese into “economic animals.” To draw a parallel example from fiction, Frankenstein’s monster becomes monstrous because of the monstrous conditions he is subjected to. Similarly, the rich characters of The Majesties end up conforming to the most monstrous stereotypes of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia—insular, money-minded, suspicious of pribumi (“native”) Indonesians—partly because of the measures they take to ensure their wellbeing in the face of discrimination. 

IP: Some of the most important discourse about contemporary Indonesian history is about the traumatic racial violence against the ethnic Chinese minority in May 1998. Since the ‘98 political reform, Indonesian artists and activists have tried to address this history of violence through books, films, or performing arts. How do you see your work in dialogue with this discourse?

TT: I’m glad you asked this question because while writing the novel I found myself asking: To what extent is it even possible for a work about anti-Chinese hostility in Indonesia not to focus on the events of May 1998? After all, there are extremely good reasons why May 1998 has been so critical to discussions of prejudice against the Chinese: the targeted attacks on the ethnic Chinese were utterly horrific, and it has taken years and years of hard work from activists, artists, and courageous survivors to get any acknowledgement from the government and general public that these attacks were in fact organized—and that the military itself was involved.

Rather than being about ethnic Chinese suffering, The Majesties is about what it takes to avoid such suffering.

Nevertheless, I personally didn’t feel comfortable with making May 1998 the focal point of this work. I was one of the fortunate and moneyed individuals who boarded a plane and left the country on the morning the violence broke out. My mother, siblings, and I watched the events reported live on CNN and BBC from Singapore, much like the Sulinado and Angsono families do in the novel. (Although my father remained in Jakarta, as did my paternal grandparents who lived near Glodok, where most of the violence occurred.) I feel an immense guilt about this—about having been able to leave when so many people simply couldn’t. How could I write in any meaningful way about May 1998 when my privileged circumstances enabled me to avoid it all together? 

And so rather than being about ethnic Chinese suffering, The Majesties is about what it takes to avoid such suffering. Or to put it another way, instead of foregrounding Chinese Indonesian characters who are the victims of anti-Chinese prejudice, the novel is about a Chinese Indonesian family that accrues wealth and takes drastic measures so they do not have to be victims—with the result that they turn villain instead. So even as the novel is a critique of the dysfunction that accompanies wealth, it is by extent a critique of the racism that encourages individuals to ruthlessly accumulate wealth in order to ensure safety for themselves and their own.

IP: Since the May ‘98 riots, there has been a tendency to romanticize the Chinese heritage in Indonesian popular culture, which ironically co-exists with ongoing prejudice and discrimination. How does your writing about a wealthy Chinese Indonesian family respond to this? 

TT: I do understand the logic behind this romanticization: what more obvious way to counter negative stereotypes and encourage the inclusion of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesian society than to affirm Chinese culture as worth celebrating? And I think it’s easy for both Chinese and non-Chinese people pushing for more inclusivity for Chinese Indonesians to fall into this trap. But in my opinion, romanticization only encourages a very superficial acceptance of Chinese culture—or what people end up thinking constitutes “Chinese culture.” Furthermore, I worry it bolsters perceptions of the Chinese population as a monolithic mass whose members all operate in standard and static “Chinese” ways. 

The Sulinado family in the novel, as well as the Angsono family, offer examples of how it’s possible to identify and be identified as ethnic Chinese, yet practically speaking not be very “Chinese” at all. To quote an early chapter, the affinity they feel for their “ancestral land” is marked by “both solidarity and distance,” and at one point the narrator makes a snide remark about how the notion that the family is 100% pure ethnic Chinese is simply delusional—“as if no drop of native pribumi blood coursed through our own veins.” The family is also fairly Westernized in many respects: the goods they consume as members of high society include luxury goods from Paris, college degrees from Australia, holiday homes in California, aristocrat husbands from Europe, and the globalized charismatic Christian subculture that originated in the US.

IP: The Australian title of The Majesties is Under Your Wings, which is a biblical allusion. To what extent does the novel respond to the concepts and rhetoric of Christianity?

TT: To quite a large extent. The novel’s Australian title comes from the novel’s epigraph, which is a passage from Psalm 17, where the poet pleads to God, “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.” I am by nature a very frank person, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see that there is a mercy and kindness in not subjecting people to certain truths, to keeping them in the shadows, so to speak. (I suppose there’s a similar message in the Lulu Wang film The Farewell.) I think you find traces of this here and there in the Bible: divine mercy depicted as refuge from the sun alongside the more common associations of divinity with sunlight, with revelation and the exposure of truth. If you think about it, Jesus dying in the place of sinful humankind is a merciful deception—a switcheroo on a cosmic scale. 

I want us all to shed our preconceived notions of what books from country X or Y should look like.

Apart from drawing on my own personal theological ponderings to write The Majesties, I desired no less for the novel to offer insight into the sociocultural phenomenon of Christianity within the Chinese Indonesian community. Due to various historical reasons (including the Suharto regime’s discouragement of “Chinese” cultural, and by extension, religious practices), a significant percentage of Chinese Indonesians now identify as Christian. And particular strains of charismatic Christianity (think megachurches, televangelists, and prosperity theology) have become immensely popular. Many members of my own family became “born-again” Christians following the events of 1998—like many of the characters in the novel.

Even as The Majesties is deeply skeptical of the mass religious revival and conversion that swept through the Chinese Indonesian community in the late 1990s and 2000s, I didn’t mean it to be wholly condemnatory either. Characters like Nikki, even Leonard, are genuinely, desperately searching for something genuinely good and true to dedicate themselves to in the midst of the superficiality and decadence of the society into which they’ve been born.

IP: The Majesties also calls into question the expectations and stereotypes of Asians in the Western world. How was this critique shaped by your own cosmopolitan background as someone born and educated in the U.S. and currently living in Australia? What kind of intervention do you wish to make in conversations around Chinese cosmopolitanism and diaspora?

TT: My experiences moving around have definitely prompted me to think about the differences between being Asian in a Western context and being Asian in Asia. More specifically, I’ve had cause to think a lot about the different expectations and subcultures surrounding Chineseness in a Western context, versus in Singapore, versus in Indonesia.

I was born in the U.S., so I have a U.S. passport, which technically made me Chinese American, even though my family moved back to Southeast Asia when I was 3. In fact, my mother would often tell friends that I was ABC—“American-Born Chinese”—and so until my early teens, I assumed that I was Chinese American. But then I began reading books by Chinese American authors like Lawrence Yep and Amy Tan, and interacting with actual Chinese Americans, and I realized there was a whole sub-culture associated with Chinese Americannness that actually didn’t apply to my own experiences: certain tropes, jokes, cultural signifiers. Moving to the US for college cemented it: I was Chinese American on paper and my accent was more or less American-sounding (thanks to my attending international schools), but that was about it. 

And it’s not just about being ethnic Chinese in a Western context versus in an Asian context either. In Singapore, if you’re Chinese, you’re in the majority, you’re in power, which isn’t the case in Indonesia. And in Singapore, whether you’re Chinese Singaporean or recently emigrated from mainland China matters too—there’s discrimination against the latter. And in Indonesia, whether your family is peranakan or totok—less or more culturally Chinese—can play a factor as well. And of course, class matters a lot, needless to say. Growing up in a wealthy family meant that I was insulated from racism’s effects—money buys you sanctuary from a lot of bad things.

I’m not sure I expect The Majesties to make any groundbreaking interventions, but I hope it continues to nudge conversations in the direction of more sensitivity to context. Asian American notions of what is “Asian” and Chinese American notions of what is “Chinese” aren’t necessarily universal.

IP: As a writer and translator, you are deeply engaged in cultural activism. You have written articles on the problems of Anglophone standards in literature and national/ global literary gatekeeping that promote certain works while rendering others invisible. Why do these issues matter to you? What changes do you wish to see?

TT: I think these issues matter to me because I am so disillusioned now. Five years ago, back when I didn’t know what I know now about the publishing industry, when I had barely dipped a toe into the lake that is literary translation, I naively believed in the soundness of these standards. I believed that when books in different languages did get translated, did get glowing reviews, did get stocked in major bookstores, it meant that those books were “the best” in some way. 

But as I gained more experience in the literary translation industry, and saw more of what was happening on the Indonesian literary translation scene, I realized that which works were considered “appealing” enough to present to publishers for their consideration, or to eventually publish and support publicity-wise, was contingent not only on whether a work was sufficiently “Indonesian” enough in content, but whether it conformed to certain “literary” aesthetic standards that could actually be quite culturally subjective. For example, a poem that is praised for being moving and tender might be dismissed as “cheesy” or “melodramatic.” Or a story that isn’t set in Indonesia or overtly (exotically) “Indonesian” in content might receive a lot less interest from publishers. 

In short, I see now just how broken The System is—that no, the cream won’t always rise to the top because the Anglophone world has very specific ideas about what kind of foreign cream it likes to consume. Therefore, more than ever before, I think it’s important to challenge The System’s standards. To at least get people to realize that what should be the most open-minded branch of the publishing industry—literature in translation—can actually be very close-minded as well.

What changes do I wish to see? I want us all to shed our preconceived notions of what books from country X or Y should look like. I want publishers to challenge their own reading tastes and that of their readers. I want Anglophone publishers’ lists to be overwhelmingly international, so that works in translation won’t have to compete with each other for a meager few slots. I also want a griffin. But griffins aren’t real, so grant me my other wishes, please!

IP: As a former Indonesia-at-large editor for Asymptote, you have played an important role in introducing Indonesian literature to the wider public. For instance, with Norman Erikson Pasaribu, you co-curated the Translation Tuesday series showcasing Indonesian writing, and most of the authors featured were women. Curating, editing, and programming are, of course, exercises of power. How do we develop curatorial strategies that challenge power structures?

TT: Phew. Big question. I think a good general “rule of thumb” might be to aim for maximum redistribution of power. So, perhaps, we should try, perpetually, to think beyond obvious or easy choices when it comes to choosing which authors to select for publications or awards, and which people we ask to act as curators and judges.

Also, maybe the fame that certain writers possess could be deployed to make space for still more writers—I know this was partly the rationale behind Norman’s and my decision to kick off the Translation Tuesday series with two female authors who are very well-known in Indonesia. We hoped that harnessing their “star power” would heighten visibility for the series as a whole, so that the following writers would benefit from a bigger readership. (If you want to read the series, you can start here and work your way backward via the links.) I do think that once you become more well-known as an author, you should think about how you might use the attention to shed more light on authors who deserve more recognition.

IP: It is exciting to see The Majesties travel the world and the novel is currently being translated into Indonesian. Is it even important for international readers to know Indonesian literature? Which literary works and initiatives should be heard? 

TT: You have no idea how happy I am that Norman is translating The Majesties into Indonesian. It’s been an absolute pleasure and honor to translate Norman’s work, and I’m pleased and honored that he is translating mine.

And that first question—what a question! Of course it’s important for international audiences to know Indonesian literature! And that second question—also, what a question! Especially since we’ve just spoken about subjective standards and gatekeeping. To avoid this clever trap you’ve laid for me, I’m going to follow the example you’ve set with your own stellar list for Lit Hub and observe first that this tiny list reflects my own biases and politics, not to mention ignorance. 

A few months ago, I read Ruhaeni Intan’s novella Arapaima and it made me super excited. Its depiction of life as a young working-class woman is powerfully bleak and dark, and I’m looking forward to reading more from her. I hope to see her work translated some day. I’d also like to see the novel Api Awan Asap by the late Benuaq Dayak writer Korrie Layun Rampan in English as well. When it comes to ethnic minority and First-Nations literary representation within Indonesia, Korrie Layun Rampan was a pioneer.

In terms of what is available in English: one of my favorite “classic” works is Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk by Ahmad Tohari, which is set in a Javanese village before and during the anti-Communist purges of 1965. It’s about a woman who is, essentially, destroyed by the patriarchy. It’s been published in English as The Dancer. People know about Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, but my favorite work of his is Bukan Pasar Malam (It’s Not An All Night Fair). And with all my heart, Intan, let me recommend your spine-tingling feminist short-story collection Apple and Knife, as well as your upcoming novel The Wandering, which is groundbreaking and rich and sly. 

Some Indonesian authors write in English or self-translate their works. Poetry by Madina Malahayati Chumaera and Khairani Barokka spring to mind, as well as Eliza Vitri Handayani’s novel, From Now On Everything Will be Different. I read Theodora Sarah Abigail’s essay collection In the Hands of a Mischievous God last year, and it was raw and blue and made me very melancholy for a while.

It’s my happy duty to endorse the authors I translate: Dee Lestari’s Paper Boats and Laksmi Pamuntjak’s The Birdwoman’s Palate were the first two books I translated, and I enjoyed the process of rendering them into English. I solemnly swear that Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s heartbreaking and heartening poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus will change your life. Also, stay tuned for my translations-in-progress, which are still in search of a publisher: Norman’s queer and fantastic Happy Stories, Mostly (that’s the working title); Budi Darma’s wickedly humorous and strange collection, The People of Bloomington; and Dee Lestari’s awesome fantasy novel about scent, ambition, and a power-hungry plant, Aroma Karsa. 

Regarding initiatives: I encourage everyone to support the Indonesian arts organization, InterSastra. I’m the translation editor for their most recent literature series, Unrepressed. The series’ purpose is to highlight literary works that tackle controversial topics, and also to provide publishing and training opportunities for emerging writers and translators. Another very cool recent initiative, spearheaded by Khairani Barokka for Modern Poetry in Translation, is this digital pamphlet My Body Is Stone, My House Is the Moon. It was produced in conjunction with Lakoat.Kujawas—a social enterprise and community organization based in Mollo, Timor and founded by the Indonesian writer Dicky Senda. I’d also love for Dalang Publishing to receive more recognition than it has so far. They’re a small California-based press dedicated to publishing Indonesian writers in English. 

The post Who Are the Real Villains in “The Majesties”? appeared first on Electric Literature.

Have you ever wanted a magical editing wand?

Just imagine: A flick of the wrist would be all that stood between you and the end of editing your writing. No frustration. Minimal time investment. An amazing manuscript or blog post.

Alas, no such magic wand exists.

But we do have grammar checker tools, which are the next-best things.

Just remember that grammar checkers are designed to make editing easier, not to eliminate the work completely.

Putting the best grammar checker tools to the test

During self-edits on my latest manuscript, I experimented with six editing tools, both free and paid, to determine which could be most beneficial to The Write Life’s audience. Besides being an author, I’m an editor, so I also weighed each tool against what I’d look for when editing.

Since editing has a broad definition — basically anything that improves your writing — it’s not surprising that the tools I tried had different functions, from checking grammar and style, to eliminating unnecessary words, to identifying areas for improvement.

What you want in a grammar checker or editing tool will influence which one(s) you choose. No one tool can do it all — nor can one of these tools wave away the work and critical thinking necessary for a well-edited blog post, magazine article or book.

A grammar checker doesn’t replace a human editor. Because language rules and elements of a good story can be so flexible, human eyes will always be superior to the rigidity of automatic tools.

Here are six of the best grammar checker tools.

1. ProWritingAid

What It Does:  ProWritingAid is a web editor and plugin that will clean up your writing by detecting grammar and spelling mistakes, plagiarism and contextual errors. It also analyzes your writing and produces reports on writing style, sentence length, grammar, and repeated words and phrases.

Price: There’s a limited free version. If you upgrade to the premium membership, you can edit in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, access a desktop app and Chrome add-ins, and — best of all — lose the word-count cap.

A year’s membership is $70. Or get two years for $100, three years for $140, or go the whole hog and buy a lifetime membership for $240.

Who It’s For: Anyone, including students, authors, freelancers or ESL writers.

How It Works: Click on “Start Editing Now,” create a free account, then paste in your text.

The Best Part: ProWritingAid has a premium option, but most of the areas you’ll want checked are available for free.

What Would Make It Better: Though ProWritingAid checks grammar, I slipped in a your/you’re mistake without getting flagged. I wasn’t overly fond of the tool’s inability to work offline, but its overall functionality is hard to argue with.

Our Recommendation: Use ProWritingAid in the self-editing stage to guide your edits. 

More Details: For an in-depth explainer of ProwritingAid’s free and premium versions, check out our full ProwritingAid review.

2. AutoCrit

What It Does: AutoCrit analyzes your manuscript to identify areas for improvement, including pacing and momentum, dialogue, strong writing, word choice and repetition. Depending on what plan you choose, you can also compare your writing to that of popular authors like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King.

Price: Three different plans are available: the “Free Forever” plan, which is free; the “Professional” for $30, or the “Elite” for $80 per month. Both of the latter offer a 14-day trial with a money-back guarantee.

Who It’s For: Fiction writers.

How It Works: Paste your text into the online dashboard or upload a document and click on AutoCrit’s tabs to see its analysis. This tool uses data from more than a million books to provide a word-by-word level analysis of your writing and shows easy ways to improve the readability of your work.

The Best Part: I spent the most time in the “Compare to Fiction” tab, which provides a comprehensive look at common issues. It highlighted my tendency to start sentences with “and” and “but,” and identified my most repeated words. I felt like I learned something about my writing, and that’s something I don’t think I could say about some other tools.

What Would Make It Better: A more accurate definition of passive voice. It highlights any use of the “be” and “had” verbs, neither of which fully capture passive voice (you need a past participle in addition to a “be” verb), and many active voice constructions were falsely labeled as passive.

Our Recommendation: AutoCrit is great to guide your edits in the self-editing stage. It’s best used for developmental edits, rewrites and avoiding common writing no-nos.

More Details: For an in-depth explainer of Autocrit’s Free Forever and paid versions, check out our full Autocrit review.

3. Grammarly

What It Does: Grammarly is a grammar checker and proofreader.

Price: A limited version is available for free, and Grammarly also offers a number of other free services such as a wordiness checker and tone detection. The full-featured premium service costs $29.95 per month, $59.95 per quarter or $139.95 per year.

Who It’s For: Anyone, including writers, business people and academics.

How It Works: Copy and paste or upload your text into the online dashboard and let Grammarly work its magic. It flags potential errors, gives suggestions and provides an explanation so you can learn why it suggests the change. There’s also a free Grammarly Add-in available for Microsoft Word and a Grammarly for Chrome extension that’s also compatible with Google Docs.

The Best Part: Grammarly is easy to use and pointed out a vocabulary issue or two that none of the other tools did. It’s superior to Microsoft Word’s grammar checker. Its synonym suggestion feature is pretty nifty, too.

What Would Make It Better: As an editor, I’ve found many people don’t understand or care to learn the technical explanation for why something’s wrong. Plain language (or as plain as you can get) explanations for mistakes would make it accessible to more writers.

Our Recommendation: Grammarly is best for the final proofreading stage, or for people who want to learn more about the technical aspects of grammar. If you’re an editor or strong writer, you might find yourself ignoring more flagged items than you fix.

More Details: For an in-depth explainer of Grammarly’s free and premium versions, check out our full Grammarly review.

4. Hemingway Editor

What It Does: Hemingway Editor is like a spellchecker, but for style. It provides a readability score — the lowest grade level someone would need to understand your text — and analyzes your writing to identify areas for improvement.

Price: Free online, and $19.99 for the desktop version, which is available for both Mac and PC.

Who It’s For: Anyone

How It Works: Paste your text into the dashboard and scan for highlighted sections of text. The highlighted text is color coded depending on your area of improvement, whether it’s hard-to-read sentences, the presence of adverbs, or passive voice.

The Best Part: In addition to providing examples on how to fix passive voice or complex phrases, Hemingway Editor also identifies how many “-ly” adverbs and passive voice constructions you’ve used and suggests a maximum number based on your word count.

In my prologue, for example, I had one use of passive voice, and Hemingway Editor suggested aiming for six uses or fewer — which I nailed. These recommendations reinforce the idea that not all adverbs or passive voice constructions are bad, and that’s something other tools miss.

What Would Make It Better: Hemingway Editor was the cleanest and easiest to use of the free editing tools, but it’s not a true grammar checker or proofreader. Even though it’s not meant to catch grammar and spelling mistakes, any editing application that catches those mistakes is instantly more attractive.

Our Recommendation: Use Hemingway Editor to increase the readability of your writing and identify problem sentences during the copyediting stage, but supplement your efforts with a grammar and spell checker.

5. WordRake

What It Does: WordRake cuts out the unnecessary words or phrases that creep into your writing. It works with Microsoft Word and Outlook, depending on which license you purchase. I tested the Microsoft Word version.

Price: The Microsoft Word version is available for Mac or Windows, and you’ll pay $129 for a year or $259 for three years. The Microsoft Word and Outlook package version is only available for Windows, and it costs $199 for a year or $399 for three.

Who It’s For: Bloggers, authors and editors using Microsoft Word or Outlook.

How It Works: WordRake is an add-in for Microsoft products and requires you to install the program before using it, though it’s as easy as following the instructions. Select the text you want to edit, then use the WordRake add-in. It uses track changes to suggest edits, which you can accept or reject.

The Best Part: WordRake is as close as you can get to an automatic editor. It appealed to me more as an editor than a writer, but it’s great at eliminating unnecessary phrases and words that bog down your writing.

What Would Make It Better: I threw a your/you’re mistake in to see if WordRake would catch it. It didn’t, even though Microsoft Word flagged it. If WordRake could catch common writing mistakes like your/you’re or their/they’re/there in addition to unnecessary words, it’d be a hard tool to beat.

Our Recommendation: WordRake is a great tool for the copyediting stage. Verbose writers, authors wanting to cut down on editing costs or editors looking to speed up their editing process will most benefit from WordRake. Watch out if you’re running Word on a slow computer: WordRake could increase your load time.

6. After the Deadline

What It Does: Like Grammarly, After the Deadline is a grammar checker.

Price: Free for personal use.

Who It’s For: Anyone.

How It Works: Click “Demonstration,” paste the text you want to check, and click “Check Writing.” After the Deadline underlines any spelling, grammar and style issues and explains its reasoning.

The Best Part: It’s free! You can also use it on your self-hosted WordPress site, as an extension or add-on for Chrome or Firefox, or with OpenOffice.org.

What Would Make It Better: A definition of passive voice that explains how you construct it grammatically. After the Deadline rightly explains what passive voice does, but it seems to focus only on the “be” verb, which occasionally leads to falsely labeling non-passive constructions as passive.

Our Recommendation: You get what you pay for with After the Deadline. Use it for a final proofread, but exercise good judgment and don’t make every change it suggests — it’s not as sophisticated as the other five editing tools mentioned.

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