AutoCrit Review: Is It Good for Novelists?
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An AutoCrit review by a book editor
Welcome to the third installment in our series of reviews of AI-powered editing platforms, where we’ll be taking a close look at AutoCrit. (You can find our review of Hemingway Editor App here and ProWritingAid here.)
With these reviews, our goal is to help writers make the best decisions about their work. There are plenty of reviews out there comparing price, ease of use, and features for these platforms. We’ll touch on some of these elements, of course, but what we really wanted to know is how they can serve fiction writers, and especially novelists.
A disclaimer
If you read our previous installment, feel free to jump down to the beginning of the review.
Before I dive in, I want to make it clear that I believe human editors are irreplaceable. No AI that we’ll be discussing will be capable of what a good human editor can do for you. Perhaps you’re thinking, Well, of course you feel that way. You’d like to keep your job. And you’d be right to think so. I feel honored to work with authors for my job, and I’d like to continue doing it! Writing stories is an extremely human, enormously intricate process of imagination, creativity, and technical ability, and that means that human feedback on what’s produced is essential.
We highly encourage you to seek out other people when it comes to getting feedback on your work—critique partners, a trusted friend, a reliable reader, an editor. As we well know, however, finding good critique partners is easier said than done, and friends and family often don’t have the time to read. Readers may not have the skills to help you improve, and you may not have the resources to hire a professional editor.
These various circumstances make AI an appealing alternative—especially for indie authors looking to keep costs low—and the two of us here at Ground Crew Editorial want to help you navigate your options, giving you our perspective on each of these platforms from our editorial viewpoint.
As always, our goal is to help you develop in your craft.
Our method
For these reviews, I’ll be using a quite old fantasy short story of Jackie’s as a base text. I first performed my own edits on it (developmental, line, and copy editing), and I’ll be comparing the AI platform’s feedback to my own. I’ll be touching primarily on three areas:
· Type and quality of feedback—What levels of editing can this program give you? Is it good at what it does? Are the suggestions useful?
· User experience—Is it easy to use? How much control does the user have? Is this geared towards beginners or writing experts?
· External factors—What are the terms of service for using this platform? Is the work stored or shared with others?
AutoCrit Review
In its origin story, AutoCrit touches on some of the pain points that arise in many writers’ groups: getting expert, unbiased feedback on your writing without spending a fortune, the amount of time it takes to get feedback, and receiving feedback of variable quality. By highlighting these common problems, AutoCrit shows it certainly has its finger on the pulse of the writing community, and it offers a wide variety of tools to address these issues. I hadn’t heard of AutoCrit until I started this series of reviews on AI-assisted writing/editing platforms, and then I was hounded mercilessly by their ads nearly everywhere I went online, many of them pointing out that AutoCrit would be there for you at 2:00 a.m. when your critique partners are asleep. (As a side note, no one needs feedback on their writing at 2:00 a.m. No one.) After reading other reviews and browsing discussions of editing platforms, I saw AutoCrit often described as being very fiction-focused, so I was curious to see how it worked.
Like other platforms, AutoCrit is composed of a wide suite of tools to help authors write and polish their work, offering many different kinds of reports that you can run on your writing. According to AutoCrit, their platform has exhaustively analyzed millions of books in order to give expert feedback. For an overall look at your work, it will generate a summary report of the major areas that these reports go over, such as pacing and momentum, dialogue, strong writing, and word choice. Each of these reports are generated by individual checks the platform runs, comparing your writing to either a genre or a specific author that you identify. For example, to gauge pacing and momentum, the platform counts words per paragraph and calculates the average number of words per sentence. AutoCrit will then give you a score on how well your work stacks up against the average for the genre or for the author you chose.
The FAQ is quick to say that the goal is not to reach 100% and that it is not a qualitative judgment on your writing. Higher scores only indicate fewer potential issues identified by AutoCrit, and they encourage users to determine their own benchmarks for determining if they’re improving their text and when they’ve finished editing.
In addition to these reports, AutoCrit presents an almost staggering amount of automatically generated analyses on elements like the protagonist’s arc and story beats. In addition, it offers ways to set writing goals and track word counts, save story ideas, and dictate text.
AutoCrit does offer a free version with basic tools such as the adverb check. For my review, I tried out the Pro Monthly membership, which gave me access to everything, including their educational courses and author services.
I will doing a deep dive into the features of this platform with lots of examples, so heads up—this post will be a longer read than usual! If you want the TL;DR version of this AutoCrit review, see below.
Our review: short and sweet
AutoCrit offers the most benefit for some of the more mechanical aspects of editing, so these reports could be beneficial for writers looking for help with things like trimming word count, improving pacing by shortening sentences/paragraphs, or introducing variety into their word choice or sentence structure. However, like most of these platforms, what it most excels at is generating reports with vast amounts of information, and much of what the platform draws your attention to may not need attention—or apply to the story at all.
The platform gave me a considerable amount of story-level feedback, but it was another avalanche of information to sift through to find the handful of useful bits. While I have read other reviews from writers who found the story analysis features to be a considerable help in identifying plot holes and mapping character arcs, I found the analysis reports to be so inaccurate to the story I was working on that they were largely unusable.
While AutoCrit does address the common pain points of price and waiting for feedback by offering a relatively affordable platform that generates feedback on demand, users should expect to spend a lot of time critically scrutinizing the reports for the few helpful notes that apply to their work and deciding how (or whether) to use the sheer amount of information that it will put at their disposal.
Getting into the edit
Developmental capabilities
To start, I jumped right into AutoCrit’s developmental editing features, plunging into the Fiction Analyzer. It will generate a synopsis of the story, complete with a list of elements that it identifies as fulfilling the story premise, a summary of the major conflicts, a list of characters, and a brief overview of worldbuilding. It also generates a timeline and lists plot threads and foreshadowing events. Each of these analyses can be generated however many times you want at the click of a button. For many of these, I had it generate a new report for me seven or eight times to see how it might change. The length of the report can vary widely (one I had it run for conflicts only gave me three incomplete sentences that didn’t even have capitalized letters), as can the style (written long-form, bullets, numbered list, etc.)
I’ll discuss a few of the different reports that fall under the Fiction Analyzer below.
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AutoCrit’s generator correctly identified a few key aspects of the story. The main character is an archer named Ask, and she, along with two others, is hunting for a hidden treasure. They are also being pursued by creatures called Scourges. Beyond this, AutoCrit got quite creative with what it said the story was about.
Ask is also a Scribe, which, in this story, means that she has memorized the powerful sacred words of her people that are no longer written down. It also means that she can’t speak, which none of the reports acknowledged. AutoCrit couldn’t seem to make sense of what it means to be a Scribe, and so it made up its own version. The phrase “protecting ancient poetry” and close iterations of it appeared in almost every analysis—so much so it became like a joke to see how it might be worked in. The words are written poetically, but they are really spells—words that, when wielded, have magical effects.
In the synopsis, it offered a few comments on how the story fulfilled its potential, including vivid descriptions, intricate dynamics between the characters, and a gradual unraveling of secrets and mysteries to build effective suspense. All nice things for the author to hear. It also added that the resolution ties back to themes of homecoming and self-discovery for Ask, which was a surprise. While Ask does decide to return to her people as a result of the events of the story (after choosing self-exile for some years), homecoming is not a strong thread throughout the story, and the choice to return only appears at the end. I might suggest to the author that it should be a stronger theme, but in its current form, it is not. What is clear in the story is that Ask knows herself very well, so a theme of self-discovery is not accurate.
One of the times that I generated a synopsis, it also included a list of unexplored conflicts. However, I was unable to get it to do this again despite over a dozen tries. One of these was a mention that personal histories impacting character relationships could deepen emotional stakes. This was an element I had noted in my own edit of the story, encouraging the author to dig deeper into the relationship between Ask and her business partner, Renovar. The reader doesn’t get any backstory about how they met or why they work together, and it would add a lot of depth to the story to know more about their personal dynamic. So that feedback from the generator was useful.
Far less useful was this suggestion of a conflict: Exploring power struggles or ethical quandaries related to using ancient poetry as weapons could introduce complex moral dilemmas. The context of the story shows that Ask’s people have hidden these words precisely because they are so powerful and dangerous. The Scourges are monsters created by people who tried to use the words on themselves. The true conflict is Ask choosing to use the words, which is forbidden, to save their lives at the climax.
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AutoCrit identified several conflicts—Ask vs. the harsh winter weather, the humans vs. the Scourges, and Ask vs. Parras (the client who has hired Ask and Renovar to find the treasure). Some conflicts that were identified were relatively unimportant, like the weather, while others were closer to the main plot. And in almost every report, it listed something like Conflict within Ask herself as she struggles with her duties as a Scribe and her desire to protect the ancient poetry. It could not recognize that protecting the words is her duty as a Scribe. These are not two separate aspects of her character.
This report might be useful for identifying places in your story that could be developed further for tension, heightening conflict that is already represented in some way on the page. However, it would be important to take even this list with a grain of salt as not all conflicts in a story should be amplified, and it may include conflicts that aren’t really there.
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This was an interesting report, and one I was quite interested in because contradictions are often ridiculously obvious to others but completely invisible to authors themselves (I speak from personal experience!). I found this to be another analysis that was excellent in bringing up lots for me to read, and it did its level best to keep coming up with problems as long as I kept clicking the button. Most of what it brought up for me were not real contradictions:
• In the beginning of the story, Ask is described as being a stranger to the Winter Wards and feeling cold, yet later on it is mentioned that she was accustomed to the Winter Wards like an ice hare within a day.
Ask is not a native of the Winter Wards, but she has survival skills and has been there for a while when the story begins.
• Renovar’s reaction towards Ask’s concerns about Parras seems contradictory as he initially dismisses her worries but then becomes suspicious of Parras when confronted with evidence.
Many people change their minds when presented with evidence, so is this really inconsistent?
• In the beginning of the story, Ask is described as keeping her vigil across from the tea merchant’s tent, listening for wind and Scourges she was paid to pin with arrows. However, later in the story when they are attacked by Scourges, it seems like this event catches them off guard and they are not fully prepared.
It’s possible for characters to be prepared for an enemy in one time and place and yet be unprepared for that same enemy in another time and place.
• The portrayal of Scourges changes throughout the story - at first they are depicted as stealthy creatures with sharp intent, but later their behavior becomes erratic and easily provoked by mere words written on a stone.
I was really surprised that this one didn’t mention that the words are ancient poetry, but in seriousness, this is an important plot point where Ask writes some of the sacred words on a stone and destroys the Scourges, not “mere words” that make them “erratic.”
• The reaction of Parras turning into multiple Scourge entities upon discovering gold contradicts his initial behavior as an eager treasure seeker willing to take risks for wealth rather than displaying supernatural abilities associated with malevolent beings like Scourges.
In this instance, the inconsistency is necessary for the story to have any kind of dramatic reveal in the climax. If Parras displayed supernatural abilities associated with malevolent beings, Ask and Renovar wouldn’t have invited him along for the treasure hunt, now would they?
As I mentioned earlier, I have read other reviews of AutoCrit from writers who found this feature in particular extremely helpful, but for my own work, I didn’t find it to be accurate or insightful. In my own hypothetical letter to the author, the biggest inconsistency that I would have drawn the author’s attention to is the fact that the reader is told that the words still have power but that no one has been able to use them. However, Ask uses the words to save them at the end of the story without any hesitation or fear that it won’t work.
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The most, shall we say…creative reports came from the character part of the analyzer.
This analysis breaks down the main character into their desire, their need, their flaw, and consistency and enhancement for dramatic conflict. This is touching on an extremely difficult part of writing fiction—stakes—so I was curious to see how it worked. Many authors have trouble identifying or wrapping language around these elements in their characters, not to mention keeping them consistent.
For Ask’s desire, it said that she desires to protect ancient poetry and her companions, showcasing a deep-seated need for purpose and belonging. Her role as a Scribe, tasked with safeguarding knowledge from the past, intertwines with her identity as an archer protecting those she cares about. This dual desire reflects an internal struggle between duty and personal fulfillment. This could be a good story, but it’s not the one on the page. Ask is essentially hired protection. She might want to keep her business partner, Renovar, alive, but Parras, their client, certainly wouldn’t be in the category of “those she cares about.” Personal fulfillment and duty are not words that most readers would associate with this story, and they clash with themes that another report generated, like “redemption through actions rather than words alone,” “resilience,” and “the importance of connection with others.” Depending on which report you’re reading, you’re in a totally different story.
For her flaw, the report read, The flaw holding Ask back is her reluctance to accept change and adaptability within herself; she struggles with the idea that embracing one aspect of herself might betray another part. Her distrust in Parras also symbolizes this flaw—her inability to see beyond surface-level judgments or consider alternative perspectives without feeling like it compromises her loyalty or values. Again, this might be a perfectly fine story, but it isn’t the one the author wrote. Ask isn’t struggling with change or adaptability or embracing different aspects of herself in this story. And her distrust in Parras is totally justified—he ends up not being human at all and tries to kill them.
As an editor, I would say that her flaw is poor communication. It’s true that she can’t speak and the words she writes must come from the sacred texts, which naturally limits what she can say, but as a person, she is withdrawn and insular. She doesn’t try too hard to be understood, intentionally keeps to herself even with Renovar, and lets her actions (or inaction) speak for her more often, which are more easily misunderstood. Choosing to use the words at the climax—writing more than just one or two words as she has done until then—marks a change in her. By using the sacred words, she’s not only expressing more but moving back towards the heritage that she’s intentionally exiled herself from.
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This was another area that held a lot of potential. Being able to spot places where characters act in a way that isn’t consistent with their personality or beliefs would be a great help to many writers. However, this report also offered a lot of advice for a story that wasn’t the one on the page. It highlighted that Ask deviates from her goals: Her decision to embark on a treasure hunt appears somewhat inconsistent with her initial portrayal as a dedicated guardian. But Ask is hired protection for a treasure hunter—this is totally in line with her external goals. (As an aside, another report mentioned herinitial characterization as merely a protector of poetry, so depending on which report you’re reading, the initial portrayal of the protagonist is either as a bodyguard or a scholar). Another inconsistency that was flagged was her questionable decisions: Given Ask’s responsibility towards safeguarding her companions and their mission from dark creatures, some of her choices could be seen as imprudent, especially when they involve delving into mysteries that potentially increase their risk without clear benefit. For instance, the exploration of ancient glyphs and Kalvarin script—while intriguing—might not logically align with the urgency of protecting themselves against immediate threats like Scourges unless these elements are convincingly tied to their survival or success. Again, because the generator has missed the point of the story—a treasure hunt—the treasure hunt itself becomes illogical. If they weren’t after this treasure, they wouldn’t have to protect themselves from the Scourges, who are after the same thing.
In its discussion of other inconsistencies, it mentioned things like Ask delving deeply into the negotiations between Renovar and Parras (which she is not present for) and readily engaging in deep conversations about ancient poetry (even though she can’t speak). It also continued to point out the shifts between her focus on protecting ancient poetry and ensuring their physical safety (being a Scribe and an archer are not mutually exclusive for Ask), her choice to abandon her goal of protecting the ancient poetry at the end (which doesn’t happen), and her motivation to protect the ancient poetry.
This kind of misreading isn’t unique to an algorithm—it’s possible for readers to get the wrong idea about a story and run with it all the way to the end, finding themselves all turned around and upset with all of the contradictions and nonsense they see. I’ve seen it happen with an editor as well; they misunderstood what genre the author was writing for and wrote a lengthy editorial letter that was almost entirely useless to her because it was holding the story up to a standard that she wasn’t even remotely trying to reach. But while misreading does happen even with human readers, there is recourse. You can have a conversation. You can ask questions, and you can clarify. With a platform like this, there’s no way to get it off of a wrong premise to give you more helpful feedback.
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This was a particularly fascinating tool for me to explore. I often authors the advice to create an outline after they’ve finished a draft, and I wondered if this tool could accomplish that quickly. It breaks down reports into Story Premise, Character Building, Worldbuilding, and the Beat Sheet, which each of those having smaller analyses broken out under them. I spent the most time in the Character Building, where there is a further breakdown of the protagonist and other characters like the support character and the distraction character, noting their goals, flaws, and audience appeal. It even lets you know what Jungian archetype they belong to.
This tool is one that may be more accurate if the platform has more material to work with than a short story, but for my purposes, I found the reports to be similarly contradictory and, in many cases, simply wrong. In the breakdown for Renovar, one report identified his flaw as being overly protective. Another report said his flaw was detachment that kept him from connecting emotionally with others. So from one view, he’s too attached; from another, he’s not attached at all.
For Want vs. Need, the generator said, While Renovar wants a close relationship with Ask for emotional fulfillment, what he truly needs is to learn how to balance protection with allowing freedom for growth in both himself and Ask. There is no indication in the story that Renovar is interested in Ask in this way, nor that he is overprotective. He’s a treasure hunter who makes a living taking risks.
For Parras, the results were even more baffling. The generator seemed to grasp at times that he is the antagonist of the story, but at others, he is discussed as a friend and companion. His plot purpose was described as misguiding Ask by suggesting shortcuts and risky decisions in their treasure hunt, promoting a flawed approach that distracts her from her true mission of protecting ancient poetry. He does not make any such suggestions, and, as we’ve been over and over again, Ask’s true mission isn’t protecting ancient poetry. His evolution is described as learning to open up more about his intentions, gradually building a stronger bond with Ask despite initial secrecy. It doesn’t say anything about him disintegrating into a rabid pack of Scourges at the end, which I would have thought an important moment of character evolution.
Bafflingly, the generator even included a physical description for him, saying that he has unkempt hair and rugged clothing suitable for exploration. I had to skim through the story again to double-check. His hair and clothing are never mentioned.
Under Beat Sheet, the generator fills in a description of the parts of the story that fill in the traditional Hero’s Journey story beats. In order to fill these in, AutoCrit got pretty creative, almost telling its own story completely. Under Refusal of the Call, it said that Ask hesitates to embrace her role as a protector and Scribe and that her insecurities keep her rooted in place. These are not conflicts found in this story. For the First Test and the Second Test, it filled in events in the story that happen in the opposite order (what it describes as the Second Test happens on the first page) and invented extra conflicts like Ask almost missing a shot that put Renovar in danger and her failing to mediate between Renovar and Parras and breaking their trust by misinterpreting their intentions.
Under Tools Received, it talked about a dagger that Ask carries, one that has been passed down through generations in her family that brings her comfort. However, Ask doesn’t carry a dagger in the story.
Under Rescue, it filled in a part of the story where Renovar and Parras step up to save Ask with their own abilities, and then, once they’re safe, her friends encourage her to rest and recover. None of this happens in the story itself, not to mention that neither of them have abilities and Parras is certainly not a friend.
The most bizarre parts of the beat sheet came at the conclusion (the Return and Fulfillment beats), where it said that Ask understands that life will not always be filled with adventure or excitement. She must accept the ordinary aspects of daily life while holding onto the lessons learned from her quest. It also added that she learns to embrace her role as a protector of ancient poetry and that, somehow, her archery skills are part of a larger mission tied to history and meaning. To be honest, I’m really not sure what that means.
I could go on, but you see the point here. While it has certainly broken down the story into story beats and character sheets, it is a far cry from the story that’s on the page. When I recommend that authors create these kinds of documents, it’s to help them get a more accurate view of the story they’ve written, as opposed to the story that’s in their minds. Seeing where those aren’t meeting up is often extremely helpful. It defeats the purpose for a tool like this to completely make up scenes, character appearance, and story beats.
Under the developmental tools that AutoCrit offers, I also took a look at two other parts of the platform.
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The Inspiration Studio is the only part of the platform that AutoCrit identifies as using generative AI, stating that the editing side is algorithmic and based on comparative data sets. That may be true, but the creative license on display in the Analyzer reports certainly seems reminiscent of AI hallucinations.
Under Inspiration, AutoCrit offers two tools, one called What Happens Next? and Change the Mood. You place your cursor at a particular part of the text, and the tool works on that section. I tried out What Happens Next? at the climax of the story. It gave a few options, such as how tension could be heightened and a suggestion for an unexpected twist: a deus ex machina ending with a supernatural figure who is the guardian of an ancient prophecy appears and the walls of reality fracture and fall away.
It also offered a Most Likely option and an Outlandish option, which was just…something else: a troupe of tiny singing mushrooms that harmonize with Ask’s words, creating a resonance so powerful it seems like reality itself might shatter. Vines sprout from the rocks and form a protective barrier, and those same vines also whisper ancient secrets that can only be understood by the pure-hearted.
AI hallucinations indeed.
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I didn’t spend too long in the story builder section, but it offers similar generated sections that you see in the Analyzer. You can put in text under Story Premise, filling in things like tropes you’d like to use and your target genre. You can then have it analyze your premise, giving feedback on the novelty of the idea, the promise of the premise, and how it might align with your chosen genre. I put in An ancient vampire in modern day solves crimes with his Scottie dog while combating social anxiety. His next-door neighbor is a local reporter.
If you don’t have text to fill in for any section, you can have the platform generate them for you, filling in copious amounts of worldbuilding details like plants and animals, available resources, and culture. I didn’t have anything in mind for this made-up story, so I automatically generated all of this for my new idea. Like protecting ancient poetry, the generator seemed to high-center on one idea. It was absolutely obsessed with coffeeshops, including them under Plentiful Resources and Helpful Opportunities. It even put “coffeeshop plants” under Flora.
Amusingly, you can have the platform evaluate itself at the end of each section. In my case, I asked it to analyze the worldbuilding that it had just made, and, no surprise, it thought it had done a pretty good job. It seemed to think the story was practically written at that point, noting that my vampire’s interactions with urban wildlife display a softer side humorously and underground tunnels provide unique, suspense-filled chase sequences.
Some writers may find this kind of fountain of idea generation helpful, but the suggestions are rather paint-by-number, as you should expect from generative AI.
Line editing capabilities
Like other platforms like this, walking you through all of the tools and reports would take an age, so I’ll just cover just a few of the features that I tried.
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Under Pacing, you’ll find Sentence Variation, Pacing, Paragraph Variation, and Chapter Variation. Each of these are essentially counters, counting numbers of letters in words, numbers of words in sentences, numbers of sentences in paragraphs, and so on. Each one gives you a number score in comparison to your chosen genre or author. For each of these checks, you can read a separate informational post about how to make revisions to improve your score and why those changes should be made.
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Under Dialogue, I took a look at Dialogue, which simply tells you how much space, percentage-wise, dialogue takes up in your story. You can toggle a setting that highlights dialogue in a different color. AutoCrit says that this is to help you identify which parts of your story have little to no dialogue. Dialogue Tags counts the number of your dialogue tags, tallying “said/asked” versus other dialogue tags. I thought that this was a particularly nice feature, as “said/asked” should be the most frequently used tags in modern fiction and it could be helpful to see if you’ve overused others.
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This part of the menu includes a lot of different checks, like looking for adverbs, passive indicators, tense consistency, and showing versus telling. I am one of those rare people who thinks adverbs are acceptable in writing, so I didn’t take the adverb check all that seriously—particularly when it was telling me that certain adverbs were used in excess and they only appeared once.
Passive Indicators could be very useful for writers who have a hard time pinpointing passive voice in their own writing. AutoCrit will highlight them in your text for you.
The Tense Consistency check could be helpful, in theory, for writers who have trouble slipping into different tenses, but this tool essentially highlights every verb in the text, with options to focus on certain kinds. The user still has to check each one to see if they’re used correctly.
“Show don’t tell” is a piece of advice that gets thrown around pretty liberally, so it was no surprise that someone’s tried to design a tool to help writers see it in their own work. I’m not convinced AutoCrit’s Showing vs. Telling tool entirely succeeds. By bringing up a report of all of the words that are usually signals for “telling,” it gives the user dozens and dozens of sentences to look at, many of which are not instances of telling. For the short story of 5,000 words, it brought up 97 instances for me to review. A few that came up for me that aren’t examples of telling (I’ve highlighted the signal word):
Get this over with
Take the first watch
Shouldn’t have let them get this far
Wouldn’t immediately notice them
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Word Choice also has a host of tools beneath it, such as Sentence Starters, POV Consistency, and Power Words. Like ProWritingAid, AutoCrit offers a useful tool that counts how many times you start your sentences in certain ways. I can tell you that this is something that a human editor will not do for you (though we will probably point out if you use a certain kind of starter too much), and it can be useful to see your patterns. AutoCrit gives you the ability to add character names so that it can also count how many sentences start that way.
POV Consistency, like the Tense Consistency tool, is really a counter. It flags every instance of first, second, and third person indicators, and you can also set it up with character names to look for character POV consistency. This could be helpful for some, but in reality, working through this tool requires checking every instance that it’s flagged to see that it’s correct. For me, this meant 563 indicators to individually check.
Power Words, I believe, is meant to help you identify the words that lend themselves towards building a particular tone or feeling in your writing, listing them under terms like Love, Fear, General, and Forbidden. I couldn’t quite grasp the rhyme or reason of how certain words ended up their categories. “Beat” showed up under Encourage in the phrase beat back the cold air of the marketplace. “Stung” showed up under Fear in the phrase her hands stung with chill, and “permanent” appeared under Safety in the phrase a permanent apology against the cold.
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Repetition included a check for Repeated Words, which I was pretty impressed with. One thing that I’m always on the lookout while I’m working at the word level are word echoes. These are words that appear in close proximity but that may be a sentence or two away from each other or even in another paragraph on the same page. This check did a good job of finding echoes like this, not just counting how many times a word had been used in total.
The Word Frequency check handled the word counting, tallying how many times a word had been used and offering a suggestion of about how many occurrences of that word should be changed. You could definitely get carried away with this if you weren’t careful. It didn’t like the word “snow” for some reason, telling me that it appeared fourteen times and that I should remove “about fourteen.” It gave me many words like this that it didn’t think should be used, like “bow,” “arrow,” “wrote,” “treasure,” “Scribe,” “shoulders,” “ink,” and dozens more. Many of the words it brought to my attention are words that are perfectly serviceable and up to the job, which is why they’re common. It doesn’t benefit a story set outside in the winter to try to use the word “snow” only once. Readers will not enjoy following these characters as they cross cold ground covered with frozen water crystals in a blizzard, brushing feather’d rain from their glenohumeral joints and pushing forward in the flaky torrent.
Just don’t do it.
Copyediting capabilities
I apologize that this part of the review will be woefully incomplete. Rather than offering its own grammar and spelling checker, AutoCrit uses an integration of Grammarly. To use this feature requires signing up for a Grammarly account and adding it as a browser extension. While I have not used Grammarly myself, it has a certain notoriety among many editors and writers I know, and I would need to write up a separate review just for Grammarly (Updated April 2025: Jackie has written a review of Grammarly that you can read in this blog post). In short, Grammarly doesn’t have the best rep among editors, in large part because making suggested changes has a high likelihood of introducing errors into the text rather than correcting them. True to form for automated systems that are intended to work on complex, nuanced language, it also often suggests changes to text that should be left alone.
User experience
Overall, AutoCrit is easy to use and navigate. In other reviews, people noted how they found the interface to be much less overwhelming than ProWritingAid, and I can certainly see that. The main power of the platform seems to be in the Analyzer and Story Builder, though at least for me, these functions would not be ones I’d be putting to use often. The line editing tools that help you get down to the sentence level offer some objective methods to approach revising your writing, and for those who could benefit from having a more nuts-and-bolts approach, this platform would give you plenty to work with.
In addition to all of these tools, AutoCrit also offers frequent webinars and a library of video content on subjects like Deep POV and self-editing. Some of these are free for all members while others have a registration fee. They also offer several services performed by human editors, such as first-chapter critiques and Story Inspection, which appears to be a developmental edit.
Plenty of resources
For every report that you can run in AutoCrit, there is a corresponding web page that you can read that explains not only how to interpret the results you’re seeing but also why they’ve flagged it as a potential problem in the text. It’s one thing to tell writers that they need to be careful about keeping their POV consistent; it’s another to explain how suddenly POV shifts are jarring for readers and can knock them out of a story. I appreciated that the explanations were close at hand and that they often included some exceptions to the rule so that writers could have a better foundation for deciding whether or not to make a change.
Feedback overkill
In my ProWritingAid review, I titled this subheading The sheer amount of it all. AutoCrit, like any automated service, will never come up short in regards to feedback. While clicking the Generate Analysis button doesn’t give you a completely unique result every time, it provides an endless source of feedback that seems like it could present users with a constantly moving target. How does a writer know when they’ve finished revising? There will always be unexplored conflicts in a story simply because the story shouldn’t include every possible conflict. There are also infinite ways to expand on a scene, infinite actions your character could take, and infinite themes you could weave in. The only ones that matter, of course, are the ones that will capture the vision you have for the story, but automated feedback cannot recognize that vision and so will generate what feels like the equivalent of buckets of spaghetti thrown against a wall. One or two noodles might stick, and the rest slaps wetly to the floor.
A bad memory
Because AutoCrit offers so many distinct tools that generate story-level feedback, it is perhaps inevitable that it can’t keep track of it all. That sounds strange to say of a system with processing power I can’t even fathom, but from my explorations, the platform seems unable to contain the essence of a single story. In the same beat sheet, it gave me different themes, explanations of character motivations, and explanations of conflict, each one describing a different story. Each one of these sections can be endlessly generated, which adds to the shaky, unstable feeling of the feedback. For many of the generated summaries, the text had a fortune-cookie quality about it where I could see some connection to the story, but the words were generic enough that the same critique could be given to anyone. At worst, it was a word salad of writerly sounding terms that ultimately had no meaning.
In other reviews of the platform, I saw comments from novelists who complained that it couldn’t remember things like character details from previous chapters or how certain scenes ended. After I waded through all of the alternate realities that it’d generated for me, I was even more shocked that writers have been able to use it for such specific feedback. It may be the case that AutoCrit functions better with novels rather than short stories, but on 5,000 words, it could not settle on a solid idea of what the story was about or even what happened from beginning to end, aside from something to do with protecting that dang ancient poetry.
External factors (a.k.a. I read the Terms and Conditions so you don’t have to)
I read through AutoCrit’s Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy and found them to be primarily focused on the elements of their site related to the courses and video archive with a few sections dedicated to the use of the writing side of the platform. They note that user information is never sold to outside parties and that data is only shared with trusted partners. User content is stored on secure servers in the United States, though they note that while they are committed to protecting the security of your information, nothing is 100% secure. Oddly, in their FAQ under “Is my work secure with AutoCrit?”, they say their users’ projects are stored on 100% secure servers. Do with that what you will.
Being spoiled with how transparent ProWritingAid is, I had to do quite a bit of searching to get more information about how AutoCrit works and even basic information about who started the company. In their story, they only mention that it began as “the brainchild of an unpublished writer with dreams of becoming an author.” Her name isn’t mentioned anywhere on AutoCrit’s website.
The factor that gave me the biggest pause was the fact that AutoCrit prides itself on being your own personal writing mentor created from an exhaustive analysis of millions of books. How did they get access to millions of books? Of course this question isn’t unique to AutoCrit; how any of these platforms have created their systems is often obscure. Given the fact data scraping has far outpaced any official systems for obtaining permission to use copyrighted property, it seems very possible that AutoCrit’s data sets and algorithms were created at the expense of millions of authors who were not asked if their work could be used in such a way. These authors also receive no benefit from the continual use of their writing on the platform as a diagnostic and teaching tool. In their FAQ, AutoCrit says that users’ work is never used to train their AI: “Absolutely not. We’re as protective of our members’ work as we are of our own.” While I would need to do more digging to take a more definitive stance, this rings hollow to me coming from a platform that has surely benefitted immensely from authors whose work was not protected.
AutoCrit review: Conclusion
Most novelists would be able to find some helpful functions in AutoCrit’s toolkit for line editing concerns, and those who are particularly tenacious and willing to constantly correct and refine the text that the platform automatically generates for them may find benefits on the developmental side of editing work. It looks like a good place to track writing habits if you’re looking for a place to draft your work, and there are a wide variety of courses for writers who want to expand their skills.
As with other platforms, it’s important to resist editing simply to reach a numerical score that a platform has assigned. I chose Brandon Sanderson for the fantasy comparison author on AutoCrit just to see the functionality of the platform, but I don’t believe that matching the percentage of times Sanderson begins his sentences with a correlative conjunction will make this story that much more likely to be accepted for publication. Nor will matching his percentage of repeated words necessarily make the prose that much stronger. It is definitely a wonderful thing to practice imitating your favorite authors, playing with elements of their style or voice that you’d like try out or make your own, but this must go beyond counting to be effective.
Some other reviewers mentioned that the platform’s inability to compare text to multiple authors or more than one genre at a time also limits the usefulness of the feedback for authors who are working in harder-to-define genres or crossover genres. So if that describes your manuscript, definitely approach the scores and the analyses that gauge the text’s alignment with the designated genre with a handful of salt.
For writers interested in the developmental features of the platform, expect to do a lot of heavy lifting for yourselves to make the output useful. It will present you with lots to work with, but that also means investing substantial time in sorting it all out, throwing a lot out, and correcting what’s left.
AutoCrit offers an extensive toolkit for fiction writers that, for users willing to put in the time to sift through the reports and find ways to incorporate it into their revision process, could meet some needs for writers looking for alternatives to hiring a human editor.
Have more questions?
There’s a lot of info here, so if you’re still processing or have questions about this AutoCrit review, I’m happy to chat anytime at ariane[at]groundcreweditorial[dot]com.
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