I know all the great advice about self-editing.
Yet, it’s never easy for my students or me. I’m always searching for ideas and information on how to make editing simpler. Nothing is as good as human eyes looking over your writing, but there are helpful self-editing resources. One of my favorite free online editing tools is Slick Write.
Slick Write has many features that will help you improve your writing style so that it’s clearer and has more variety. It can show you how to make any type of writing more interesting. And if you want a reader to pay attention to your work, you want to have an engaging writing style that is easy to read.
Do you want a video version of this post? Check it out here:
What does Slick Write do?
You can use Slick Write to “read” your text and spot areas of writing you can improve. It points out things you may not even think to look for in your own work. Like Hemingway Editor it also shows the readability of your writing. If you want to see how Hemingway Editor works check out my blog post, “Hemingway Editor: The Secret Online Editing Tool for Powerful Writing.” https://www.academicwritingsuccess.com/hemingway-editor-secret-online-editing-tool-powerful-writing/
Slick Write looks at your text and analyzes 3 key areas of your writing: features, structure, and vocabulary.
Features
In this section, Slick Write analyzes your work and points out things like wordy phrases, passive voice, and adverbs. The grammar suggestions are underlined in green and blue. You can see that here:
When you make changes in this section, you improve the clarity of your writing.
Structure
In this section, Slick Write looks at the types of sentences you have in your writing: simple, complex, and compound-complex. It highlights the different types of sentences. You can look at your writing and see if you have sentence variety. This is what the structure section looks like:
Vocabulary
Slick Write also rates the variety in your vocabulary. It shows the most repetitive words in an area of your text. These areas are all color-coded. This way you can see how much vocabulary variety there is in each section.
How do you use Slick Write?
It is easy to edit writing with Slick Write. This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to use it, but if you want to see it in action or get more detail check out the video above.
- Visit https://www.slickwrite.com and click the button labeled “start writing.”
- Copy and paste your text into the open area.
- Click on the checkmark at the top of the menu or on the left side(they both do the same thing). Then, Slick Write “reads” the text.
- On the top menu, there are 3 categories: Features, Structure, and Vocabulary. Slick Write automatically checks the features first, but if you want to start with structure or vocabulary–select that category.
- Review the suggestions and when you are ready to edit click on the pencil icon.
- Make your changes.
- Click on the checkmark and review it again.
- Move onto the next section and then review and edit.
- When you’re finished, you can copy and paste the text back into a document, or you can save it as a text file.
Slick Write is powerful and simple to use.
And it has other features too (I show these in the video). I encourage you to check out this free online editing tool and see how you can use it.
Let me know what you think of Slick Write in the comments below.
And if you want to learn about all the editing tools I love, check out my blog post, The Top 9 Free Online Editing Tools For Writing Excellent Papers
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