The Publishing Performance Show Tom Wilde of ProWritingAid – Understanding Passive Voice and Why You're Overusing It
Tom Wilde is the Head of Partnerships at ProWritingAid, a comprehensive writing toolkit designed for storytellers and creative writers. With a background as an English teacher, Tom brings educational expertise to helping writers understand craft elements like passive voice, sentence structure, and readability. ProWritingAid has evolved from a grammar checker into a full editorial assistant that works with writers across multiple platforms, offering 25 different reports that analyze everything from sticky sentences to character development. The tool integrates with popular writing software like Scrivener, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word, providing both real-time checking and deep manuscript analysis.
In this episode:
- What ProWritingAid is and how it's evolved beyond basic grammar checking
- How the tool integrates with Scrivener, Google Docs, Word, and other writing platforms
- The difference between real-time checking and deep report analysis
- Privacy guarantees: your text is never stored or used for AI training
- The sticky sentences report: identifying when 40% of your words are just padding
- How the all repeats report finds overused words and phrases you can't see
- Readability analysis at the paragraph level to prevent reader drop-off
- AI-powered features: Rephrase, Critique, and Sparks
- How the Critique report analyzes characterization, dialogue, plot, and structure
- Using ChatGPT's API responsibly without storing or sharing user text
- AI Sparks for writer's block: inspiration without replacing your voice
- Changing perspective, tense, or adding sensory detail with AI assistance
- Genre-specific writing goals and benchmarks for different fiction categories
- Writers Week events throughout the year for different genres
Resources mentioned:
- ProWritingAid: https://prowritingaid.com/
- Writers Week events: https://prowritingaid.com/art/1163/learn-with-prowritingaid-this-month.aspx
- Integration with Scrivener, Word, Google Docs: https://prowritingaid.com/integrations
- YouTube channel tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClh8Sjuq-j17zxjfvvxmcIg
Book recommendations:
- Go As A River by Shelley Reed: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Go-River/Shelley-Read/9781954118232
- Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: https://www.amazon.com/Fingersmith-Sarah-Waters/dp/1573229725
Connect with Tom:
- Website: https://prowritingaid.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prowritingaid
- X.com: https://twitter.com/prowritingaid
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prowritingaid.insta/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prowritingaid
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClh8Sjuq-j17zxjfvvxmcIg
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- @teddyagsmith
- Website: https://publishingperformance.com/?ref=ywm3mtc
- Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/publishingperformance/
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- Instagram - https://instagram.com/publishingperformanceinsta
- Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHV6ltaUB4SULkU6JEMhFSw
- Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/publishing-performance/
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