I’m trying to consolidate more of my various project blogs into one place so look forward to more posts here barring further hammer damage from the anxiety faeries.
I hacked away at EditMinion a bit yesterday, added some features, fleshed out others. Here are some of the updates.
Cliché finding now works
There’s a big list of phrases that it searches for like “it was a dark and stormy night”, and “quick as a bunny”. Most people probably won’t run afoul of this one but it was fun to code.
Commonly misspelled words finder now works.
Over 4000 words compiled by Wikipedia editors. If you’re already using Word or another word processor with spellcheck this won’t likely be needed.
New feature: Tricky Homonyms
I think this is a really useful feature and another way to make EditMinion useful where other spellcheckers fall short. This will find misspellings in the form of homonyms, i.e. weather/whether, it’s/its, their/there/they’re, etc. These types of words a spellchecker wouldn’t catch because they’re still valid words and the spellchecker is incapable of understanding the word’s context.
People have contacted me saying that it highlights some things that are not wrong. This is missing the point a bit. The goal of EditMinion is to bring words to your attention so that you can use your discernment whether you’ve chosen the right word or not. It has the potential to be more useful when used in this way. It’s also a robot so it’s not judgmental, it’s arbitrary.
Look forward to more updates in the future.
Hi, I’ve emailed you twice now about the desktop writeordie that I had but haven’t any more as my pc was destroyed by a virus. I must be emailing you at the wrong address, as I’ve had no reply. Could you send it to me at the email address I’ve provided please?
Thanks!
Cathy
I’ve had the same issue as Cathy. I’ve e-mailed you twice, and it’s been several days and I haven’t heard anything. My old PC died a brave death, and I’ve been hoping to get it so that I can work on my August NaNoWriMo project.
If there’s more information you need from me, feel free to let me know at the e-mail provided. Thank you!
Help! I just recently bought this program to use on my Mac. My daughter recently bought it to use on her PC and loves it. But it does not work on my Mac—there’s no place to click to actually start writing and using it. I emailed several times and tried contacting you through the website to no avail. Noticed that there were many questions from other Mac users in the same boat, going back close to a year with no replies, and figured maybe Dr. Wicked had passed on or something.
I was in the process of trying to get a paypal refund tonight, came to this page to be sure i had the right web address…and saw that Dr Wicked had just recently posted!! GREAT news, because I’d much prefer to get the program working, than to try for a refund! SOoooo…..please, can you help me get this to work on my Mac?? Thanks!
I’ve just discovered the Write Or Die web app and Editminion, and they are both fantastic. Congrats on building a bot so much more brilliant than a spell checker, and Write Or Die is exactly the kick in the pants I need to make five-minute writing bursts possible.
I’ve been telling my writing friends what a genius you are.
As an editor and copywriter for many, many years, copy mistakes tend to stand out when I read anything. I thought you’d like to know that there are errors on your website. Included here are but a few; bold verbiage is from your website (it may not show bold here, as I left in your “comment” section, since you have no email address included); following it are correction suggestions. If you would like additional help, please let me know.
so I’m kindof used to it. – spacing
The idea is to instill in the would-be writer with a fear of not writing. We do this by employing principles taught in Introduction to Psychology. – The first sentence is semantically incorrect – “to instill in the would-be writer with a fear…” underlined word should be deleted. if Introduction to Psychology is the name of class, it should have quotation marks around it. If it’s not, wording should be changed, i.e. taught in a an introduction to psychology (or psychology basics course).
Anyone remember Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement? – same as previous idea, i.e. Anyone remember their course about operant conditioning and negative reinforcement or Remember when you studied operant conditioning and negative reinforcement principles?
Negative Reinforcement “strengthens a behavior because a negative condition is stopped or avoided as a consequence of the behavior.” – If what you have in quotes is taken from course material or a book by someone on topic, that source should be included in your website. It’s more appropriate for topic-specific/detailed quotes, for example, that could only come from experts int the field. The quote is very generic, so you don’t need the quotation marks really, unless you want to cite the source.
Change to: Negative reinforcement strengthens a behavior……(“reinforcement” should be lower case)
These consequences will persist until your preset conditions have been met (that is, your time is up or you’ve written you wordcount goal or both) – Here, there’s a spacing error and a punctuation error (missing period at the end of the sentence.
EditMinion seems to have as much trouble with passive voice as many high school English students. Any time there is a construction of “was + verb(any conjugation)”, it highlighted it as passive. But in the passage I entered, all of those constructions were in the form of “was + gerund (the -ing form of the verb)” AKA the past progressive.
Now, I know EditMinion’s purpose is to bring attention to area’s that need to be checked over, but because there is enough trouble with passive voice vs other “was verb” constructions, it might be helpful to figure out a way to separate true passive constructions.
On the other hand, I realized that I write a lot of past progressive verbs, and may want to rephrase those when I do a serious edit.
On a related note, it didn’t seem to count things correctly when I had all the buttons selected. You might want to note this if other people have this happen, and ask that they focus on their worst areas for self-editing.
Ironically, I sent that and immediately saw something I wish I could edit. Oops.
I purchased the upgrade program and I have not receive it. I think there is a problem, I will give it a few more days to see if I receive it. If I do not hear from you in the next few days, I will assumed there is problem; as I see others are having the same problem.
Thanks
I for all time emailed this weblog post page to all my friends, as if like to
read it after that my friends will too.