Michael La Ronn

“This tool is a game changer!”

"It is not a replacement for an editor, but your editor will love you if you use this tool."

Michael La Ronn has published many science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He also runs the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up where he provides writing advice for authors. Learn more about him at www.authorlevelup.com.

““I have begun using this in my everyday routine. It has become indispensable.””

Video Transcription

Today we’re taking a look at Draftsmith, a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to help you catch typos and edit your work at a level we’ve never seen before in the writing space. I’m just gonna cut to the chase and give you everything you need to know within, like, the next 30 seconds. So, first things first, this tool is a game changer, guys. I have begun using this in my everyday routine. It has become indispensable, and I know it’s going to become indispensable for you, too. Here’s why.

First, it uses OpenAI’s Large Language Models to help you, one, find typos, and, two, redraft sentences as needed to help you harness the power of AI without having to use ChatGPT or do any sort of prompting. Next, it does not keep your data, and it does not use your data to train or build AI models. Next, it helped me catch seventy percent more typos than Grammarly, Microsoft Word, and ProWritingAid combined, and the errors it helped me catch were not caught by the previously mentioned apps, and I have receipts and proof later in the video. It’s highly accurate, with very few false positives, unlike other apps on the market today. It’s available in Microsoft Word on both Windows and Mac operating systems, which is always a plus, and this is coming soon for Microsoft Word for the web. Now, if you didn’t know, Microsoft Word is available for free on the web, has been for a long time, and Draftsmith will work in the web version, which means that you will not need to have a paid Microsoft subscription in order to do everything I’m going to show you in this video. It only means that you’ll have to have a paid Draftsmith license. So that’s coming soon, and keep that in the back of your head as you watch this video.

If you pay monthly, the cost is $18 per month, but if you pay annually the cost is $120 a year, which shakes out to about $10 a month. And they offer a very generous free trial that has very few limitations. And this is from the Intelligent Editing team, the same team that brought us PerfectIt another app that I’ve spotlighted on this channel and that I also use in my regular editing workflow.

Those are the fast facts. Now let’s get into some details. But, before we do, quick disclaimer that I did receive full access to Draftsmith by the Intelligent Editing team in exchange for an honest review. Also, the Intelligent Editing team did consult me early in this app’s development to get some advice and feedback on how to develop it, because I have been using artificial intelligence for about the last ten months or so to help me edit my work. So I want you to know that upfront. And second, in case you’re new here, my name is Michael La Ronn with Author Level Up. I do regular writing videos to help you unlock your inner Stephen King, Dean Koontz, whatever your favourite mega-best-seller is, because we’ve all got that potential inside of us, and I hope that these videos help you do that. So, if you like what you see here, hit that Subscribe button. And with that, let’s jump into my computer so you can see how it works.

We’re here inside Microsoft Word, which is where Draftsmith lives. Now, the installation process for Draftsmith just takes a couple of minutes. It’s extremely easy. And, once you install it on your Microsoft account, it will be available wherever you use Microsoft Word. So, if you use Microsoft Word in the cloud, if you use it on your computer, it will show up everywhere you use it, which is great. Alright, so I can access it by going to the Draftsmith tab here on the ribbon. And that will open up Draftsmith. And if I click the Launch button here, it will appear on the right-hand side of the screen. So, we’re signed in, and you’ll notice that we’ve got a plethora of options here, which is great. So, the option that I know that many of you are going to be interested in is what we call this Dictation Fixer. I’m gonna make the text really big so you can see everything I’m doing. And I have turned on Track Changes just so you can see the sort of changes that are being made. This is not turned on by default when you’re using Draftsmith, by the way.

Okay, so, when I click that Dictation Fixer button, you’ll notice that I get three options. Now, the three options are options that are available under any of these buttons that you pick, but it just defaults them for your convenience, because it knows that you’re going to be probably using these if you’re dictating. For example, I dictate all my books, and I know a lot of you guys do as well. The default feature when you click that button is Remove Typos, and this is the feature that I know that probably the majority of you are going to be using ninety percent of the time. But we’re going to go through a lot of the different features so you can see how they work.

Okay, but with these buttons along the top of Draftsmith and the buttons in the opening menu, you have the ability to use those buttons on anything that you're doing.

It's more of a configuration thing. All right. So when I click this remove typos button, it's going to find typos in my work. Now, if I click this Polish button, it is going to recommend minor changes to help me polish the sentence and make it a little bit cleaner.

And I've got this simplified button that I can use for text that needs to be simplified. Particularly nonfiction text, for example. Now I can click between them. OK, now I can also click this down arrow and that will give me some additional options where I can change the nature of the edit as well.

All right, so if I go down here, you'll see that I've got a suggester. So all the suggestions are going to appear in this box, and it's going to analyze sentences based on where I put my cursor. So if I put my cursor in this sentence, it is going to analyze that sentence. And to get it to do that, all I have to do is click this refresh button. And then it's going to analyze the sentence.

Now you will notice that it does not recommend any changes for this sentence. OK, that is great. So I am going to click this next button. And you will notice here that now it is recommending a change. OK, so I have got this Show changes button clicked. If I toggle between this, it will show me what changes the app is suggesting. So, for removing typos, I would always recommend that you have that button clicked.

OK, so you can tell I made some errors here. Instead of cooped, I said coped and instead of kneaded I said need. OK, so both of those are solid suggestions. So I am going to replace the text. And because I have track changes enabled, you will notice that it made the changes directly in the manuscript and I just did that to make it a little bit easier for you to see.

OK and I can just continue cycling through my sentences and finding errors as they come up. OK, so here's another one. Oh, OK, so I missed an article. This happened. This happens all the time where you're writing a writing a sentence and you drop an article. OK, And this is really, really good at catching those dropped articles, 'cause sometimes even editors miss edits like this. OK, so I forgot to say a so I signed Hazel up for a service animal certification a few years ago. So we're gonna click that and it fixes the text directly in Microsoft Word. I love this, especially if you're using Microsoft Word as your primary writing app. If you if you got a problem, just open up Draftsmith and you can fix it in seconds.

All right, let's take a look at another type of error that Draftsmith can catch that other spelling and grammar checkers probably would not catch. And that is a proper noun type of error. So I'm going to review this sentence and it says here that our first stop was the Saint Louis Central Library. Well, that's a proper noun, and that should be capitalized. So it helped me catch that minor error there. So we're going to replace that. So you would just go through all of your sentences, have this, scan it, and you'd be done. You'd have a lot of typos that would be caught.

Now, I recognize that you do have to go sentence by sentence. It can be a little slow, but the team is working on some ways to improve that. But the team has told me that they really do want authors to be in the driver's seat here. They don't want to just be recommending changes that may or may not be a good fit for your work. So that's why they want the author to initiate the edit.

So let's take a look at some of the other features. If I click this down arrow. I have the ability to change my choices here, so instead of removing typos, I could choose to redraft the sentences. So for example, instead of saying our first stop was the Saint Louis Central Library, we could make this a little bit more active. We could say we first visited the Saint Louis Central Library. Now that's not to my taste, but that's something that you could do, and if you don't like it, you don't have to accept it.

I could also. I'll pick a different sentence I can break up. A sentence. OK, so this sentence here is a bit of a long sentence, so it could recommend breaking this up if I wanted to. It would just basically, if I replace the text here, it would just put a period here in the middle of the sentences and, you know, help me still keep what I was trying to say. So that is an option. If you've got a really long sentence and maybe you know it needs to be broken up, you can experiment with that as well.

Now you do have the ability to change from passive to active voice as well. If you've got some text that's in the passive voice, it will make some recommendations to get you into the active voice.

That has its time and its place, you know, I don't know that I would use this a whole lot for fiction, but if you're writing sales copy or book descriptions, that's sort of thing.

Passive voice there is a big no-no, so you could potentially use this tool to help you strengthen your sales copy as well.

Now, Draftsmith has many other features as well, so we'll just give a quick overview of some of the other features that you may be able to take advantage of.

The 1st is a fluency enhancer, so if English is not your first language and you are trying to find ways to strengthen your text, Draftsmith will recommend some additional things to help you improve your fluency in English or at least improve the fluency of the text.

There's also the Engagement Tuner which will help make your text a little bit more lively and engaging. Help you improve your tone. Not useful for fiction, but there are some cases of nonfiction where that could be helpful.

There's also a word count trimmer where it will recommend reductions to your sentences to help you hit a certain word count that could be useful. If you're writing, you know magazine articles or things where you've got a strict limit, that can be helpful.

There's also an empathy tuner, which they recommend you use for marketing press releases or SCO that has its time and its place, but for fiction and nonfiction, probably not all that useful for you.

And then there's also the ability to make it easier for an audience at a different reading level. So for example, I can go in here and get recommendations that would be more suited for an 11 year old or a high schooler, or I can simplify the sentences and you've got various different categories here that are great.

OK? And you even have the ability to translate text to English if you want to do that using the power of the Open AI language models.

So this is all here. I just bring it to your attention just in case you ever need this someday.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention some of the funnier options that are hidden. Draftsmith So I could make this text happier if I wanted to. But more importantly, I could also make this text sound like a pirate. So, up until college, I was a spry young lad. That's hilarious. I could also make it in the style of Tolkien if I wanted to do that. OK, so it's not recommending anything there, but you can just give me some different recommendations.

If you want to have a little bit of fun with this, you can do that as well. You can make it sound like Shakespeare. All those sorts of things I guess I had. I had a blast doing that. I thought it was pretty fun.

Now you should know about that. So this is a tool that you can use every day to help you catch more typos and more spelling errors. But Michael, you said earlier in the video that this can help you catch more typos and spelling and grammar errors than other apps that are on the market. Please provide some proof. I am glad you asked that.

So you guys know I like my data and I like to be a little scientific about things. So I put Draftsmith to the test and compared it against Microsoft Word's basic editor.

The free version of Grammarly. The paid version of Grammarly and Pro writing aid. And here is what I found. I ran a test on a sample of fiction that was about 1300 words. Now keep in mind that I've been using the same large language models for the last year, so I know how they work and these results are very typical of what I was getting before. I use Draftsmith as well. All right, so that's how I know this is accurate. So in this 1300 word sample.

There were 15 bona fide.

True typos or grammatical errors. So I ran the text through each app to find how many errors it caught. So Microsoft Word's editor, very basic, caught 3 out of 15 errors, right? That's about 20%.

The free version of Grammarly caught four out of the 15 errors at 27%. The premium version of Grammarly fared a little bit better at 7 out of 15 errors, around 47%.

Providing aid had the same results at 7 out of 15 errors at 47%, and Draftsmith just comes and blows them out of the water, catching 12 out of the 15 errors at around 80%.

All right, so clearly you can see here Draftsmith caught more errors than the other spelling and grammar checkers. But we can go a little bit deeper than that because the numbers are actually better than they appear.

What I wanted to know was what was the total number of unique errors that each writing app caught that none of the others caught, because that is really going to tell you the true value of this app.

So Microsoft Word's Editor did not catch any unique errors all of the other APPS caught the same errors that Microsoft Word's editor used, which means I really didn't even need to use it. There was really no value in using it. Now, Grammarly Free was the same way, unfortunately. Nothing it caught wasn't caught already by the other competitors. Grammarly Premium caught two unique errors, which is a respectable number now. ProWritingAid did catch one unique error that none of the other ones caught. It was an em dash that needed to be reformatted, so I give them some credit for that. Now here we go again with Draftsmith blowing everybody else out of the water. Draftsmith caught 10 errors that the other apps did not catch, meaning you are in completely new territory with this application.

You're at another level you if you use this in addition to the other apps on this screen, you will automatically catch more typos. And when I do the math on this example, guys Draftsmith help me catch 70% more errors, meaning that my manuscript is going to be a lot cleaner when I send this to my editor.

Now, as I said before, I have been testing this stuff for about a year. And I can tell you that these results are right on the money on what I typically see with Open AI large language models.

They are helping you catch things that you could not normally catch otherwise. 

But do not take my word for it. Do a quick experiment yourself.  Try the free trial.  Run the numbers, see how many errors you actually have in the manuscript, see how many Draftsmith can catch. Compare it to their spelling and grammar checkers that you are already using, and I think you will see that you will be getting very good results.

Draftsmith is an amazing innovation that inspires us to really think about a future of writing where typos are a thing of the past.  I think that is a beautiful thing.  It is not a replacement for an editor, but your editor will love you if you use this tool.

So let us talk about the pros of Draftsmith. I have talked about a lot of them already, but I will reiterate that it is highly accurate.  It helps you catch typos and grammar errors that other current tools in the market cannot catch.

So, you're kind of leapfrogging in your capabilities if you use this app. It's $120.00 per year, which I know you guys don't like subscriptions, but that's fairly affordable and also as the open AI models improve, the app will hopefully improve as well. Now that being said, because this is an honest review, there are some criticisms of the app that I think everybody should weigh and test for themselves.

First, this can be a little slow. You're going to have to go through each of your sentences and review it. Now it's not going to take you forever, but it is going to take you some time to be able to unlock some of the abilities and get the advanced grammar and spell checking that we're talking about. I spoke to the development team about this, and they are aware of this and they are working on some ways to improve this in the future. So I have no doubt that this is actually going to improve.

Another thing you should know is that this is not a perfect solution. It is going to recommend some false positives or some things that will be wrong. Now, my experience is that the false positives that it does recommend are extremely low and extremely rare compared to other checkers on the market, particularly Grammarly. So even if you do use this, you're still coming out ahead, but you just have to understand that not everything it gives you is going to be a perfect suggestion. And the only other con that I can think about as I use this app is that you know because this uses the Open AI large language models. This app is at the whim of Open AI. So if Open AI does something that completely breaks the language models, it could affect Draftsmith. And so that's something that you have to understand as well.

Now with the Intelligent Editing team, you are in good hands. If you've ever used PerfectIt, then you know that they create top-notch apps and they are top-notch developers, and I have no doubt that they can fix any issues that come up. But that being said, you are still at the mercy of OpenAI.

Another thing that I know some people are going to ask me about is: Does this integrate with Scrivener or insert the name of whatever other writing app you use? The answer is, unfortunately, no. It does not integrate with any other writing apps. So if you're drafting your manuscript in another writing app, yes, you are going to have to follow an extra step to get this into Microsoft Word. So what I would propose, though, is that most of you, I would imagine, are probably already going to get your work into a Word format anyway.

So what you should do is simply wait until you are ready to send it to your editor. Then run Draftsmith through your manuscript at that time. That way, you are not taking an extra step and going into another writing app or introducing more friction into your process. Just get it ready for your editor, get it into Draft Smith, and then make the edits you need to make and then send it to your editor. If you would like to check out a free trial, you can get it at draftsmith.ai.

Like I said, you have nothing to lose. I want to thank the intelligent editing team for providing me access to Draftsmith, and I hope that you guys will enjoy this.

Take care and happy editing.