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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hello, everybody! Welcome to our first session of day! 2 of romance writers week. I hope you all are having a great Tuesday so far, and I want to go ahead and make sure that everything is working. So if you can see and hear me go ahead and drop into the chat. Hi, Linda! Good to see you go ahead and drop into the chat, and your favorite, your name, and then your favorite takeaway from day. One of romance writers week.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi! Good morning, Barbara. Thank you for joining us so early in the day.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi, Lena! Good morning. Hello! And apologize if I have not said that correctly.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi Shannon Shannon says so much incredible information yesterday. We've got jasmine from Germany, Teresa from Minneapolis, New Jersey.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Great would love Savannah sessions catching the replays. Oh, Pipa! Hello! From Connecticut. My family is in Connecticut. So they were sending me photos of the

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: the session or the snow there.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Great looks like we've got people from all over Scotland, Italy, Spain, another Minnesota, Canada.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Amazing! Well, welcome, everybody. I am so glad to hear you. Just a few just a few things to chat about before we get started. And yes, Linda, I am going to be at London Book fair. So send me an email. We can talk about it.

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but just a few housekeeping notes before we get started. So today, I am going to be giving our session on how to make use technology to make editing easier and faster but a couple of quick bits of housekeeping before we get started

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: first accessing your replays. So all of the replays are added to our hub page when they're done processing by zoom can take different amounts of time, just depending on how quickly zoom goes! Usually we add them by the end of the day. Same thing with slides just as soon as we get them.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and the replays are available for everyone for one week after the event until March first, and then, if you're a premium and premium pro member, they will be available at that point. After that.

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Just a couple another kind of quick bit of housekeeping about this week in general, our sessions Monday through Thursday are free for everyone to attend, and our session on Friday are limited to premium and premium pro users. If you wanna upgrade your account by Friday morning you can do a monthly or annual or lifetime plan. Then you can gain access and everybody who has an existing premium, a premium pro account, or a new one.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: We'll receive an email Friday morning with the instructions for accessing those live sessions and viewing the replays. It's going to be different links for Friday. So just keep an eye on your email for Friday morning.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And if any of you are interested in upgrading before that time, we do have special offers for that. So we have 25% off yearly premium or premium pro. You could find that link on the Hub page which I've just put into the chat, and we'll talk a lot about premium today on my session but providing a premium is a great way to line edit and to edit your work. And it has a bunch of different OP. Tools for you to improve your improve your manuscript, make it really tight, and make sure that romance story is great to go.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay. And just as we get down to getting started, remember, you could always keep the conversation going in our community which I'm putting the link to in the chat. If you have any questions for me that I don't get to by the end of my session today. Please feel free to join the community

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and just tag me. Say, Haley, I've got a question for you, and I will be happy to answer it there. And then, as a reminder for this session, please use the QA. Box. If you have questions for me, it is just me here monitoring the session today. And the chat is moving very, very quickly. So please put any questions you have for me about editing or about providing aid into the QA. And I will do my best to answer those and if you'd like to chat with anyone else about the session, or just about anything in general. Please use the chat

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and as I said, everything is available on the hub for you to see. Okay. With that being said, I think we are ready to get started. And so, Hi, everybody, I have not met you before. My name is Haley. I am the director of community here at providing aid which means that my job is to put on events like this, which is pretty much the best job in the world.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I've got my co-pilot, Knox down here who is eating his bone. So if you hear him barking a little bit in the background. Hopefully, the bone will keep him occupied. But we will see how it goes. He's very, very rainy here today in England, so he has not had as much of a walk as I normally would like him. Mercer put 4 months old in his great yeah, I

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I do not have a crate for Knox, but he should be. He should be good here with his phone for for a bit. He seems very happy. Okay, well, let's get started. Let me share my screen again.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Good to see. We've got so many dog and cat lovers in the in the chat. Okay, so today, we're gonna talk about how to use technology to make editing simple and I'm going to talk about this in relationship to pro writing aid. Specifically. Now, I wanna start off by saying a couple of different things about the use of technology and editing, because

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I've been doing this session for several years now, but a lot of things have changed since I first started first started doing this. I'm sure everybody is really aware of how Chat, Gbt and generative AI have come into the process and really just opened up a bunch of different possibilities for writing and editing and kind of changed the landscape in a way that we're all still figuring out. So

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I am going to be talking about how to use technology to make editing simple. But that being said, I'm going to talk about it, using pro writing aid and using pro writing aid in a scaling way. So all of the things that I'm going to show you today will have options to do without pro writing aid. They will have options to do with pro writing aid. And then, even within pro writing aid. There's going to be ways to scale that up and down. So there will be ways to use pro writing Aids reports to just get more information.

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But there will also be ways to use prating aids more generative AI features. If that's something that you like. As a writer myself, I am really passionate about using tools that help you, but only to the extent that you want to help. You want that help. So if generative AI is not something that you're comfortable with. I'll show you how to do it without that. And if you are comfortable with generative AI, and that's part of your process that's totally cool. And you can use that as well. So just again.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: because technology has been changing so rapidly, I just wanted to start off by saying that everything I'll teach you today is something that you can do by yourself, something you can do with just the the regular kind of level of pro writing aid features. But it's also something that if you want to add generative AI to the top for ideation, or even for rewriting purposes, you can do that. So we'll talk about all that today.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay, as I said again, my name is Haley. I'm the director of community at providing aid. It is so great to be here with all of you. And today we're going to talk about a few things. First. I'm going to talk about. Why, I think clarity is the main goal. When you are editing. Next, I'm going to talk about 5 principles that can make your writing more clear, and how you can do them using technology. And then, finally, I'm going to talk about how you can apply those principles to your writing to make it more effective when you're using technology to edit.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So let's go ahead and get in. As I said, I believe that clarity is an essential part of storytelling. And, to be frank, I think that's the main goal of your editing process. Whether you're editing your story with a tool like fiction, or whether you're editing, doing kind of your line and copy editing with a tool like pro writing aid. Clarity is going to be your job. And that's because if your writing isn't clear it's not going to engage your readers.

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So as writers, our main job is to get our meaning across clearly and effectively. So, if our writing is too complicated or too hard to follow. Then we're not actually doing our job. And all the time we've spent crafting, you know, meticulously crafting neat cutes for our characters. And you know, thinking about how to create this this amazing love match, it's not going to work. If we haven't

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: told that story clearly. If we're being unclear, it means that our readers are going to spend more time trying to figure out what we're saying than actually engaging with our work. And good writing is always going to prioritize clearly communicating ideas over showing off fancy and confusing language.

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So before I get any further, I want to go into what clarity is and isn't. So when I'm talking about clarity as the essential goal of your editing process, I'm talking about 3 things. First, I'm talking about how easy your writing is to understand

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: now how easy your writing is to understand is a sliding scale, and what makes something easy will be different depending on your audience. So clarity is basically on a sliding scale. It's how easy your writing is to understand. But second, it's ha! Whether or not your sentences are set up in a reader focused way, because what's clear for one group of readers is not going to be clear for another group of readers. Has anyone here read any of the romance books by Allie Hazelwood by any chance just feel free to tell me in the chat if you read anything by Allie Hazelwood.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Yes, yes, we've got some.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Yeah, yes. Has anyone read Ali Hazelwood when she was a fan fiction author before she became a where she published her romance

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: was just me.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: No? Okay. Well, Ellie Hazelwood started as a fan fiction author, and then she's adapted some of her content into original fiction, and then she's just coming up with original fiction as well. But for those of you who are or are not familiar with her.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Ellie Hazel Wood is a scientist as well as a writer, and so she is often using content. Often her characters are science scientists. So they are. You know, they're talking about like pretty, complex concepts. They're like physicists and things like that. Now, because these are romance books and not, you know, hardcore science fiction. Or you know science textbooks.

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She describes the science, but she does it in a way that romance readers who have no background in science will understand. If she was writing a similar story, but the focus was on the science rather than on the romance. She might go into much more depth about the science, because that audience would expect it. So that's what I mean when saying, you know, things are set up as in a reader focused way you need to keep your mind on who you're writing for.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: so that you're able to make sure that those readers will get what they need to get and understand what they need to understand so again, Allie Hazel was a great example because she talks about complex scientific scientific concepts. And her characters are really, you know, complex scientific

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: scientists themselves. But she's kind of glossing over the the science and not going super into it so that she's able to. You know, focus on the romance, which is what those readers want. So clarity is, how easy your writing is to understand whether your sentences are set up in a reader focused way. And then, finally, it's also about adding rich and specific language that adds to your audiences understanding. So again,

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Allie Hazelwood is a really great example of this, because Ally Hazelwood does have really beautiful descriptions of physics and the work that their character, her characters, are doing in these different narratives, and she does that because it's adding to their world and adding to their internal characterization. But she's not

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: She's not going too deep into it. She's just doing it when it's adding things there. So when you're thinking about clarity, you want to think about how easy your writer writing is to understand whether or not your sentences are set up in a reader focused way. And then have you added rich and specific language where it makes sense to add to your writer's under reader's understanding.

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And then clarity, on the other hand, is not how simple or juvenile the ideas in your writing are, and there. It's nothing to do with whether or not your pros is engaging, unique, or exciting. So often when I talk about making writing more clear as part of the editing process. People get really nervous, and they think, Oh, you know, I I'm writing for adults. I don't want to make it, you know, too simple, or I don't want to make it too juvenile. Not

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writing for kids, but clarity has nothing to do with whether or not your ideas are for kids, or whether or not you're writing for kids.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: whether you're writing for kids, young adults, adults, etc. You deserve to have clear language and clear and

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: clear construction of your ideas, so that your audience can engage with that and then clarity also has nothing to do with whether or not your pros is engaging, unique, or exciting. This is something that I hear a lot from people. If they are you, particularly as they're starting to use technology to help in their writing process. They're really, really worried that the technology is going to take what makes them them out of their writing. They're worried that the technology is going to take the personality away from that.

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So I wanna start off by saying that clarity has nothing to do with whether or not your pros is engaging, unique, and exciting. You can have a very, very clear voice. You can have sentences that sound like you while still being clear.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and we'll talk about more about that as we go through and also I love all of the archive of our own love, and it's going on in the chat. It is the best place. Okay? So now that we've talked about what clarity is and isn't.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: What does clarity mean? How do we get there? Clarity starts with your sentences. It starts at the sentence level. So when we are editing, and when we are using technology to make our writing more clear, we need to look sentence by sentence.

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And that's because every sentence is like a Mini movie. It's almost a complete story in itself. So I want you to think of every single sentence in your writing as a mini movie. Your reader is playing in their head.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So if I say, Nox eats the bone, you kind of have an image of what that looks like, or the dog eats the bone. Even if you don't know exactly what my dog looks like, you'll have an image in your mind that you're playing with. That goes along with that sentence. And that's why we want to make sure that our sentences are clear, so that image that our readers are creating in their minds is accurate to what we're trying to portray. If our writing is too complicated, if we haven't gotten our meaning

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cross clearly enough, then that movie is going to be inaccurate.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If we have clear sentences, then we have will have clear paragraphs, and if we will have clear, clear paragraphs, then we will have clear stories. We're not going to have a clear story. If we have confusion at the sentence level. So that's why, when I'm talking about editing today, I'm going to talk about creating clear sentences

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: alright. So now that we know what clarity is. Let's talk about how we write clear sentences.

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So I'm going to talk about 5 self editing principles that you can use today. Or that you can learn today and use edit with in the future, using technology, as I mentioned before, for anyone who is new. As I go through each of these principles. I'm going to explain what the principle is. Talk about. Why, I think it's so important for the editing process. And then I'm going to talk to you about how you can use technology specifically pro writing it to fix it.

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Now, again, I'm going to talk about that in 3 different ways. First, I'm going to talk about how you can do it yourself.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Next, I'm going to talk about how you can use. Do it. Do using kind of the basic level of prating aid features. So reports suggestions, goals. And then I'm also going to talk about how you can fix some of these things using generative. AI. If that is something that you're comfortable with, you're not comfortable with it. You don't have to use it. So that's why I'll show the 3 different ways.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay, our first principle of editing is to make your subjects the stars.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So subjects are the stars of your sentences. They are the main actors in your text, it is important to prioritize them. You want to treat your subjects like the stars of your sentences.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If you've written a sentence with passive voice. That means you have made something other than your subject, your star. You put the object of your sentence before the subject. When you do this, you take the power away from your subjects. So a passive voice sentence is like the one pictured here. The present was opened by Jane. That sentence kind of come if you come back to that principle of the Mini movie.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: the sentence kind of creates a movie where the present pops into the reader's mind first, because it's the first thing that was brought up in the sentence. The present. And then Jane is all the way at the back. She's kind of out of focus as we see here, because Jane comes in at the very end of the sentence. So this is a great example of using of how passive voice can kind of take the power away from your subject again in this very, very simple sentence

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like this the present was opened by Jane. It's not going to get in the way of your understanding. But the more complex your sentences are, passive. Voice can negatively affect your readers because it becomes too wordy and confusing.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: It's not grammatically incorrect. However, you can use passive voice. It's just important to choose when so when you're thinking about editing, you need to make sure that you are choosing when, to use passive voice rather than just having passive voice there as

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: as a a kind of a bad habit, or something that you didn't realize. So I recommend keeping passive voice within in these 3 instances.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: First, you can keep it if the subject of your sentence is unknown. So in a sentence like Stonehenge was built around 5,000 years ago, we don't know who built Stonehenge. So that's okay. We can have the passive construction there, because we don't know.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: You can also use passive voice if the subject of your sentence is irrelevant. So in this sentence the time in life building was constructed in 1959 and changed the skyline. The passive construction of was constructed is okay, because it doesn't really matter. We're not focused on that in this sentence.

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And then finally, as I think, Kathy said, you can also use

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: passive voice if you're making a deliberate choice so often crime or even newspaper headlines will use passive voice because they want to create mystery. So we see here, Mary realized a suspicious package had been left on her door. There's a passive construction here because we don't know who left the package for Mary. So it's creating this kind of deliberate choice to make this be mysterious, because for Mary she doesn't know who left it either. Right?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So many of us use passive voice in our daily writing. I am recommending that you try to eliminate eliminate, passive voice, except if you are in one of these 3 instances, if the subject of your sentence is unknown, if the subject is irrelevant, or if you're trying to make a deliberate choice to hide the subject for another reason.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If that's the case, then you can leave If you can leave, you can leave passive voice in. If, however, you want to get rid of passive voice, the way to fix it is to put the subject in the beginning of the sentence, so instead of the present was opened by Jane, we flip the subject to the beginning and say, Jane opens, the present can see the images kind of change, so that, Jane, the girl, is the focus as opposed to the present in our previous our previous sentence.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So like, I said, I'm going to show you now how to fix it both by yourself, and then also with the with technology. So if you want to just fix this yourself. You can find the word by. That's a good indicator that there's a path of construction so like the present was opened by Jane, you can look for 2 b plus verb constructions, and then you can switch it. Once you found that path of construction, you can switch it. So the doer comes first. So instead of the present was opened by Jane, Jane opens the present.

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Now, since the session is about editing with technology.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: the process that I just talked about doing it by yourself is something you can definitely do, and is something that you often work with line editors and copy editors for to fix your pros. Now, technology can make this simpler and easier. As a couple of people have noted in the chat pro writing aid has the ability to find passive voice for you. So I am in pro writing Aids real time report right now. I'm in our web editor, and I just have a sample text here.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: The real time report which is on when you turn on your document highlights instances of passive voice as one of the kind of key areas that it's looking for in your document. So we can see here that we have a passive construction.

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In the sentence that's underlined here in purple.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Now, I saw a couple of different people talking about how pro writing a doesn't allow pass the voice in the chat. Now. this is where technology is really helpful. And this is why I think technology is such a great part of the line editing process. Specifically, pro writing aid gives you this information. It tells you you have a passive construction here, and it does it with a touch of a button, so you can find it really, simply and easily, just by scrolling down and seeing the purple the purple highlights for passive voice.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Now, at this point you can choose what you want to do with it. So if you just want to have the information of where you have a passive construction providing and shows you that it's here.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If you decide, you know what? Actually, this passive construction shouldn't be here. It's not for one of those 3 lead reasons I just listed. So I need to switch it to active. Then you have a couple of different options.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: first, because pro-writing aid is founded for you. You could just rewrite the sentence yourself

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providing it also has the option in some easier sentences to just fix the passive voice and to just eliminate it in a dropdown kind of like this. This isn't passive voice, but it will just switch it easily for you.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: But if the sentence is a bit more a bit more complex, you could use a generative AI tool like suggest rephrases to suggest different ways to say this sentence. So there's a bunch of different ways. You can figure out how to fix this passive voice using technology, the very, very baseline. The technology makes it super easy to find places where you have passive sentence constructions and just see them with the touch of a button.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If you want to fix them, you can also just fix them by adding specific specific

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: making specific choices. Rather excuse me, or, if you'd like to, you can even go a step further and have generative AI suggesting, you know, different ways to do that. And just as Leslie says in the chat, sometimes the generative AI might change the intent, but it also could give you different ideas for rewriting. So that's a whole other idea that you could want to do.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: or that you could have. You could look in, see what it suggests, and take that and make it your own as well. So there's so many different ways that technology can make something like passive voice, much faster to find and fix in your writing.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and that is just the beginning.

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So our second principle of making your writing more clear for your readers is to reduce what I call glue words

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: in good writing. You want to prioritize working words over glue words. Now, what are those 2 types of words?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Working words are words that contain a sentence's most essential information. You cannot change them, or the meaning of the sentence will change. So think about your nouns, your verbs, your adjectives. Those are working words. So if I said, go back to the example of my dog, we say Nox, choose his bone, and I change Knox to Meime, who is my cat.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Then the meaning of the sentence changes so Mae May chooses. The bone is different than Knox. Choose the bone, so I can't change Nox or may make. It's a working word. If I changed. Nox, choose the bone to Nox. Choose my shoes

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again. The meaning of the sentence changes. It's a working word.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If I changed Nox, choose the bone to Knox chases the bone. The meaning of the sentence changes again. Those are all working words. They contain the most sentences, most essential information. You cannot change them, or the meaning of the sentence will change. And, Amy, I see your question in the chat. Can you just make sure that you add that to the QA. So that I can. I don't lose it before the end. And same thing goes for anybody who has any questions.

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If you can make sure you add them to the Q&A, that'd be great.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay? So those are working words. The other types of words and sentences are glue, words, glue. Words are basically everything else. So if working words are your nouns, your adjectives, your verbs, glue, words is everything that makes the essential pieces of your sentence stick together.

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you can reduce, remove, or replace them, and the core meaning of the sentence will likely stay the same. So think about words like articles, prepositions, conjunctions, all these words that you do need to make your sentence make sense. But if you have too many of them, your sentence is going to become muddled.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: If you have too many of those glue words, your sentence is going to become sticky. It's hard to read. It's hard to get through

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: so sticky sentence. Let's look a look at this very sticky sentence.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Dave walked over into the backyard of the school in order to see if there was a new bicycle that he could use in his class.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Now this sentence has a lot of blue words, and not as many working words. What I would love for you to do is tell me in the chat, what are our working words in the sentence the essential bits of this sentence that we cannot change, or else the sentence would change. What are our working words?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: We can just type them right into the chat

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: walked. Yep. Dave walked yet. Dave bicycle walked Dave

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: backyard school walking Dave back here. It's cool. Yeah, great job. Everybody.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Exactly. So I got. Dave walked backyard school bicycle class. If I changed Dave to Haley, the meaning of the sentence would change. If I change school to hospital, the sentence would change. If I change bicycle to roller blades, the sentence would change. If I change class to you know, after school program, or you know. II don't know. I can't think of anything else. But you would use the bicycle for racing racing crew, or something like that. All of that would change the meaning of the sentence.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So those are the working words. Everything else in this sentence is a glue word. So you can see our proportions are way off. Here we only have a few working words, and all of the rest of this sentence is glue. So this sentence is really overly long and confusing. It's not grammatically incorrect. There's nothing you know wrong with it. It's not. Nothing's misspelled. It's not missing a comma. But the sentence is too long and confusing. We're hiding the meaning behind all of these extra words.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So how do we fix it?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: The good and the bad news is that there isn't one way to fix the sticky sentence. Now, I said, good and bad, and because, as I mentioned at the beginning, I know a lot of people tend to be nervous when editing that they're just going to make their writing sound the same as everybody else's, especially if they're using technology. They're worried that the technology is going to take away their their voice and make it sound totally different from them, or make it sound all the same, even worse as everybody else's.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: When you're fixing fixing sticky sentences. There is not one way to do that, so you can create dozens of different ways to make one single sentence better. So fixing a sticky sentence with technology does not mean it's going to sound the same as everybody else's, because there's not one single way to fix it.

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And the bad news about that is that there's not one way to fix it. And so you're going to have to go through a lot of different options to A, find sticky sentences and B fix them. And that's where I think technology can really, really help. Technology can help you find those sticky sentences, and it can give you ideas for fixing them without without

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: sounding like everyone else. But to kind of demonstrate like that. Let's try this. I would like everybody to try to fix this sentence, so, as we said, it's nothing wrong with it. It's not grammatically incorrect, but it is too sticky. So see if you can rewrite this sentence and just drop it in the chat and make it sound clearer, more effective

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and eliminate some of those blue words. Diane's ahead of the game, Diane said. Dave walked over to the school's backyard, hunting for a new bicycle that he could use in Class Nice. Let's see what other options we've got.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Diane did a great job of cutting out some of this middle part.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Amy has. Dave walked into the school's backyard to see if there was a bicycle to use in class. Dave walked to the school to find a new bicycle to use for class. Dave walked into the school's backyard to find a bicycle. Yeah, exactly.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: This is really interesting, because we've got a bunch of different options. I think. Did Amy maybe even put into here, or did I? Just is that my chat going a bit wild?

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Or maybe there's 2 Amy's.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: anyway, all of the different we can see here. Basically, every single option is slightly different than everybody else's. I don't know if we've had 2 of exactly the same to Amy, so I don't know if we had had 2 of exactly the same, but we have had almost over a dozen at this point. Different ways to fix this sentence, which again shows every single one of these versions, is stronger than the first sentence that we had. But there are dozens and dozens of ways to change this in order to make it more effective.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I changed it by changing my verb, I said. Dave checked the school's backyard for a new bicycle to use in class a bit cheeky. Change the verb though, because, as the author, I can determine the intent. But basically all this is to say what we want to do in our writing is identify places where we have used too many of these blue words that get in the way of our readers, and then find ways to make it faster or to make it better.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So if you wanna fix this yourself, you can do it, though it's a very manual process. You'll first want to look for overly long sentences, so I would say anything over 18 words is probably too long, and the next thing you wanna do is look for prepositions. So words like excuse me. Blue words words like prepositions, conjunctions, articles, anything that's going to, you know you can produce, remove, or replace to make the sentence more effective. And then you're going to rewrite it.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: There's not one way to fix the sticky sentence. It's not going to be one simple fix. But knowing this, you can change the sentence yourself to make it more effective.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Now, technology can make the process much faster and much easier. So providing aid, first of all

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: scans your scans, your document for something called our glue index. So that is how much? Your kind of overall percentage in the document of glue to sticky words. So we recommend that you have a score of 40% glue words or below, which is this kind of little range that we have here. And then the goals shows you if you are outside of that. So this tick mark shows that we have a bit higher than 40%. So we might wanna look at some of our sticky sentences.

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You can then click to run the sticky sentences report, or you can just get it up here at the top.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and then providing it does the work of finding those sticky sentences for you. So it'll find both sticky. So 60% and higher and semi-sticky, 40 to 60% glue words in the writing in your writing, so you can see them right away. So it does immediately. The technology does that work of finding the sticky sentences for you. You don't have to read. You don't have to count the words. You can just come in and find the sticky sentences

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the next thing that it'll do is it? Will highlight the glue words. So you can see here in the pop up. It just tells you what the glue words are. So again, technology finds it really quickly, and then it tells you what the problematic words are, so you know what to reduce, remove, or replace. If you'd like to.

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then finally, at the the highest level. If you would like to use some of the AI features and the generative AI features, you could also suggest rephrases, so you can hit, suggest, rephrase.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: It'll show you a bunch of different ways to change the sentence. You can either use that directly in the document if you'd like it, or if you don't want to use it, then you can use it as inspiration for another way to change it. But again, technology makes it so much faster, so that rather than reading through and trying to highlight this yourself, it finds it. It highlights the glue words. And then, if you'd like to continue to edit those or to change those words, it'll just give you different options for changing them really quickly.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Good to hear that some people are sticky sentences, fans in Chad. Okay. Our third principle of editing is to use powerful verbs verbs are the engines of our writing. They help make it stronger. Many of our writers. Unfortunately, many of us, including myself, use weak verbs. I think somebody in the somebody in the chat was saying that they never think about changing verbs. Same thing with me. I always kind of get one verb stuck in my head when I'm writing a sentence, and I don't often think about making it more powerful or changing it.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: That's where, again, technology can come in and help. Many writers use weak verbs and weak adjectives, too. And that kind of takes the meaning away and takes the power away of your sentences

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and writers tend to do this in one of 2 ways.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: The first is by hiding verbs in a process known as nominalization. So here's an example of a nominalization. We will make an announcement of the winner on Friday. This highlight here make an announcement is an example of a nominalization.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: It's taking a powerful verb announce. So you could just say, we will announce the winner on Friday, and it's turning that into a weak verb plus noun phrase. So instead of just, we will announce the winner. On Friday we will make an announcement.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Again, this is not incorrect. Make an announcement is a perfectly normal way. To say something, but it's taking the power away. Make is a much less specific and much less powerful verb than announce and make an announcement is a longer phrase than just announce, right? So what we've done here is taken away the verb taken away the power from that sentence, and used a much longer phrase in its place when we don't necessarily have

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to. Writers tend to also use weak verbs by adding adjectives like the word. Very. So saying, things like I ran quickly, needing adverbs to really clarify the meaning of what they're trying to say so. The adverb is kind of doing the work of creating the evocative nature of what you're trying to the picture of what you're trying to paint. And so you're using a weak verb plus an adverb instead of just using a strong verb. In the first place.

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So as a writer. You want to let your verbs power your writing, and create something very, very evocative and strong for your readers.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So I recommend doing 2 things, first, removing nominalizations unless you're trying to dial something back. So sometimes in business writing, for instance, we actually want to use nominalizations because we don't want to come across as too aggressive. Or, you know, we just want to hide some of the power of the verb.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: in which case something like make an announcement is totally fine. However, if you want to show your show, the power of the verb removing nominalizations helps make that strength, so we will announce the winner on Friday instead of we will make an announcement of the winner on Friday.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And then you also want to say words that again create that movie that you really mean. So instead of ran quickly dashed towards the bus verbs that create that evocative nature of what you're looking for.

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Now, if you're looking to do this yourself. You want to look for adverbs in your writing. You also want to look for places where you have done, you know. Used a week verb plus noun construction, so made an announcement, decided to blank again.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Places where you have used a week verb plus now, and we'll show you the nominalizations. And then places where you've used adverbs gives you a hint of where you have used week verbs as well.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Now, technology again makes it much, much easier

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: now. Here. Oh, and Lou, that's such a great point. I'm gonna come back to it in just a second in providing it in the real time checker. We'll do find a couple of these things for you first. This is actually an example of a week. A week adjective and a week and an adverb, but it'll find places where you've used adverbs and just help you help suggest ways for you to change that. It'll also find nominalizations. Here's a good example.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and give you a way to just quickly, with the touch of a button, make the sentence stronger. So again, finding those strong verbs and making it easier for you now a couple quick things that people are just looking for in here. So first we've got our thesaurus, so you can find replacements for nouns, verbs, or adjectives.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: You can also double, click. Any verb oops might cursor's getting away. You can also double click any word and pull up the thesaurus as well. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can do to come in and see additional words if you'd like to use it.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Alright.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay. I want to come back to Lou's question on

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Blue had a really great comment in the chat that a lot of people actually fall into the trap of feeling like they need to have a high word count. I think that is exactly right, Lou, and that's fourth principle that we're gonna talk about here

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: targeting the correct readability. So audiences actually prefer that works are easy to read. And I think, just as Luca says, a lot of people fall into the trap that you need to hit a certain word. Count

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: for me. This is something that comes out of you know how I used to be in university and in high school, and things like that. I would always be trying to hit a specific word count. So I'd say things in the most complicated way possible rather than just saying, you know something direct into the point.

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Now, there is definitely a time and a space for words, for you know, making a point with how you're constructing sentences. But just as Steve is saying, you wanna make sure the words aren't extraneous that they're there for a purpose. And that's because our audiences actually prefer works that are easy to read.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Most mass market fiction is written at a seventh grade reading level.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: which means that a 12 year old could understand it. Now, it doesn't mean that a 12 year old is it's appropriate for a 12 year old. Rather, it means that the language is language accessible to a 12 year old. If that makes sense. So 12 year old could read and comprehend what's being said. That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's, you know, at the same maturity level for a 12 year old.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: But typically audiences prefer prefer works that are easy to read now, like Diane says, that is different. So we're going to. As we talk about readability, we're going to talk about audiences, part of that. So when we're thinking about whether or not something is easy to read. The first thing that I'm talking about is that your ideas are the stars. You want your ideas to shine so your audience isn't sitting there with a dictionary having to open up the dictionary and figure out what

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you're trying to say. So readable work prioritizes the strength of your ideas, your characters, the relationship you've set up, etc. Rather than the you know, showing off your vocabulary.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Readable work also means that you choose your words carefully. You do not have to forego all interesting words, you just have to be choosy. And to illustrate this, I often talk about when I used to be a teacher.

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so when I was a teacher. I was a science teacher, and I had to write assessments for fifth graders so 10 year olds. And and when I did that I would have to use really complicated vocabulary like, you know, photosynthesis, or something like that.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: But I also at the same time had to make sure that the test overall was was at a fifth grade reading level because they're 10 years old. So they actually don't know anything beyond that level. And we need to make sure that you know the test is fair. So I could use words like photosynthesis in my writing as long as I prioritize making everything around photosynthesis simple.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So readability is something that takes into account all of your word choice and your sentence construction. So when you're thinking about making your work readable, it doesn't mean that you have to get rid of every interesting construction. Every interesting word choice. You just need to be choosy. Think about. Why am I constructing it this way? Why am I using this particular word? If you're trying to do something, or you're trying to get a point across, then? Great! That's

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: totally your prerogative as an author. But if it's just a word that slipped in there and you don't, it doesn't really have a clear meaning, or if your sentences just overly long because of glue words, you can cut that down, and it'll make a much more effective experience for your reader than if you're just kind of stuffing your sentences in there.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Ss, dawn says, killing your darlings.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And the third thing is that audience matters so every single audience is different, and you want to consider yours when targeting readability. So most of us, I assume, right here for romance writing, though many of us might be writing in different genres as well. A romance audience is going to have different different

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: ideas of what readable means and what they're expecting from their writing. Then, as Greg says, like a Science Fiction author, right? So Science fiction and fantasy audiences tend to have different ideas of what they like and what they'll want to read, they might be more involved in like complex, intricate world building, and more

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: more acceptable of that, though not all. Sometimes fantasy, romance, or romantic depending on whether it's fantasy, romance, or romance and fantasy that can change a little bit. So if you've read any, you know pure fantasy versus romantic, romantic tends to have a bit less world building, though, will depend on the the writer. And again, what they're what they're focusing on tends to be a bit more about the relationships than

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: you know that politics inherent to the world, though again, that that ratio will depend on who the author is and what your specific audience prefers. So you need to keep in mind who you are writing for when you're targeting readability, think about what your ideal reader likes. And if I think somebody in the chat was saying, they really like to read really strong dry, long text. That is something that people do like to read. So if you're getting to a point, and you're like, that's actually what I want to do. I, my audience, will care about reading longer. You know more.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: more difficult sentences. That is okay. But make sure that you're considering your audience when assessing your readability, so that you're not mismatching your ideas to them. So that's what readability means. On the other hand, readability has nothing to do with read whether or not your pros is boring like, I said, you can use unique words and structures. You just need to do it consciously.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And then finally, it has nothing to do with whether or not your word. Your writing is dumbed down, I think, like Lou says, people tend to think to use complicated sentences, maybe because they have a bit of imposter syndrome, or they just want to make sure that they sound smart. But actually the opposite is true.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Complicated language. Or complicated ideas deserve clear language. The more clear and straightforward your language is, the more people are going to be able to understand your complex ideas. So if you have really adult concepts, really complicated pieces that you're trying to get across. Then that clear language will help make sure that your readers understand it effectively.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So now that we've covered what readability means, it doesn't mean, how do we understand? If our work is readable? And I would recommend using a technology tool called a readability score which helps predict who will be able to understand and read your writing. There are many, many different readability scores to choose from, and basically all of them do the same thing. They read a text and predict who would be able to understand that.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So if you run your work through a readability calculator, and see that your score is too high. You can do a number of different things to fix it. First and foremost, you can look at your vocabulary. See if you can switch any of your complex words for easier ones again, doesn't have to be every single word. But switching some of your more complex vocabulary for easier ones will make the readability go down same thing. Longer. Sentences tend to make the readability up so shorter. Sentences help reduce readability.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: You can also reduce any jargon or words that are kind of domain specific. And finally, you can use active voice. We almost get all the way without Knox parking. He, I think, is going to be over soon. Okay, we're on principle former. So we've got one more and then finally within providing it. There's a bunch of different things that you can do to improve readability. So first here in the real time report, you'll see your readability grade, and it'll set a target for your document type. So you can see if you are in the right space or not.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: The readability report will also highlight. Which of your paragraphs are easy to read, difficult to read, etc. And then, if you have, if you would like to, you can also highlight any of your phrases, and you can also use our sparks function here to then edit for readability and clarity. So if you see you know this particular paragraph here was too hard to read. I can highlight it and use sparks readability function to again. Edit

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Don. I'll explain sparks a little bit more at the end, if you can just put that into the QA. So I remember to come back to it.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: But Sparks will again help you. Edit at the very basic level done. Read a bit or excuse me. Rephrase works at the sentence level, and it just gives you different rephrase options at a basic level. Sparks works at the paragraph level. So it works on longer phrases, and it gives you much more kind of complex ways to change a paragraph versus a single sentence. That's very, very high level.

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Okay.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I know we've got questions coming. So let's get to our fifth principle, our fifth principle of creating clarity is to choose specific words. So we've talked a lot about how we can cut and make shorter and make shorter sentences shorter, clearer sentences. But I want to go back and talk about what we can add in. So it's not always about just cutting things. It's also about making sure we are choosing specific words that

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: tell our readers exactly what we're trying to say.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Now, if we're too vague, then our reading is our we are not going to be specific enough for our readers. So I'd love for you to tell me in the chat. What do you picture when I say the sentence, what do you think Kate is doing? So? My sentences. Kate made some improvements to her cabin, and now it's worth more. I'd love you. Just tell me in the chat, yeah, what do you think improvements means?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: What do you think more means

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: renovated it. Kitchen, fresh cooked paint, kitchen remodel. Fix some stuff painted.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hi, Andrea! Good to see you resale value knickknacks on the shelf.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: decorated. Throw pillows. Got Bobby from queer eye to come. That would be the dream.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Yeah, all of the above, right? So we've got a ton of different places for people. Brandy got stuck on improvements again. We don't know. We have absolutely no idea. As Katie says, it's a higher price. But this sentence, well, perfectly valid. There's no grammatical errors in the sentence. It is not clear at all. It could mean absolutely anything. And we can see that based on what we're saying.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So we need to make sure that we're not just being clear and concise, that we're also being specific. Clarity is about being clear and concise as well as specific.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So now Now, I've fixed the sentence by saying, Kate, replace the bathroom suite. Repaint to the living room, laid hardwood floors in this cabin, increasing its value by 10.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: The sentence is much clearer about what we've done. If we want to say, as Greg suggested, or maybe with Daryl, Kate removed the bodies, etc., whatever Kate did, at least now we have that clear movie of what's happening. And we have a clear understanding of how the value is going up. And so again, clarity is not just about cutting things to make it as concise as possible. You also need to be specific with what you're trying to say

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: so. As we think back to that sentence, clarity does not always equal brevity. You're not always coming in here and trying to make your sentences as short as they possibly can be, they need to be specific, too. So you need to be concise and specific.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: or else that movie that your readers are playing in their head is not going to be accurate. So again, if you're thinking about that, you know. Image of Kate put redoing her house. All of us were playing different movies in her mind, and when we come to the second version of the sentence, where Kate is redoing her bathroom suite, etc.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: We're going to have a much similar movie again. Some of us, I think, in the chat went way off topic and had Kate, you know, hiding bodies under the floorboards and that type of thing. So again, the the Mini movie was not accurate. So as the writer, we're not doing our job of showing exactly what we want to see, because our readers are going wildly away from what we're looking for. So again, clarity does not always equal brevity needs to be clear and specific, concise and specific.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And the best way to do this is asking yourself, is that movie accurate to what I'm trying to show, or you could ask, you know, a zoom room full of 230 people, if if that is accurate to what you're trying to show, and you can see, what kind of things people come up with.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: But ultimately technology can also help support you with this so providing aid will help you find. Let's see if we go into our diction. Report.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: It will help you find places where you have vague and abstract words, and then there's again a number of different ways that you could fix, that you can fix by rephrasing the entire sentence. You can come in here and look for the Thesaurus report. It'll also find places where again you've used constructions like many different or very big, where you just haven't said specifically what you're meaning.

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And it will help you make those easier.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay? So before we get to questions, just a quick recap today, we talked about why clarity is the most important goal for all writers. We have talked about the 5 key principles that I believe will help make your writing more clear when you're editing, and then we also talked about how to use technology to make it more effective.

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I I would say, the biggest thing when with technology is that it gives you more information. So it's going to give you all of the information that you could find manually. But it's going to take a really really long time. So using a tool like pro writing, a just makes that so much faster, you can find all the places you've used, passive voice. You can find all the places where you've used glue words. You can find places where you're being vague, and then, if you'd like to use

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: some of the generative AI features to get new ideas for how to phrase them or to rephrase them, you can. But if you'd like to just stop at the information, it again makes it much faster to find it.

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Alright. Let us go in to questions. Oh, thank you so much, Lou, that was so kind. Okay, I'll try to get as many questions as I can.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay, Laura says in the goal section where you can select creative historical fiction, is there a way to select historical fiction and romance. So that's here. You can select your document type which will give you different suggestions based on your particular genre. Unfortunately, you can't do 2 at the same time. So what I would recommend is, do historical fiction, and then do romance, and just see how you kind of end up in between

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Helen says the suggestion doesn't say long enough for this before it disappears. I will tell our team that it will move if you move your cursor out. So just try to keep your cursor there as an interim place.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay. Amy has a really good question. That I want to talk about. I will take my screen share off. So Amy's question is, I've seen some academic writers being used accused of plagiarism because they've used these kinds of edit tools, has this had an impact on publishing edits. So I think the first and foremost thing to think about? Because this is a huge question. Amy is that

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: there hasn't been any like clear decision on either an international or a national level of what these types of tools mean in term in the publishing process. And I think that that is going to be something that happens over the next. You know, year, 5 years, 10 years is something that we're going to figure out.

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That's why one of the things that I talked about in this presentation is how to scale it up.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So if you are very, very worried of about how to put the impact of rephrasing tools, then just don't use them, but you can still use a tool like pro writing it to just find places where to fix things. So if you're very again very worried about the impact of AI on your work.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Don't use it. Just use a tool like pro writing aid to find the places where you could fix, and then you can fix them yourself. Right now. There just isn't clarity on what clarity point of presentation, but there just isn't clarity right now on what plagiarism is going to mean. And I think that's going to be something that changes quite honestly a lot over the next 6 months, year, 5 years. But again, my recommendation for you, if you're nervous about that at all, use the technology to find places that you can make improvements. But then just make the improvements yourself.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Yesterday's replays are on the hub. I will just show you briefly, cause I know sometimes people can't find it. And so the Hub, if you scroll all the way down on the hub

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: to do.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Yeah. So if you scroll all the way down in the hub, you'll see the schedule. And then these Youtube videos. We upload them here after the sessions are done.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So just scroll all the way to the bottom. When will prorating it, start selling Hayley merch? I will send this to the chat and see see what the team says.

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Leslie. The lifetime, the 25%, unfortunately, is not applicable to lifetime. It's just applicable to yearly right now.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Cameron says I'm making a novel, and I had to edit chapters to make it more clear. Got any more advice based on what we learned today, Cameron, I'm gonna put these slides up after I would just look through these 5 principles and make sure that you've gone through each and every one of them, and I would also say, go through them in stages. II find that writing is really difficult. If I don't approach it, really, sequentially. So I will go through and like, make all my passive voice edits. Then I'll do another

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: walk through and do my sticky sentences so sometimes approaching it in very systematic ways, helps me kind of keep it straight.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Oh, how do we maintain clarity when describing scenes or conversations with multiple characters. Example, a group of 4. Thanks. That's a really great question one of the things to say is again.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: consider your goal for the scene. So if your goal is to create, you know a lot of dialogue and kind of cross talk, and to have conversations between characters. Think about how you're using words like said and asked to sign post. Who's talking? And that's not one of the reports that I've reviewed here. But we do have a dialogue report which you can find by going to more reports and then dialog

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and it'll help you find places where you use dialog tag, so you can better identify those characters.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: And then again, make sure you're trying to think about what you're trying to communicate at that point. So if you're having a long conversation between your characters, it's likely not the right place to do a lot of background world building, because it's going to take readers out of the conversation. So think about trying to kind of segment what's happening in your scene? So the dialogue is happening at one place, and then you're having kind of the clear signposts of who's talking? Well, not kind of mixing it up with a bunch of back story or something at that point as well.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Do. Do. Should we use writing styles that are just grammatic, slightly grammatically incorrect to avoid charges of AI writing or plagiarism. That is a great question. So, Diane. Every single.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: every single writing, even AI driven writing, is going to have mistakes in it. I think

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: part of it is because like a lot of the things we talked about today are not. It's not a matter of grammatical correctness, like sticky sentences are not something that's correct or incorrect. Most sticky sentences are grammatically correct. They just could be shorter and more effective. So because of that. There's not just. It's not any single manuscript. Any published manuscript is not going to be perfect. There's going to be places where there's grammatical inaccuracies. If you're writing fiction a lot of dialogue will be grammatically incorrect.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: so I don't. To be honest, I think even if you had completely had AI generate every single thing. I don't think your manuscript would be 100% grammatically perfect, because that's just not something that really happens, particularly in fiction, where you have characters talking in different ways.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I will also say that's why, if you're coming in here on goals, that's why all of these are ranges as opposed to one specific specific section. You're not aiming for 100. I have never gotten 100% on on the tool. And II don't know that anyone does. There's almost always going to be errors. So that's why we're giving you kind of a range to target rather than all of it.

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A couple of people have asked about other languages. Unfortunately, we don't have another language option right now.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid:  hopefully, maybe soon we'll see

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid:  repray. I've talked about rephrasing plagiarism again, if you. The only way, to be sure, I would say, Leslie, right now is to not use it, and you can turn it off if you don't want to use it, but I think it's just a matter of comfort. And like I said right now, there's not clear guidance on what plagiarism means or doesn't in the world of AI. I think that that clarity is coming. It's not something that pro writing will give. That's something that you know courts are deciding and things like that. But right now, if you really

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worried about it, I would just not use the features. And again, I would use, you know all of the features in these reports here.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Are not generative. AI. So you can, you know, use them. Get the information without changing.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Yes, you can set it to British English. You can set it to British, Australian, Canadian or just general English.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: A couple of people have asked. It's at grade 4 level. Is that too easy? Or, you know, is this too easy?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: I would actually say that there isn't really a bottom level of being too easy. Though, you know what you wanna do. If you're worried about being too easy, I would give it to somebody who is in your target audience and see what they say. That's where a good human can kind of come in and give more of you know more of a a sense of whether or not the writing is kind of flowing, but often a lot of a lot of novels are at that kind of grade. 5 grade, 4, etc. Level.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay. Can I chew gum? Not? Well, definitely, not while I'm doing this, I would be choking. Okay?

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: provide. Oh, good question from Amy. Pro writing does not use user writing to train the I. AI, we have access to none of your writing. We yes, we don't have access to any of your writing. We don't have access. We don't use it to train our algorithms, and we never retain copies of your text. So it's not that not huge thing. We never do that.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay, all right, we have a lot of questions. And I think we're just about out of time. I know that there are a bunch more. So what I'm going to do is put the link into the community chat.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Please feel free to go in there and tag me with with more questions. I am more than happy to answer them. If you also have any specific questions for me that you're not comfortable sharing with the larger group. Just email, hello@prowritinga.com. And I am more than happy to answer them. That will go, and just say that it's for Haley, and they will get it to me. And then I am putting in the chat as well the link to the hub.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: which has all the slides, links, and replays. I will put up the slides for this session so that you can have them. And then again, please feel free to put other other questions into the chat, and thank you all so much for all of the kind words and I hope you have a great rest of your session. I'll see you all

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: tomorrow. I'm doing Suzanne Parks interview, as well as a couple of other sessions. So it's so great great to see all of you, and have a great rest of your day. Bye.