Why Hire an Editor

Here are five bottom-line reasons you should hire a human editor and not rely on a grammar checker, especially one with AI.

Fiction writing is not AI’s strong suit.

AI loves patterns and it will find repetitions of ideas, and words or phrases perfectly acceptable. Yes, you can program an AI grammar checker to let you know when you’ve repeated things, or count how often you’ve used certain words (like crutch or filter words), but there’s a nuance to using repetition in creative writing. There are places where it is useful and other places where it will drag down your story. AI struggles with nuance, so your “corrected” story will have little nuance.

AI’s knowledge is limited.

AI can only know the facts it has been trained on. So if you’re asking it to fact-check — one of the tasks of a copy editor — something set really recently or in a very specialized area of knowledge, AI may not know it so it won’t correct something wrong, or it even may attempt to correct something that is right.

You can say “well my readers only care about the story,” but the fact of the matter is, that one reader who knows the fact is going to put it in their review that you got that wrong, and ding, you’ve gone from a 5-star storyteller to a average Jane.

AI loves passive voice.

Trained most often to work in nonfiction and write essays and research documents, AI’s patterns to construct sentences when they suggest a revision, more often than not, suggests a passive voice construction. That is, the action is done to the subject instead of the action is done by the subject:

The phone was picked up by him (passive)
He picked up the phone (active)

Storytelling needs a mix of active voice and passive voice, because these affect pacing and tone. Typically more active than passive. Flat stories get DNF’d by readers.

AI’s natural style is often dry, plain.

Again, AI were originally trained to work with nonfiction, and deliver factual writings, so its suggestions to correct fiction will also be objective voice. It will also summarize more than is typical for fiction.

AI can also be too flowery and overwrought.

So, flip a switch, right? Tell the AI you’re writing fiction and to correct for a certain style. Unfortunately, because of that lack of nuance previously discussed, AI programmed to tell or correct a story in a particular style will overplay that style until the situations are over the top, characters are too much, and too emotional. What you’ll have on your hands will be a parody. AI cannot do subtle.

Bonus: Using AI will not make you a better writer.

AI is a tool. It can help you produce writing faster. For all that speed though, your first book and your last book will read exactly the same. You won’t grow as a writer. A human’s writing style changes as they grow. You don’t write like you did at age 12, 22, or 32. For one, you have more lived experience. That not only affects what you write about, but it affects how you write about it. It’s called perspective.

Yes, you might use fewer crutch words if you’ve asked AI to note those for you, but that’s a bit like Pavlov’s dog. You’re reacting to stimuli (“using crutch words is bad”) rather than reading your specific before and after and wrestling with why the story works so much better without the crutch words.

Then, too, all your stories will be structured the same because you won’t have learned why a certain structural element, like the inciting incident or a twist, works (or doesn’t), and because you’ll be afraid to mess up, you won’t try something new. Your writing will instead grow stale.

Learning to write better is time-consuming and includes stumbles and difficulties. So, yes, you will struggle. But a human editor will get that, and we will always be here to help you learn.