What is Chapter Critique?
Chapter Critique offers on-demand developmental critique of your chapter. It provides comprehensive and actionable feedback on your story’s plot, characters, pacing, dialogue, and more.
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced writer, you can receive instant feedback on your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement to improve your craft.
Finding a critique partner can be hard. We designed our Chapter Critique to help support your writing journey. It was not designed to replace human developmental editors or beta readers.
How do I use the Chapter Critique?
You can use Chapter Critique in our Web Editor, Chrome Browser Extension, ProWritingAid Desktop Everywhere, or Word Add-In for Windows.
Press the Critique or Get Critique button available in your integration. Then, click the Chapter Critique option. For more information on this, you can follow the instructions provided here.
Once a Chapter Critique has been run on your document, you will see a window showing the results of your analysis.
What type of feedback will I get with Chapter Critique?
Chapter Critique reads your text in a similar fashion to a developmental editor and provides specific feedback on the key elements of storytelling for your chapter or short story, such as:
- Strengths - what you’re doing well in your writing
- Plot/Story - how well your narrative flows and any obvious plot areas that can be developed further
- Characters - how effectively your characters are developed
- Tension - how much conflict is in your writing and how engaging it is for a reader
- Point of View - how consistently you stick to a specific POV
- Setting - how much you describe the setting in your scenes and whether you could include more details
- Style/Voice - how authentic your writing sounds throughout the analyzed text
- Clarity/Cohesion - the readability of your text and any areas that are tricky for a reader to understand
- Writing Style - an assessment of the writing style used and how appropriate it is for the genre of your text
- Description - how much sensory description you use to show the story rather than tell it
- Dialogue - how authentic your characters sound in their dialogue
- Mood - an assessment of the mood of your text and how different elements in your narrative contribute to creating it
- Pacing - how quickly or slowly your narrative moves and whether any improvements are needed
- Potential improvements - a summary of potential improvements you could make to the analyzed text
Chapter Critique results are specially crafted for your document. Each time you run a Chapter Critique, your results will show a combination of some or all of these elements. No two results should be the same (unless no changes have been made to your document).
If you want to check, or compare, your previous Chapter Critique results, you can access these in your Feedback History. You can find more information about this here.
Can I run a Chapter Critique on my whole manuscript?
Chapter Critique has been designed to work with your chapters.
We recommend writing of 500 words to ensure you get a meaningful amount of feedback on your writing.
The maximum number of words you can use the Chapter Critique for is 4,000 words each time you run the report.
Running the report on shorter pieces helps you to get more in-depth analysis of sections of your writing without getting overwhelmed with improvement suggestions.
If you write short stories of 4,000 words or less, this means you can get an analysis of your entire piece in one report.
If you are a novelist and would prefer to analyze multiple chapters at once, you may find Manuscript Analysis more suited to your needs.
What is the difference between Chapter Critique and Manuscript Analysis?
Both our Chapter Critique and Manuscript Analysis offer on-demand feedback for writers.
Chapter Critique is ideal for individual chapters or shorter pieces of text. It provides comprehensive developmental critique feedback on plot, characters, pacing, descriptions, dialogue, and more on up to 4,000 words, with a recommended minimum word count of 500 for meaningful results.
Manuscript Analysis is designed to run on larger pieces of text, like novels. It can be used on up to 300,000 words with a recommended minimum word count of 4,000 words for best results.
In this article, you will find a comparison of both reports.
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