Reluctant  Android, my first psi-fi novel, was professionally copy-edited. That cost nearly $2,000 and was worth every dime. The quality of the manuscript was hugely improved, and I learned a lot about writing good, clear sentences. I thought I already knew that. You don’t know what you don’t know.

The second book in the Newcomers series is Alien Talk.  (www.psifibooks.com/books-from-psifibooks-com).The third is Intelligent Things.  Others are in the pipeline. It occurred to me that I cannot afford professional copy editing on every book I write. It’s not going to happen. At the same time, I do need editing.  An author is limited in self-editing because of the way the human mind works.

If you could see through your own delusions, they wouldn’t be delusions, would they?

Since the Newcomers series is about highly advanced, AI androids, I thought, There must be a robot out there that can do copy editing. There is. There are a handful of them.

The one I chose was Grammarly (www.grammarly.com). It seems to have been designed as a simple grammar-checker for email, memos, and other short texts. It can be installed as a Chrome add-on. It catches basketfuls of common errors such as missing hyphenation, misapplied apostrophes, and so on. It’s much better than the built-in tools embedded in Word and other software. And it’s free.

The Premium service is $30 a month, or $20 if you sign up for a longer period. The Premium handles more complex writing. After using the free add-on for a while, I decided to try the premium version (www.grammarly.com/premium).

Designed by linguists and writers, the upgrade runs in the cloud. You upload your Word document and Grammarly crunches it. The software provides sophisticated checks on punctuation, grammar, context, and sentence structure, everything a live line-editor would do. It also criticizes vocabulary and diction in general. It’s terrific at catching words I chronically overuse, like “obviously,” and “nevertheless,” and it’s good at telling me when my modifiers are misplaced and my pronouns vague. Robots never sleep. I do.

Using Grammarly all day every day, I can edit an 80,000 word novel in less than a week. I believe the level of improvement to the manuscript is almost equal to what the live editor provided, at a fraction of the cost, not counting the cost of exhaustion to my poor brain.

Grammarly is not perfect. For one thing, it can only handle 50 pages at a time, which makes it a pain to use. You can’t just click “OK” on each suggestion it makes because you need to make the changes in the full manuscript, not in the 50-page sample. That means a tremendous amount of cutting and pasting.

Also, the software does not discriminate text within quotation marks from other text, and as any writer knows, characters seldom speak grammatically. That means a ton of false-positives flagged by Grammarly must be ignored.

I have a few other smaller complaints, such as the fact that the software is not very flexible, but I guess you shouldn’t expect flexibility from a robot.  It does not like idioms or even unusual sentence structures. It hates fragments. It becomes enraged by split infinitives.  And its dictionary is rather limited, though you can add your own words to it. It recently insisted that a “slat truck” was actually a “salt truck,” perhaps a reasonable guess based on a common mistyping of “salt,” but on the other hand, what would a “salt truck” even be? It was a stupid suggestion. AI, this is not. (And that last sentence, it would flag).

I should say that my human copy editor also made errors, so nothing’s perfect. I don’t slavishly adopt every line of Grammarly’s advice. I have to evaluate each flagged bit of text and decide what to do, so the cost savings comes straight out of my brain. But in the end, I get the result that I want at a price I can pay.

That’s my pitch for Grammarly, the automated copy-editor. Someday it might join the ranks of the Newcomers (see www.psifibooks.com)