Writing & Editing
The editor, formatting, shortcuts, Word and markdown files, autosave and version history.
Guides
Editing Your Manuscript with Writing Desk
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0:00 Writing Desk's comprehensive editorial tools are designed to help you refine and improve your manuscript. Here's how.
0:06 First, there's the Proofreader, which provides spelling, grammar, and style suggestions, including filter words, weak intensifiers, weak adverbs, and repetition.
0:20 The Analysis dropdown offers additional editorial tools to help you examine your writing style and structure.
0:27 Open Prose Analysis to review sentence length, passive voice, where you might be telling versus showing, and repeated sentence openings, so you can polish and improve the impact of your writing.
0:44 Finally, there's the AI Editor. This runs an AI editorial review across four lenses, highlighting the chapter's strengths and potential areas for improvement.
0:55 For example, here it says the tension drops in the middle of the first chapter, creating an uneven emotional arc.
1:02 The AI editorial review should never replace human feedback, but it's a good way to get quick insights so you can hone your writing as you go.
1:12 Additional editorial features include Chapter Variants. A variant creates a second copy of the chapter you can edit side by side, so you can edit boldly without losing the original, for example to try a different point of view.
1:28 Right-click to rename a variant or promote a variant to active status.
1:33 There's also full Version History. Click the hamburger menu, go to Version History, and open it to see the last 10 versions of your document, created automatically and periodically as you edit.
1:47 The final editing tool is Finish Draft. Clicking it creates a draft snapshot saved alongside your manuscript, so you can keep editing knowing your initial draft is saved and reviewable if you ever want to revert.
2:08 Writing Desk's editorial tools are designed to help you make your manuscript the best it can be, without getting in the way.
2:15 Download Writing Desk today to take them for a spin.
Questions
Headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, alignment, first-line indent, bulleted and numbered lists, links, tables, quotes, line spacing and adjustable text size. Most have keyboard shortcuts, and you can also format as you type with markdown, such as ## for a chapter heading.
Yes. Press ⌘/ in Writing Desk, or choose Help, Keyboard Shortcuts from the menu bar, for a searchable list of every shortcut. See all keyboard shortcuts.
Yes, in every kind of document. Type ## and a space for a chapter heading, wrap a word in ** for bold, or start a line with - for a list. Choose Help, Markdown Reference from the menu bar for the full list. Format as you type.
Chapters are defined by Heading 2. Press ⌥⌘2, choose Heading 2 from the paragraph style menu in the toolbar, or type ## and a space at the start of a line.
Yes. Writing Desk autosaves every document every few seconds, whatever its format. Projects also save a new version at the end of each session, which you'll find in Version History.
Yes, for projects and Writing Desk documents. Choose Version History from the menu bar, then select any dated version from the list to open it.
It saves a copy of your manuscript exactly as it is right now into your drafts folder, alongside your current file. That means you can keep editing the current version freely, knowing you can always revert to that snapshot if you need to.
Chapter variants let you create alternate versions of a chapter while keeping the original intact, and switch between them whenever you like, so you can edit boldly without losing anything. Variants need a Writing Desk document (.wddoc) and are part of Premium.
Yes. Press ⌘F, and scope it to the current chapter or the whole manuscript.
A distraction-free writing view that hides everything except your writing. Press ⇧⌘F to enter it, and ⇧⌘F again or Esc to leave.
Text size is adjustable from the toolbar.
Yes.
Images already in a markdown file show in the editor. Adding images from inside Writing Desk is on the roadmap. In the meantime, you can open image files as reference tabs while you write, pin them to a document, and add them to character and location entries in the Resource Hub.
Yes. Writing Desk opens .docx files as they are and saves your changes back as Word files. Headings that use Word's heading styles, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, lists, links and tables all carry across. Edit Word files in Writing Desk.
Export your Writing Desk document to Word, share it, and when the edited file comes back, open it in Writing Desk. A bar above the text offers to merge the changes into your document, and Writing Desk saves a copy of your previous version first. Send your manuscript out in Word and merge the edits back.
All text changes, headings that use Word heading styles, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, lists, links and tables. Alignment, indents and font sizes stay as Writing Desk has them. Your comments stay with the document but lose their place in the text, and chapter variants stay with any chapter whose heading hasn't changed.
The offer appears when an opened .docx matches one of your Writing Desk documents and its text has changed. If nothing has changed, there's nothing to merge. If the file has been renamed and its link to Writing Desk was lost along the way, merge it by hand: click the project control at the bottom of the sidebar and choose Merge into a Writing Desk document.
Export saves a copy of your manuscript in a new file format. Submission Export formats it to Shunn guidelines for submitting to agents. Print / Save as PDF uses your Mac's print dialogue to print or save a PDF of your manuscript.
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