Writing & Editing
The editor itself, formatting, autosave, version history, and export.
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.
Headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, alignment, first-line indent, bullet and numbered lists, links, tables, blockquotes, line spacing, and adjustable font size.
New chapters are defined by H2 headings. Insert an H2 directly, or select some text and use Cmd+Opt+2.
Yes, Writing Desk autosaves your work every few seconds, and saves a new version at the end of each session that you can find in Version History.
Yes. Open Settings, click Version History, 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 Iterations let you create alternate versions of a chapter while keeping the original fully intact, and switch between them whenever you like. Edit boldly, without ever losing anything.
Yes, and you can scope it to the current chapter or the whole manuscript.
A distraction-free writing view that hides all side panels. Press Esc to exit.
Text size is adjustable from the toolbar.
Not yet. It's on the roadmap, but there's no launch date yet.
Not into the manuscript text itself. You can open image files as reference tabs while you write, and add them to character and location entries in the Resource Centre.
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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