Developmental editing is a complex task requiring creativity, strategy, people skills, and a deep understanding of publishing and genre. It’s no wonder we developmental editors tend to think highly of ourselves. When the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) first entered our personal narratives, it made sense that many of us assumed the technology would not be capable of assisting with this demanding, cerebral higher level of editing.
As AI has become entrenched in writing and lower levels of editing, developmental editors now may be starting to squirm and may be asking: Can a machine truly understand the nuances of a story? Will a bot render my hard-earned expertise into a bunch of algorithms? Is there still a place for me—the human—in this new technological era?
It’s true that AI’s analytical capabilities are well suited to helping developmental editors with many job duties. This article lays out how to use AI for developmental editing in a way that complements your human skills and allows you to improve your editing efficiency without compromising your editorial judgment or integrity—which should never be replaced. When a developmental editor uses AI to quickly identify a manuscript’s flaws, it frees up time to focus on creative solutions, resulting in higher-quality edits completed faster. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t. Read on.
What Is AI Developmental Editing?
Developmental editing is a type of editing that focuses on improving the “big picture” elements of a manuscript. It analyzes fundamentals like structure, pacing, plot and character development, and theme and synthesizes the information into suggestions for improvement. This guides the author to create a manuscript that is cohesive and engaging and potentially loved one day by readers and critics alike.
AI developmental editing includes the same pieces as traditional developmental editing but adds AI tools to assist human editors with analysis, brainstorming, and reducing the manual workload. In AI developmental editing, tasks are divided, with the AI doing the tasks it can do best and the human editor doing the tasks they can do best.
Why Use AI for Developmental Editing?
Imagine doing your job but doing it faster and easier. Now imagine doing your job faster, easier, and better. Incorporating AI into your editorial workflow opens the doors to big gains in efficiency and quality, when used effectively.
Speed: You can get back all of the hours you would have spent on your first read-through by having AI do it for you. Thanks to recent technological improvements, some AI tools can analyze entire book-length manuscripts in one go. Within seconds, they can spit out a chapter-by-chapter summary and report of the main weaknesses you would have identified yourself during your first pass. Now you’ll be more prepared when you start page one.
Quality: AI can be excellent at identifying content gaps, recognizing inconsistencies, and brainstorming ideas and solutions. Working together with it means fewer subtle issues slip through the cracks and you will have options to consider that you may not have thought of on your own. (Think of it like a colleague you can bounce ideas off of.)
Now that you know the key benefits, let’s examine how to incorporate AI in your work.
How Can You Use AI for Developmental Editing?
There’s a place for AI at all stages of the developmental editing workflow, from pre-editing tasks to drafting feedback for authors. Here’s an overview of some ways to use AI in your work.
Step 1: Choose the Right AI Tool
The first step is to choose the best AI tool in the toolbox. This depends on the type of content you are working with.
Shorter Works
If you work on a chapter-by-chapter basis or you’re editing a shorter piece, such as an article or marketing copy, you have more options. Just about any chatbot (such as ChatGPT or Copilot) can handle your developmental editing analyses.
Longer Works
If you work with full-length book manuscripts, until recently, you had to break the document into smaller chunks the AI could take in. Now, there are tools that can do full-length manuscript analysis. One option is Claude, which is a favorite among book editors. The one I’m currently finding to be most accurate and consistent with long documents is Google’s NotebookLM. It also cites which exact page it pulled information from, making it easy to verify its work. Google Gemini also works incredibly well with long documents. (The main difference between NotebookLM and Gemini is the interface.)
Claude summarizing a 149-page public-domain philosophical work
Supplementary Documents
Developmental Editing involves tracking many different elements, page by page, as you go. The right AI tool can do this tracking for you and create documents both you and the author may find helpful, such as:
Character Lists
Setting Lists
Plot Timelines
Subtopic Lists
Glossaries
Example Prompt: Please extract a list of settings in the book. Include a brief description of each setting.
Gemini extracting the lengthy list of settings from an obscure public-domain fantasy book
Analyses to Identify Issues
Think of the problem areas authors tend to struggle with and ask the AI to analyze them. You can receive structured analyses while leaving room for your creative editorial influence and decision-making. Here are examples:
Plot Analysis
If you know the plot’s intended framework, prompt the AI to fit plot points onto the template to see where the plot may be misaligned.
Example Prompt: Please map the plot onto the Freytag’s pyramid story structure.
Follow-Up Prompt: Explain how well the plot follows the Freytag’s pyramid story structure.
NotebookLM organizing the fantasy book's plot according to the Freytag's Pyramid story structure
Character Analysis
Get help determining the overall strengths and weaknesses of specific characters, whether they make quality heroes or villains, whether they’re relatable, and more.
Example Prompt: Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the main character's arc and offer suggestions for improvement.
Content Gap Analysis
When working with nonfiction, you can prompt the AI to look for areas where adding subtopics could make the work feel more complete.
Example Prompt: Please review chapter 3 and list subtopics the author could add or expand to make the book more comprehensive.
NotebookLM conducting a content gap analysis on the philosophy book
Structural Analysis
This analysis type works with both fiction and nonfiction. Use AI to probe whether the structure fits the expectations of the genre and makes sense.
Example Prompt: Please analyze the book's structure and list any places where the sequence of arguments lack logical flow.
Step 3: Fact-Check and Brainstorm During Editing
Wish you could get a quick second opinion or access your own personal fact-checker while editing? Now you’ve got one.
Fact-Checking
If you question whether you're correctly remembering the detail that seemed unimportant when you read it days ago, you can ask NotebookLM about it. It will review the copy of the manuscript you’ve uploaded and answer.
Example Prompt: Where did Zorak and Zena have the discussion about the magical ring?
Brainstorming
As you edit and come across an element that could be improved, you can ask AI to brainstorm a list of ideas to fix the issue. They won’t all be good, but there will likely be some you had not considered. You can use your experience and editorial judgment to select the best option.
Example Prompt: Please suggest plot events that could take place between chapters 9 and 10 to fill in any gaps in the timeline.
Through the analyses the AI conducted at the pre-editing stage, you’ll have pages of helpful insights you could put your touch on and incorporate into your editorial feedback. If there are any topics you may need to use careful wording with, such as suggesting the author cut a beloved character or favorite chapter, you could ask the AI for guidance with explaining your reasoning. You’ll want to be mindful not to have it sound like a robot wrote it, but it can quickly get you 80% of the way to the wording you want.
Example Prompt: Please write a compliment sandwich about why the Zorak character should be cut. The first paragraph should focus on a strength of the Zorak character. The second paragraph should explain why Zorak should be cut. The third paragraph should focus on a positive of the Zorak character while maintaining the recommendation to cut.
What Are the Challenges of Using AI for Developmental Editors?
While AI offers developmental editors many benefits, it also has limitations and should not be used without careful human oversight. One common drawback is AI tends to offer ideas that are generic (overused tropes), cliché (end every chapter on a cliffhanger), or simply misaligned with the author’s style (suggesting against experimentation in literary fiction).
Also, since AI isn’t human, it doesn’t know what it’s like to be human. You do. You can better gauge the manuscript’s emotional resonance than any program can. Your human editorial judgment, emotional intelligence, and experience remain integral to the developmental editing process.
Final Thoughts
When used well, AI tools like Claude and NotebookLM can be powerful partners to developmental editors. AI can join its analytical skills with your creativity and empathy to conduct edits that are efficient, comprehensive, creative, and that enable authors to create stronger connections with readers, tell better stories, and make their words have greater impact.
Erin Servais teaches editors to upskill with Artificial Intelligence through her AI for Editors courses and customized group training. She is known worldwide as a thought leader in AI education for editors, writers, and other publishing professionals. Learn more at www.aiforeditors.com and www.servaissolutions.com.
Thanks to continued advances in AI editing tools, editors have powerful technology to help them streamline copyediting and content editing tasks. The trouble is there are so many AI editing options out there that it can be overwhelming to choose one.
In this article, we will review the five AI editing tools I recommend the most—Claude for Word, Draftsmith, MarkMyWords, Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), and LanguageTool—and see what they have to offer modern editors.
These are not in any particular order; which editing tool is best for you depends on your individual needs. I will break down their key features, user experiences, pros and cons, and pricing so you can make an informed decision about which ones are right for you.
Five Best AI Tools for Editors: Key Takeaways
Claude for Word: AI chat inside Word, included in every paid Claude plan
Draftsmith: A line editor that improves writing quality sentence by sentence
MarkMyWords: Select from six style guides (AMA, CMOS, etc.), one-time payment
Gemini Notebook: Deep document analysis and extraction with very low hallucination risk
LanguageTool: Works wherever you write, supports 20+ languages
Claude for Word is an add-in from Microsoft that brings Claude’s editing capabilities into Word. This is different from Claude’s Microsoft 365 Connector. Where the Connector brings your documents into Claude, Claude for Word embeds an AI chat into a Word sidebar.
Key Editing Features in Claude for Word
Every edit lands as a tracked change that you can review before applying to the document.
Can read and respond to existing comment threads, which is a notable capability for editors working in documents with existing markup.
Full-featured AI functionality,including research, fact-checking, and drafting documents from templates. Prompt Claude as you normally would without leaving Word.
Context carries across all “Claude for” apps, so work that begins in Word can continue in Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook without explaining the context each time.
User Experience
Claude for Word is easy to install from the Microsoft Marketplace, and it is easy to access in the sidebar, but there is a real learning curve if you do not have experience with AI for editing.
Like with all AI chats, you prompt it into action by describing what you want in everyday language. Click the button, and Claude does as you ask. It sounds simple, but you will want a collection of dependable prompts to ensure consistent high-quality results.
If you’re an advanced Claude user, you can employ Skills and embed style guides right in the sidebar within Word. That means you can automate lists of tasks with your reasoning AI agent. Text revisions, from standard grammar, spelling, and punctuation corrections to custom rules from your style guide, will be applied while you’re working on something else—and Claude will leave comments labeled with your name along the way.
I tried Claude for Word, and it performed as promised: it made corrections that conformed to editorial standards while leaving comments that explained changes and offered suggestions. It took about three minutes to copyedit a 74-page document.
Claude appears as a sidebar panel inside of Microsoft Word. It tracks changes and even makes comments.
Pros and Cons for Claude for Word
Claude for Word’s strongest selling point is how much power it adds to Word while allowing editors to stay in a familiar setting.
Pro: Included in all paid Claude plans. No additional software purchases needed.
Pro: Every edit can be marked up with tracked changes. It’s clear where changes have been made, and they can be accepted or rejected as always.
Pro: Can respond to existing comment threads. This is where Claude for Word is more like an assistant than a tool, very useful for documents that already have editorial markup.
Pro: Flexible natural language interface. Describe exactly what you want rather than selecting from a fixed menu of editing options. Extend into research, analysis, and other AI-friendly tasks.
Con: It will train future AI models on the text unless you opt out. Unlike the Claude API where privacy is the default, Claude Pro and Max plan users must opt out of training in their privacy settings to limit data sharing.
Con: Claude plans have usage limits. There are caps to how much you can use Claude per day and per week. To work beyond your plan limits adds additional fees.
Claude for Word Pricing
Claude for Word is included at no additional cost on all paid Claude plans.
The least expensive plan is Claude Pro for $20 USD per month or $200 USD per year.
The add-in from the Microsoft Marketplace is free.
Draftsmith is an application from the makers ofPerfectItthat is designed specifically for granular, controlled editing. It works directly inside of Microsoft Word, allowing for a seamless workflow.
Where most AI tools on my list focus on copyediting (catching grammar errors, fixing spelling, applying style rules), Draftsmith is a line editor that works through a document, offering suggestions for how each sentence could be clearer, more readable, more engaging, or more concise.
If you already use PerfectIt, try running Draftsmith first, then have PerfectIt catch consistency issues and apply your house style.
Key Editing Features in Draftsmith
Line-by-line processing as Draftsmith runs AI prompts in the background to edit text one sentence at a time for better precision and higher accuracy.
Changes will be marked up as tracked changes if you have it turned on. You’ll see all its revisions, ensuring a transparent and professional editing process.
Eight specialized editing tools address specific writing improvement scenarios rather than general editing. Each one opens a set of suggestion buttons in the Draftsmith panel. A few that stand out from other editing tools:
Fluency Enhancer is specifically for helping authors with English as a Second Language (ESL) sound natural. This will be especially helpful for translators and editors who work with multilingual writers.
Dictation Fixer cleans up voice-to-text transcripts, which are their own category of cryptic phonetic errors.
Word Count Trimmer reduces word counts without losing meaning, which is helpful when facing strict limits.
The Decision Box shows a preview of each suggested change before anything is applied. It all happens in the same panel. Accept a change, reject it, ask for a new suggestion, or edit it yourself. Nothing changes in the document until you approve it.
User Experience
Draftsmith installs from the Microsoft Store and appears as a new tab in the Word ribbon. Once you click a tool button, the Draftsmith panel opens on the right side of your document. From there, it moves through the text sentence by sentence, showing one suggestion at a time in the Decision Box. The workflow keeps you focused: You’re not scanning a list of flagged issues across the whole document. Rather, you’re making one considered decision at a time before moving to the next sentence.
The panel is unobtrusive when you’re not using it and doesn’t require switching between applications. Because it works on Mac, Windows, and Word Online with full feature parity on all platforms, there are no compatibility caveats to navigate.
Drafsmith works as a sidebar panel inside of Microsoft Word. Its simple buttons run prompts. No AI skills needed!
Pros and Cons for Draftsmith
Pro: Rephrases existing text rather than generates new ideas. Draftsmith works with the existing text, which minimizes the typical AI risks of hallucinations and fabricated content. However, it could create an error (particularly an error of omission) when simplifying or summarizing text.
Pro: Strong privacy protections. Draftsmith promises never to store your text or use it to train future AI models, and it will not be seen by anyone outside their systems.
Pro: You are always in control. The Decision Box keeps editors in charge of every change; nothing is applied without your approval.
Pro: Specialized tools for real editorial challenges. ESL fluency, plain language, readability targeting, and word count trimming are common editing scenarios that Draftsmith addresses directly.
Con: Word only. No browser extension, Google Docs add-on, or standalone web editor at this time.
Con: Slow by design. The sentence-by-sentence approach gives you control but will not give you a rapid pass on a long document.
Draftsmith Pricing
Free trial—7 days, 25 sentences per day, full functionality
Individual—$18 USD per month or $120 USD per year
Team—$32 USD per month or $192 USD per year for individual accounts for 2 or more users
Enterprise—$24,000 USD for 10 or more users. Includes priority support, live training, and an account manager
MarkMyWords is a Microsoft Word add-in for AI-assisted copyediting made by Jack Lyon of Editorium. You may know him because of Editor’s ToolKit Plus. You can tell by its features that it was developed by someone who understands our needs. It also has no monthly fee.
Key Editing Features in MarkMyWords
MarkMyWords edits appear as tracked changes in your Word document, and optionally, it will add AI-generated comments to larger edits with an explanation for the change.
Multiple editing methods allow for finer control. Quick-click the general presets (Light Editing, Academic Editing, Simplify, etc.), select specific editing checks (Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation, etc.), or use the Custom Instructions feature to add your own AI editing prompt. You can also choose which Claude model to use so you can point the more capable models at complex tasks.
Choose from 6 style guides—AGS, AMA, APA, CMOS, MLA, and New Oxford—or no style guide.
MarkMyWords handles supplemental document elements that can get left out or messed up when a document is uploaded to AI. Block quotes, footnotes, and endnotes are no problem, but you can exclude them, too.
User Experience
Marcella Weiner wrote about her experience using MarkMyWords. Some of her insights are included below, but read her blog post to get the full scoop.
MarkMyWords lives in Word as a new ribbon tab, so it looks right at home. Editors can make quick editing selections or add Custom Instructions to ask Claude to fact-check and take on other tasks.
And it does not just highlight where you should make changes, as LanguageTool does; MarkMyWords makes the changes in Word for you. It also adds comments to explain the changes, and it will label the comments with your name or Claude’s.
It is easy to install, though creating an account to get the API key (a private and secure app connection code) you need to run it will probably be a new experience. Don’t worry, the user manual explains the steps, and it’s only for the installation; you won’t have to go through that every time you use it.
Pros and Cons for MarkMyWords
MarkMyWords’s strongest selling points are editing control, privacy, and costs.
Pro: All the major style guides are included. And they can be selected with a simple click. Different clients or departments using different style guides? No problem.
Pro: Will not use your work to train new models. Using the Claude API means privacy is the default. Anthropic is known for having stricter data protections, making this one of the more privacy-sound tools in this list.
Pro: No monthly subscription. The only ongoing cost is pay-as-you-go through the Anthropic API. Marcella calculated that editing a 70,000-word manuscript would probably cost just a few dollars.
Pro: No chat function. MarkMyWords gives you the benefits of AI editing without writing prompts to instruct the AI. That lessens the learning curve, though advanced AI editors may find this limiting.
Con: No chat function. There is no chat interface for advanced AI users to deliver complex instructions as with Claude for Word.
Con: May not work on your Mac. MarkMyWords runs primarily on Windows. Its inconsistent support for Mac users is a known issue.
MarkMyWords Pricing
Free trial—45 days with all the features
$69.95 USD one-time fee (no subscription)
Pay-as-you-go through your Anthropic account. Marcella found that editing a 70,000-word manuscript cost around $2 USD.
Gemini Notebook is an AI-powered tool from Google that helps people organize and understand information. It works by analyzing sources you provide—uploaded files, websites, YouTube videos, or documents from your Google Drive. Its chat feature allows you to ask questions about the material or extract categories of information.
Key Editing Features in Gemini Notebook
Since Gemini Notebook excels at analysis and data extraction, there are myriad ways to incorporate this technology into an editorial workflow. Here are some ideas:
Distill and synthesize sources to generate a detailed synopsis or chapter-by-chapter summaries to get a quick overview of the material.
Generate supplementary materials like subtopic lists and glossaries. Fiction editors can use this for character lists, setting lists, and plot timelines.
Check for consistency by querying to verify whether a claim or detail matches what’s stated elsewhere in the document.
Generate a Mind Map to explore structure and relationships within a complex document—useful for heavily plotted fiction or dense nonfiction.
Listen to Audio Overviews when you want a spoken introduction to a new document rather than reading another summary—a welcome option when your eyes need a break.
User Experience
Gemini Notebook has an interface similar to other chatbots, with the addition of a nifty organizational feature. Output from chats can be stored as notes in each notebook.
You create a notebook, load it with the project’s files, and then create notes about the document by asking questions in the chat. The notebook can hold all the logistical information about the project for easy reference, so I create one for each project.
It’s very easy to add sources, and Gemini Notebook accepts common formats for text, audio, and video, including DOCX, EPUB, PDF, PPTX, MP3, MP4, and dozens of others. Website and YouTube links can also be added as sources, and multiple links can be added at once, which is a real time-saver when pulling together research. You can also pull files directly from your connected Google Drive.
A few limitations: Gemini Notebook cannot access content behind a login, so you cannot add paywalled articles, materials within a membership platform, or YouTube videos that are private or unlisted.
The interface of Gemini Notebook has a column for sources, a main chat window, and a "studio" where you can make assets like infographics, slide decks, and reports.
Pros and Cons for Gemini Notebook
Gemini Notebook was the first publicly accessible generative AI tool that could reliably work with large document collections and long documents like manuals and book manuscripts. Now other AI platforms can handle larger documents, but Gemini Notebook offers one thing some others lack: reliability.
Pro: Gemini Notebook rarely makes mistakes. Its reliability comes from pulling information only from the sources we provide, making it far less likely to “hallucinate” (the popular term for when a generative AI model makes things up).
Pro: Multiple output and export formats. Since the previous version of this article, Gemini Notebook has greatly expanded what it can generate and what you can do with that output. Notes and text-based outputs, such as reports and tables, can now be exported directly to Google Docs or Sheets in your connected account. This is a significant improvement if you want to edit the Notes or Sheets or shape them to your preferences.
Pro: The AI does not train on your sources. Gemini Notebook says they do not train new models with your uploaded sources or prompts unless you choose to provide feedback. If you use a business or school-issued Google Workspace account, your data remains fully private and exempt from human review. That’s worth keeping in mind if you work with sensitive information from your own Gmail account.
Con: Requires a Google account. To use Gemini Notebook, you must have a personal Google account or a participating Google Workspace account. Being a Google product, data privacy and security are a natural concern.The way Google handles data depends on the type of account you have.
Gemini Notebook Pricing
There is a generous free version of Gemini Notebook that offers enough usage for most editors.
Paid plans are available through Google AI subscriptions:
Google AI Plus is $4.99 USD per month.
Google AI Pro is $19.99 USD per month and has higher limits and more features.
Some Google Workspace subscriptions include Gemini Notebook Pro at no additional cost.
LanguageTool occupies a different spot than most tools mentioned so far. Where most are within Word, LanguageTool works wherever there are words—your browser, Word, Google Docs. It’s a grammar, spelling, style, and consistency checker that used to be a privacy-first tool but now has data policies like other tools.
Key Editing Features in LanguageTool
LanguageTool’s core strength is depth of grammar and style analysis:
“Picky Mode” highlights nuanced suggestions for a more rigorous editorial pass.
The Personal Style Guide is a paid plan featurethat lets you define your own rules: preferred terminology, phrases to avoid, house style conventions. These apply consistently everywhere LanguageTool runs. There’s only one style guide per account, though, which is a downside for freelancers and in-house teams that support multiple departments.
You can use it almost everywhere becausethe LanguageTool site hosts a web editor, works in desktop apps, and has a browser extension that works across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. There’s also a Word add-in and a Google Docs add-on.
It supports more than 20 languages. If you’re an editor who works in more than one language, automatic language detection handles the switching; there is no need to toggle between them.
User Experience
LanguageTool feels like it is a feature added to wherever you already write. There’s no separate app to open or sidebar to hide and display.
The standout detail is the inline popup. A double-click on any word reveals a small window with synonym options and suggestions right there in the text. No side panel taking up precious screen real estate. It’s nice to have it out of the way when it’s not being used.
A small flag with a green check or a red error count sits at the corner of each page, making it easy to quickly skim a document and spot where problems are concentrated before diving in.
Picky Mode is just what it sounds like. It takes a closer pass to reveal subtle issues that can require more judgment.
Pros and Cons for LanguageTool
LanguageTool’s biggest selling points are how it fits easily into your existing workflow and its affordability.
Pro: Half the cost of Grammarly. Editors familiar with the new Grammarly will find LanguageTool behaves similarly, but Grammarly costs $12 USD per month while LanguageTool costs substantially less on annual plans—about $6 USD per month.
Pro:You can use it almost everywhere. There's a web editor, desktop apps, Google Docs, Word, and a browser extension that works across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.
Con: No longer privacy-first. LanguageTool was long regarded as the privacy-conscious alternative, but that’s changed. The new policy includes sharing data with advertising partners and using session replay tools to capture keystrokes and mouse movements. Inputs to AI-powered features may be used to train future AI models.
LanguageTool Pricing
LanguageTool’s free plan includes a personal dictionary but has notable limitations: only basic grammar and spelling checks on a maximum of 20,000 characters, not words, per text field (their Premium plan allows 150,000 characters). It no longer includes the browser extension.
Instead of multiple plans as other tools have, LanguageTool has a single plan with discounts for longer subscriptions:
Monthly—$24.90 USD
Quarterly—$49.90 USD
Annual—$69.90 USD
Two-year—$119.80 USD
Team—$66.40 USD per user per year (minimum 2 users); includes a Team Style Guide and shared dictionary
There’s an educational discount of up to 20% off Premium for students, teachers, and professors.
How to Choose Which Tools to Use
As an editor, finding the best AI editing tools is essential for simplifying your editorial workflow and improving your work. Carefully comparing features, pricing, and user experience across Claude for Word, Draftsmith, MarkMyWords, Gemini Notebook, and LanguageTool will help you determine your right combination of paid and free tools for AI copyediting, line-editing, and content editing.
My five best AI tools for editors have different purposes and approaches, which is good news. That means you don’t have to choose just one, and you won’t need to pay for all of them, either.
A useful way to think about them is by which problem they solve.
If your work involves helping authors write more clearly, concisely, or accessibly, Draftsmith addresses problems none of the other tools here touch, especially if you regularly work with ESL writers or have to abide by strict word counts.
If you need an all-purpose grammar and style checker that works across your browser, Word, and Google Docs, then LanguageTool is the only tool on this list that does that. If you need to analyze, research, or extract information from a document without the risk of AI making things up, Gemini Notebook is in a category of its own.
That leaves MarkMyWords and Claude for Word, which are unlike the other tools and quite similar to each other in being automated AI assistants within Word that utilize track changes. The difference is in how much control you want in your editing and what you’re already paying for.
As Marcella Weiner puts it: “MarkMyWords offers things Claude for Word does not: more control, including the ability to manage your own AI usage costs, choose specific editorial presets, and add custom instructions.”
If you want an AI editing agent with professional editorial style guide enforcement and manageable, pay-as-you-go costs, MarkMyWords is the better fit. If you want the flexibility to research, draft, and edit from the same sidebar, and you’re already on a paid Claude plan, then Claude for Word streamlines and superpowers your editing workflow without adding to your monthly expenses.
Not everything on this list requires a financial commitment. Gemini Notebook’s free tier is generous enough for most editors, while LanguageTool’s free plan gives you a sense of how it works before committing. MarkMyWords offers a 45-day free trial, and Draftsmith gives you a week to try all its features. Claude for Word requires a paid Claude plan and Microsoft 365, but if you already have those subscriptions, AI automation costs nothing extra.
Start with the editing problem you most want to solve, or where you could use the most support, then try the free tiers where they exist and continue from there.
One well-chosen tool from this list used consistently will do more for your workflow than all five tools used occasionally. By strategically integrating these tools into your AI editing workflow, you can boost your productivity and quality without breaking the bank.
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AI tools evolve quickly—their features, pricing, and data policies can change without much fanfare. The specifics in this article were accurate at publication. Before making decisions based on any tool mentioned here, check its website directly.
Erin Servais helps editors upskill through AI. Her AI for Editors courses are known worldwide as the #1 AI course for in-house and freelance editors of all types, including medical editors, finance editors, education editors, corporate communications editors, and book editors.
Erin served on the board of directors for ACES: The Society for Editing and has presented about editing, entrepreneurship, and AI for the Professional Editors Network, Editors Canada, the Northwest Editors Guild, ACES, and many others.
As AI grows in popularity, it's normal to worry about how it will affect what we do as editors. But here's the thing: a lot of these concerns are based on misunderstandings about what AI can and can't do and how AI fits into the editing process. In this article, we’ll tackle these misconceptions so you’ll have a better understanding of how AI tools work and see how they can combine with essential human skills to help us be even better editors.
Misconception 1: AI Is Not Safe to Use with Clients’ Text
There are ways to use AI tools that provide data security. You need to know the specific settings for your tool of choice, however, because each is different. For instance, in ChatGPT, there is a setting you can switch on that stops the company from storing any text you put in their system long-term and using it to train new versions. Claude automatically does not use text to train new versions.
Whichever tool you use, it’s important to have your client’s or employer’s permission before you use AI with their text. Have a conversation with them to explain how you’ll use AI and the security measures you'll take to protect their work. It’s also wise to include a clause in your contract that makes it clear you’ll use this technology.
Misconception 2: AI Can’t Be Trusted
For many editors, getting the facts right is part of our jobs. It’s understandable we’d be worried about earlier AI models’ “hallucinations,” the term for when AI generates incorrect information. But there has been much improvement over the last several months that should alleviate this concern.
There are several quality AI-powered research tools available now. My favorite for general use is Perplexity. This works similarly to a search engine. You type in your query, but instead of getting pages of links of varying degrees of usefulness and reliability, you receive an answer akin to a personalized encyclopedia entry along with citations and links to sources that are overwhelmingly top-tier outlets like research journals, encyclopedias, and trusted news organizations. ChatGPT and Gemini also have access to the live web and can cite their sources when instructed to do so. This speeds up research and fact-checking immensely and ups the trust factor with AI tools because you can see exactly where they are getting their information.
Misconception 3: Using AI Is Cheating
AI can handle a lot of tasks on editors’ to-do lists and vastly speed up the process. When the work is suddenly so much easier, of course it can feel like using AI is cheating. Think about this: Was using spellcheck cheating? Or what about the dictionary? Was it cheating when you had to thumb through the pages to find the entry because you did not have every word in the English language memorized? Was it cheating when editors moved from marking up paper to using word processors?
Editing has always been a collaborative process between editors’ own knowledge, experience, and skills and the tools they've used—style guides, reference books, and technology. AI can be seen as another tool in the editors’ toolkit. When you use AI, it’s giving you suggestions, but you are still the one making the decisions of which suggestions to accept. You are still in control, using your knowledge of what is best for the writer and the reader.
Misconception 4: AI Is Not a Good Editor
Right now, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude absolutely can conduct copyedits (straightforward checks for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style) as well as humans can. I’ll admit that ChatGPT and Claude are often more accurate at copyediting than I am—and way faster, completing in seconds an edit that would take me hours.
I’ve found the editors who say AI isn't very skilled aren’t using the tools correctly. For example, they’ll use a vague prompt like “edit this” and then claim victory when it doesn’t make the precise changes they want. AI does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. If you want it to make a precise type of change, instruct it to do so.
AI is also quite good with content editing. It excels with idea generation. When you instruct it to examine a particular aspect of the text and offer suggestions for improvement, it can come back with so many ideas, some novel ones you may have never thought of on your own. You won’t want to pass along every idea it comes up with to the author, but it can certainly give you good ideas and help to spark ideas of your own.
Misconception 5: AI Can Replace Human Editors
I have heard multiple horror stories about entire editorial teams being laid off and replaced with...wait for it...Grammarly. Instead of writers sending their work to editors, writers are told to send their own work through Grammarly. And we all know how trustworthy Grammarly is, right? (I’m cringing. I encourage the use of many AI tools, but Grammarly is not among them.) Clearly these decisions are being made by people far removed from the day-to-day editorial process, and they are being made with shareholders and bonuses in mind, not readers. Because AI cannot and should not replace human editors.
These algorithms can catch mechanical errors, suggest improvements in grammar and syntax, and improve readability. However, AI can struggle to grasp the nuances of language, such as irony, sarcasm, or subtle shifts in tone. Since AI is built to follow formulas, it also struggles with allowing the creative freedom authors employ when purposefully bending or breaking language “rules.” And it cannot fully appreciate the cultural, historical, or personal backgrounds that shape a writer's voice and message.
Editing isn't just fixing spelling and pushing commas around. Editing involves a lot of soft skills. Editors build relationships with authors. We provide personalized guidance, and we make judgment calls based on our experience, what we know about the author, and what we know about helping the author do their best work for the reader. Human editors offer encouragement and education and nurture talent. Grammarly is not going to grow legs, hop out of the computer, and sit down with the author and explain to them, in precisely the way they know works best for that individual person, how they can improve.
Some companies care more about budgets than creating quality writing, however. This means if editors are to surf this technological wave successfully, they need to learn how to use AI tools so they can do their jobs faster and better than before—AI augmented, with their humanity intact.
Let's be real: AI is here, and it's only going to become a bigger part of our editing lives. By understanding what AI can and can't do, we can learn to use it as another powerful tool in our editing toolkit. It can help us with the nitty-gritty mechanics of editing, speed up our research and fact-checking, and even spark new ideas for improving a piece of writing. But AI can't replace the human touch we bring—our ability to connect with authors, understand the nuances of language, and make judgment calls based on our experience and expertise. With AI assisting us, we have more time to focus on what we do best: helping writers write well.
Erin Servais helps editors upskill through AI. Her AI for Editors course is known worldwide as the leading training for editors of all types, including medical editors, finance editors, education editors, corporate communications editors, and book editors.
A version of this article first appeared in the Editorial Freelancers Association's newsletter. Erin collaborated with artificial intelligence to write this article.
