Rate My
Prose.

What "Rate My Prose" Actually Means

Most feedback you get as a writer is useless. Your beta readers are your friends. Your critique group doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Your mom thinks it's wonderful. The Amazon reviewers are too few and too polarized — the haters are unhinged and the fans are uncritical. You almost never get what you actually need: a trained editor reading your work honestly and telling you what's wrong with it.

That's what the Red Pen does. You paste a chapter — free up to 2,500 words a run — and you get a report that reads like a real developmental editor wrote it. A letter grade. A blunt paragraph verdict. A list of your specific crutch words and overused phrases. A comparison to the authors your voice most resembles. A list of your top technical issues. And a recommended edit level — because sometimes you need a proofread and sometimes you need a full structural overhaul and pretending they're the same thing doesn't help.

It's not going to be kind. It's going to be accurate. Those are different things, and accurate is the useful one.

What's In The Report

• Letter Grade. A to F. An excerpt that would hold up in a traditional publishing submission gets a B+ or better. Most indie-pub first drafts land in the C range. That's fine — C is not a death sentence, it's a diagnostic.
• Verdict. One paragraph in editorial English. What's working, what's broken, what the voice is trying to do, whether it's getting there.
• Status Tag. Amateur / Professional / AI Slop. Three rough categories based on the specific patterns in the text. If your prose has three or more AI tells, you get the AI Slop tag even if you wrote it yourself — which means the tells are in your default voice and worth fixing.
• Favorite Words. The words and phrases your brain reaches for too often. Usually you don't notice them because they're invisible to you. The tool notices.
• Overused Crutches. Phrases you lean on when you don't know what to write. "She felt like." "Something shifted." "He couldn't help but." Every writer has these. The tool names yours.
• Similar Authors. A fast style comparison. Not an insult — a diagnostic. "Reads like Cormac McCarthy with a head injury" tells you what your voice is doing.
• Specific Stylistic Problems. Two or three concrete, fixable issues. Not "your pacing is off" — "your sentence length variation is flat: you're averaging 14-word sentences across six paragraphs and it's making the rhythm monotonous."
• Technical Issues. Mechanical stuff: dialogue punctuation, tense drift, comma splices, filter-word density, em-dash overuse.
• Recommended Service. Proofread, Copyedit, Line Edit, or Full Polish. What your excerpt actually needs — not what you hope it needs.
• Before-And-After. The tool picks your weakest paragraph and rewrites it so you can see what the fixed version looks like. This is the most useful part. You can see the delta between where your prose is and where it could be.

Why "The Red Pen" (And Why It's Blunt)

The Red Pen is a persona. High-end literary editor, brutal honesty, impeccable taste. The point isn't cruelty — the point is that soft feedback teaches you nothing. If an editor tells you "the pacing feels off," you have no idea what to fix. If they tell you "your chapter one has three 500-word scenes in a row with no escalating conflict and the protagonist never decides anything," you can fix that tonight.

Specificity is the thing. Every generic note the Red Pen could have written has been removed. You won't get "tighten your prose." You'll get "you have nine filter words in the first two pages — here they are."

How To Use It

Step 1: Pick a representative sample

Don't paste a polished pitch paragraph you've already rewritten forty times. Paste an actual scene — a chapter opening, a middle scene, an emotional beat — that represents your normal writing. The point is honest diagnosis, which means the Red Pen needs to see the real draft, not the curated showpiece.

Step 2: Take the grade without arguing

Grades feel personal. They aren't. A C+ is not an insult — it's a starting point. Almost every first draft grades C. Almost every revised draft grades B. Almost every published novel's opening chapter grades A-. The grade tells you where you are on that ladder, not whether you should give up.

Step 3: Look at the favorite words

This is the single most useful part of the report. You have phrases you lean on that are invisible to you. A good editor spots them in a week. The tool spots them in thirty seconds. Fix those, and your prose gets 20% better without touching anything else.

Step 4: Use the before-and-after

The rewrite of your weakest paragraph is the crown jewel of the report. Don't just copy it — compare it to yours. What did the Red Pen cut? What did it add? What kind of specificity did it reach for? That's the move you need to make on every other paragraph.

Rate My Prose FAQ

Will this hurt my feelings?

Probably a little. Good editorial feedback usually does. The alternative is feedback that doesn't help, which hurts worse later when your book doesn't sell.

Can I argue with the grade?

You can, but run the tool twice first. Two grades in a row agreeing on a problem is a stronger signal than one. The tool is non-deterministic — run the same text twice and you'll get slightly different verdicts.

What counts as a "C" grade?

Competent. Functional. Has specific problems but also has specific strengths. Most first-draft fiction. Not bad. Not ready.

What counts as "A" prose?

Publishable. Specific. Voiced. Doesn't lean on AI-default phrases or stock metaphors. Varies sentence length. Names emotions concretely. Cuts filter words. Has dialogue with friction. Earns every sentence.

Can I test published books?

Yes, and you should. Paste the opening chapter of your favorite novel and see what it grades. You'll learn what the tool actually values, and you'll recalibrate your expectations for your own work.

What To Do Next

• Prose Rewriter — fix the specific line-level problems the Red Pen named.
• The Humanizer — if your status tag was "AI Slop," run it through the humanizer.
• AI Slop Scanner — finds the specific patterns with regex-level precision.
• AI Beta Reader — structural critique (plot, pacing, character) versus this tool's line-level focus.
• Show Don't Tell Translator — for the specific "telling instead of showing" issues the Red Pen often flags.