The first essay I wrote at university was returned to me with the phrase ‘awkward prose, needs work,‘ scrawled on the back with a thick pencil. I was mortified, thinking at the time that I was hot stuff and would carry all before me with the power of my pen. Even now, the subject of that one essay is still fresh in my mind, while the years that followed are no more than a hazy memory.

Embarrassing as it was, this episode was my introduction to the painful process of editing, and I’m thankful it happened at a young age. The essays that came after were hacked half to death, reading more like crisp technical manuals than lively historical arguments, but things settled down after a year or so, and the prose became more readable.

We all need to be told our writing is clumsy and awkward at some point, otherwise we carry on in blissful ignorance, inflicting our barely coherent ramblings on the world. When I began work on PageFour, there was no intention of addressing the editing process, my thinking was that this was something every writer must tackle themselves. Instead, the primary focus has always been to improve the writing environment, and remove whatever distractions might exist to interrupt the writer in full flow.

But now I face a dilemma. For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking of introducing a feature into PageFour that would step over this line.

From my own experience, one of the more common problems tackled when editing, is repeated words and phrases, where the same two or three words appear many times across paragraphs, pages and chapters. When this is not intentional, it can be incredibly difficult to catch, often slipping through many editing iterations.

Computers however, have no interest in how smooth your prose reads, and would flag these potential problems in a heartbeat. So the question is, should I implement this feature?

I’ve already designed the user interface in my mind, and it looks good - tucked away out of sight until it might be needed. The way I see the feature working, a single page or a number of pages would be read, and a list of two, three, or four word phrases that appear more than a certain number of times would be displayed. It would then be up to the writer to decide if these needed to be looked at in any detail. An additional linked feature might be a similar list of words or phrases used at the beginning of sentences.

Up to now, I’ve based the design of PageFour on what works for me, but I fully realise that implementing a feature that plays a part in the editing process may prove a serious turn off for many people.

Is crossing the line into editing a step too far?