Most manuscript tools stop at the surface — passive voice, adverb counts, readability scores. Galleys goes where they can't: plot structure, character arcs, voice consistency, continuity, and the AI prose patterns that mark your draft as machine-assisted.
Severity-tiered issues with exact line references, root-cause diagnosis, and before/after revision — the way a Big Five developmental editor works.
Grammar tools and manuscript tools solve fundamentally different problems. Here's what you get at each level.
| Capability | Grammarly | ProWritingAid | AutoCrit | Marlowe | Inkshift | Galleys |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grammar & spelling | ✓ | ✓ | Basic | — | — | — |
| Style & readability reports | Basic | ✓ | ✓ | Basic | Basic | ✓ |
| Plot structure analysis | — | — | Charts | Charts | ✓ | ✓ Deep |
| Foreshadowing tracking | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ Plant → Payoff |
| Character voice grading | — | — | — | Basic | General | ✓ A+ to C per character |
| Continuity / canon checking | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ Cross-chapter |
| AI prose pattern detection | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ 12+ patterns |
| Severity-tiered editorial report | — | — | — | — | Partial | ✓ CRIT / HIGH / MED / LOW |
| Before/after revision examples | — | Rephrase | — | — | — | ✓ Voice-matched |
| Multi-wave revision plan | — | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ 5-wave |
These aren't edge cases. They're the most common reasons manuscripts get rejected — and the hardest for authors to see in their own work.
Twelve distinct patterns that appear 3–10× more often in AI-assisted prose than in published fiction. Em-dash addiction, hedge word constellations, show-then-tell, conflict avoidance, neat parallel cataloguing. If you used AI to draft, Galleys catches what it left behind.
Tracks every plant, reminder, and payoff across your full manuscript. Flags orphaned plants that never resolve, unearned payoffs missing setup, and promise decay — threads that die before they pay off. Uses the 20,000-word reminder threshold.
Checks what each character knows at each point in the story. If your protagonist acts on information she doesn't learn until Chapter 18, but the scene is in Chapter 12 — that's a knowledge-gate violation. Galleys catches it.
Tracks speech patterns, contraction usage, vocabulary level, metaphor domain, and emotional register per character across 50,000+ words. A character who speaks in clipped sentences in Chapter 5 shouldn't deliver florid monologues in Chapter 60.
If you used Claude, ChatGPT, or Sudowrite to help draft — or even if you didn't — these patterns creep into prose. Agents and experienced readers spot them instantly. Galleys flags them before anyone else sees your manuscript.
A vivid image followed by a sentence explaining what the image meant. The explanation murders the image.
Arguments that resolve in the same scene. Apologies within two pages. Tension introduced and immediately neutralized.
"Couldn't help but," "found himself," "something like," "for a long moment," "not quite." Each is a tell. Three on one page is a pattern.
The four-beat structure: "X. Or Y. Or both. Or neither." An LLM signature. Real confusion is messier.
Named emotions instead of evoked ones. The reader should feel it, not be told the character feels it.
"The way" constructions, triple simile stacking, participial phrase openings. Powerful once, a tic when repeated.
Other tools highlight problems. Galleys shows you the revision — written to match your voice, not replace it.
She looked at him for a long moment, something like sadness in her eyes — or perhaps it was resignation, or the ghost of something she couldn't quite name. The way he stood there, hands at his sides, the way he wouldn't meet her gaze, the way his shoulders carried a weight she couldn't see — it told her everything she needed to know.
“I'm sorry,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. She couldn't help but notice the tremor in it. The words hung between them like a curtain, like a wall, like all the things they'd never said.
She held his gaze until he looked away. His hands were still. He was making fists and didn't know it.
“I'm sorry.” His voice cracked on the second word.
Something hot pressed behind her eyes. Her jaw ached from clenching. “I know,” she said, and turned toward the door.
40% shorter. Every emotion shown through physical detail. No similes, no hedge words, no named emotions, no thematic gloss.
Galleys gives you the editorial report your manuscript actually needs — at a price that makes revision possible, not prohibitive.
“Editing is not rewriting. It is helping the author's vision achieve its fullest expression. The author's voice is sacred.”The Galleys Editorial Philosophy