--- title: "Revision tools" description: "Galley's revision tools in full: read-through, book-wide find and replace, overused words, name consistency, the consistency sweep, book-at-a-glance stats, chapter stages, and version history." source: https://usegalley.com/docs/revision --- # Revising your book Here's a hard truth every writer hits: after sixty thousand words you can't really see your own book anymore. You know it too well. Galley's revision tools are a fresh pair of eyes. Every one of them *finds* things and hands them to you. None of them rewrites your prose. What you do with what they turn up is entirely yours. ## Read-through Before you fix anything, read it. **Read-through** pours the whole manuscript into one continuous column, every chapter, end to end, with a faint rule at each seam, so you can read your book the way a reader will, in one sitting, instead of one chapter tab at a time. It's where you feel the pacing sag, hear a chapter open on the same beat as the last, and notice the prose change across a stretch you wrote months apart. Open it from the **Toolkit** menu, next to Preview. It's a quiet reading surface: pick a text size and a light, sepia, or dark page, and a slim bar tracks how far through you are. It's read-only by design, this is for reading, not editing, so nothing you do here can change a word by accident. *Galley read-through mode showing The Lantern of Quiet Hours as one continuous scroll, with reading themes, text size and a progress bar.* Read-through: the whole book in one scroll, with reading themes and a progress bar. ## Book-wide find & replace Open it with **Find** in the top bar, beside `⌘K`, or just press `⌘F`. Unlike your browser's find, this searches **every chapter at once**, so renaming a character or fixing a repeated typo is one search box instead of twenty-six. - Find and replace across the whole book, or step match by match. - Because a sweeping replace is exactly the thing you might regret, Galley **snapshots the whole book first**, so undoing it is one trip to version history away. ⌨️ `⌘F` is the app's find, on purpose. It's wired so it opens Galley's book-wide search instead of the browser's page search, which would only see the chapter you're looking at. Full list in [Shortcuts](https://usegalley.com/docs/shortcuts). ## Overused words Everyone has crutch words: "just", "really", "suddenly", some verb you reach for without noticing. The **overused words** tool counts yours, shows how often each turns up per thousand words, and points you to the chapter where it piles up most. It doesn't tell you to cut anything. It makes the habit visible, which is usually enough. Open it from the book's tools menu, next to [export](https://usegalley.com/docs/preview-and-export). *The Galley overused-words report listing repeated words with their use count, rate per thousand words, distribution across chapters and where each peaks.* The overused-words report: your most-repeated words, their rate per thousand, and where each clusters. ## Name consistency This one saves real embarrassment. **Name consistency** catches the character whose name you spelled one way ninety times and slipped on once: a lone *Sara* among forty-one *Sarah*s, invisible to you and glaring to a reader. It draws on your [cast and their aliases](https://usegalley.com/docs/the-story-bible#characters), your locations, and your glossary, then flags the near-matches that are almost certainly typos rather than real names. ## Consistency sweep This is the mechanical half of a copyedit, the pass a professional runs first and charges you for. **Consistency sweep** reads the whole book and flags four kinds of drift: - **British vs American spelling.** A *colour* here and a *color* there, *realise* against *realize*. It tells you which way the book leans and lists the ones that break the pattern. - **Hyphenation.** *well-being* in one chapter, *wellbeing* in the next. - **Typography.** Straight quotes that slipped in from a paste, double spaces, a space before a comma, three dots where an ellipsis belongs, double hyphens standing in for a dash. - **Numbers.** Small numbers set as digits where the trade would spell them out, offered as an advisory, since ages and years are fair exceptions. Crucially, it **leaves dialogue alone**. A character who says "colour" is characterisation, not a mistake, so a spelling that appears inside quotation marks is noted as such rather than flagged as an error. And like every tool here, it finds and never fixes. It hands you the list, and you decide, with `⌘F` to change any one across the book. ## Book at a glance Open the **Stats** panel from the status bar at the foot. It reads the **shape** of what you've written, not just the word counts. Every chapter's length is a row of bars, so a chapter that's accidentally twice as long as the rest, or a stub you meant to expand, jumps straight out. Alongside it, per chapter and for the whole book: average sentence length, the share of words that fall inside dialogue, the longest paragraph, and how many scene breaks a chapter carries. Live word counts and reading-time estimates sit with them. None of it grades you. There's no target to hit and no red for "too long", because a novel isn't a word-count race, it's a shape you revise. The numbers just make the shape visible, the same way a printed proof makes a layout visible: you see the saggy middle and the all-dialogue chapter, and you decide what, if anything, they mean. ## Tracking what's finished As you work through the manuscript, nudge each chapter along its stages with a click: **Draft / Revised / Final** Your [dashboard](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-first-book) turns those chips into a progress bar, giving you an honest map of how much is truly done versus how much just feels done. See [Chapters & structure](https://usegalley.com/docs/structure#stages). ## Going back to an earlier draft Every chapter keeps a history of past versions: a snapshot each day, plus one whenever you snapshot by hand, move a chapter to a new stage, or make a big change like a book-wide replace. If a revision goes sideways, open the **Version history** panel and: - Hit **Compare** on any version to see exactly what changed between it and your current text: added words highlighted, removed ones struck through. - **Restore** the one you want. Your current text is snapshotted first, so you can't lose it either way. Your own snapshots and milestones are kept indefinitely; only the routine daily ones are thinned over time. There's more in [The editor](https://usegalley.com/docs/the-editor#saving). 🔎 Every tool here finds things. None of them rewrites your book. There's no "AI edit" that quietly changes your voice. The judgement stays yours, which is the whole idea. [PreviousTrim, type & conventions](https://usegalley.com/docs/book-design) [NextPreview & export](https://usegalley.com/docs/preview-and-export)