Style Writer - a plain english writing software, not only a grammar checker

I first encountered Style Writer tucked away unpretentiously at the back of a computer exhibition. It was competing for attention with a virtual reality game, free teddy bears, and a reconstruction of a Parisian cafe. At least you could tell what the StyleWriter stand was promoting. I liked it already.

The package comes from the UK-based company Editor Software. "StyleWriter is designed for people who do a lot of writing, but wouldn't necessarily consider themselves writers", according to the program designers. I'm sure it could benefit many people who do consider themselves writers.

As a manual writer myself, I believe that good software needs a good manual. When a product claims to help with writing style, its manual is doubly important. The StyleWriter (CD) manual is excellent. It is clear, to the point, and gives you every confidence in the claims of the software.

The package is easy to use; you certainly don't have to be a computer genius. It accepts text directly from the most popular word processing packages or through the clipboard. If you have a little computer experience its use is pretty intuitive, but the computerized manual and tutorial provide thorough backup.

StyleWriter has two kinds of online help. Predictably, one is about using the program. The other is like having the Chicago Manual of Style at your fingertips. For example, if you forget how to use the exclamation mark correctly, advice is available at the press of a key.

As it checks your text, StyleWriter looks for stylistic horrors such as long sentences and passive constructions. It also watches for sexist language, jargon and foreign terms amongst a host of other problems. It checks for up to 26 different categories of stylistic and proofreading pitfalls. The house style category lets you include your own organization's style rules for checking.

StyleWriter is undoubtedly useful for anyone who writes, not just technical authors. It takes the hard slog out of editing, and draws your attention to stylistic faults you probably didn't know you had. In an ideal world, every technical author would have a copy of it.

The Manual
Anne Bradbeer reviews a software package that should bring a touch of style to your work.

White Smoke Review

The White Smoke software is available as a download and works with any program. You can paste text in and copy it out, or simply compose in the compose window. I tried the online demo, and there are some minor differences from the downloadable product. However, most of the main features are the same.

So, what does it look like? It’s a bit like Word, Google Docs and other word processing programs. It’s got a simple array of formatting buttons across the top for editing style, font and font size, followed by buttons for bold, italics, underline, creating coloured text and a few more. The second row has buttons for alignment, bullets and numbering, and cutting and pasting. A cool feature is that it will paste text from Word or plain text depending on the button you choose.

The top of the window has three tabs on the left (enrichment, dictionary and templates) plus two on the right for information. The templates window allows you to load one of 600 templates in the commercial, literary, medical or legal categories and customise them for your needs. The dictionary is a lookup window and the main window, where you write and edit text, is enrichment. At the bottom of a window is a WhiteSmoke button, as well as undo, redo and demo buttons. The bottom right allows you to select the type of writing you are doing (great for those interested in business and literary, less so for those of us who blog for a living) If you’re writing a speech, dissertation or letter, you’re covered too. On to the main window.

Grammar Checking

You can use WhiteSmoke with any application, since it works with cut and paste, and you can also set it to check as you type. When you paste some text in, and hit one of those two buttons you get some text underlined in different colours. The colour code is blue for enrichment/thesaurus, green for grammar and red for spelling, cleverly following MS Word conventions. Here is where it gets interesting. Click on or hover over an underlined word and you get suggestions for improvement. So, how did WhiteSmoke do? I used it to check three articles I was writing for a client.

It picked up well on spelling errors. I use UK English, so it tried to convert them to US English. It found no grammatical errors - I had to insert a deliberate mistake to test that. That’s a major improvement over Word, which always finds grammatical errors where there are none. For me, the winner was the enrichments popup menu. That’s in two parts. The left suggests adjectives and adverbs you can add to enrich your writing, while the right suggests synonyms. Just click to add your changes. I liked some of the suggestions and can see where this type of software would help people who struggle with writing.

There are several different WhiteSmoke products aimed respectively at general writing, business writing, creative writing, legal writing, medical writing and executive writing, as well as a language translator that offers instant translation into 20 languages. There are also pro versions with additional enhancements (currently on sale for $1 when you buy the main program).

White Smoke is a useful product, especially for people who are new to writing or who have English as a second language. Even experienced writers will find it useful on a day when the words just aren’t flowing the way you want.

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