StyleWriter: Keeping Your Prose in Pristine Form Going Above and Beyond Your Average Word Processor Scott Koegler
Business writing involves several skills, disciplines, and procedures. For most businesses it's rare enough to find an employee that can write professionally, much less follow a particular style the company has developed. StyleWriter from Editor Software won't write your documents for you, nor will it structure your prose into logically flowing communication — that's still the responsibility of the writer. But what it will do is analyze your document for grammatical and linguistic problems, while also identifying words or phrases that need to be changed to match your organization's definition of standards.
StyleWriter installs as both an add-on for Microsoft Word and as a standalone application. If you regularly use MS Word as your editor you can click the icon in the Word toolbar to start StyleWriter's analysis. If you use another editor you'll need to start StyleWriter separately, and you may need to paste your document into the app.
Using MS Word or a similar word processor that supports DDE is the preferred method, though, as StyleWriter uses DDE (dynamic data interchange) to connect to your word processor. StyleWriter can use DDE interactively to apply changes it suggests directly to your document, and will even get out of the way so you can edit the document directly.
You can also use StyleWriter with any other application by copying your text to the Windows Clipboard. This does however make the process more cumbersome since StyleWriter's changes can't be automatically applied. In this case you will need to make the edits manually based on StyleWriter's instructions. It would be helpful if the program had a more generic link and could be used directly with any Windows-based editor.
Going Above and Beyond Your Average Word Processor
So how is StyleWriter different than your average word processor?
All word processors can check your spelling, and most will even review your grammar and suggest changes, but StyleWriter goes beyond that. When StyleWriter is started from its icon in the Word taskbar it performs a preliminary analysis of your document and scores it on three criteria — average sentence length, number of passive verbs used, and overall style.
Different document types use different styles. For example, research papers have distinctly different styles than press releases. StyleWriter offers several choices for the type of document to be checked, including general writing, newsletter, resumé, cover letter, technical report, instructions, and general letter. Selecting the type of document you'll be checking loads StyleWriter's basic analytical parameters.
Besides checking sentence length and the number of passive verbs, StyleWriter's style indexes check for a wide variety of common editorial issues like misused words, confused words, complex words, jargon, abstract words, hyphenation, overused words, legal words, sexist writing, clichés, grammar, and redundancies. And it goes even farther and does some of the same things a human editor would look for, such as overwriting, foreign words, sentence structure check, and even preferred spelling.
