What is StyleWriter?

StyleWriter is the best word processing add-on on the market. It teaches you to write in the style of top authors and journalists by checking every document for thousands of style and English usage faults. Many times more powerful than any other writing aid, StyleWriter improves your writing style instantly.

StyleWriter assumes you can write a sentence and doesn’t check your grammar as Microsoft Word already offers you this feature. StyleWriter can therefore concentrate on offering you practical advice that transforms the way you write.
StyleWriter mimics an expert editor checking, cutting and rearranging your words to produce a clear and readable style.

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How does StyleWriter work?

StyleWriter is an add-on to Microsoft Word to help you edit everything you write into a model of clear English. If you’ve used Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker, you might find a few errors to correct. You might even find the constant highlighting of false errors, especially with the grammar checker, frustrating. If you’ve tried other so-called writing enhancement programs, you’ll soon discover they offer silly advice or offer little that Microsoft’s doesn’t already do.

StyleWriter marks up your document and shows you how to edit each sentence. You can click on any highlighted alternative to change the text in StyleWriter and Microsoft Word. Alternatively, with one click you can go to Microsoft Word to redraft the word, phrase or sentence.

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In the examples above, Microsoft Word does not find any errors or make any editing suggestions. StyleWriter offers spelling, proofreading and editing advice on 33 words, phrases or sentences to produce a redraft that’s 23 percent shorter.

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Designed by experts to pass on their expertise

Designed by journalists, editors and business writing tutors, StyleWriter gives you the skills of a good editor. Simply click the StyleWriter button in Microsoft Word (or any clipboard text) to launch a check for thousands of faults and bad habits found in writing. Trimming the excess words, simplifying and clarifying your style, checking for good English usage — editing is easy with StyleWriter.

Clarity and readability

Most documents benefit from strong editing to improve clarity and readability. Many of us have poor writing habits, making our writing dull and long-winded and this makes it difficult to get our message across. StyleWriter changes your habits by showing you how to edit your writing into a clear and readable style. StyleWriter is the ideal writing software for anyone who needs to communicate clearly in English.

Lawyers, government officials, engineers, educators, accountants are just a few professional groups who have found StyleWriter transforms their writing style. Use StyleWriter and you'll find you soon save time drafting, send more direct and easily understood documents and get better responses from your readers.

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Encourages the clearest writing style

StyleWriter works by teaching you to write in plain English - the style underlying all great writing. Plain English is clear English. Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are writers with a simple, clear and direct style. Time, Newsweek, Scientific America and the Washington Post - just about every successful publication - owe their popularity and readership to adopting a clear, readable style.

Look at your writing through the editor's eyes

Imagine you could afford to pay an editor to improve every document you write. Send off your business plan, technical report or sales letter and you'd get a shorter, clearer and more effective document back. But the cost would be hundreds of dollars.
With StyleWriter you can edit your own documents and save money. Sure, a professional editor would show you other ways to improve your document, but you could get most of the advice offered by running StyleWriter through your text.

Break your writing habits

Good writing transfers ideas and information from the writer to the reader clearly and concisely. StyleWriter encourages the clearest style so your reader concentrates and acts on your message rather than struggles to understand what you want to say.
StyleWriter helps you write in clear English by identifying words and phrases in your writing that get in the way of clarity and poor style. It doesn't encourage a standard style. There's plenty of room for individual style, rhetoric and imaginative writing. So let StyleWriter help you get rid of your poor writing habits, present in most writing, so you can express yourself clearly in your own words.

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Gain new writing skills

StyleWriter shows you how to run the editorial pen through everything you write to make it clear, concise and readable. Why waste time drafting average documents when you can use StyleWriter to write documents that get the results that you want?

StyleWriter users claim the program has led to better results when they write:

• Sales letters bring in more business.
• Press releases get more media coverage.
• Readers act on your suggestions.
• People compliment you on your style and clarity.
• Contracts don't cause disputes because they are clear.
• Web pages increase sales.

The most powerful way to edit any document

StyleWriter displays all your editing problems at the same time, including three key statistics and ratings and a graphic display of your style. As you begin editing, StyleWriter offers intelligent alternatives and sound advice to help you edit your document into clear and concise English. With a split screen of StyleWriter and your word processor, you can go through your document at your own pace. You can click on any style or usage problem with your mouse, or click back to your word processor to edit your text.

StyleWriter edits any document. Articles, press releases, résumés and cover letters, technical manuals, speeches, advertisements, sales letters, proposals, legal documents, corporate communications - you name it, StyleWriter can help edit it. Within seconds of launching, StyleWriter has analyzed your documents for thousands of style and English usage issues.

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StyleWriter's Editing Features

StyleWriter brings together a host of tools to help you improve the style and readability. Its proofreading tools finds many errors missed by Word’s spellchecker and grammar checker. You can even customize StyleWriter to add your own proofreading and editing checks.

Style Checker Passive Verbs Hidden Verbs Complex Words Abstract Words Legal Works Clichés Business Clichés Wordy Phrases Overwriting Foreign Words Unusual Words Jargon buster Abbreviations Difficult Words Jargon Phrases

readability Readability Score Readability Ratings Readability by Audience Readability by Writing Task Sentence Length (Average) Sentence Analysis Graph Sentence Variety Graph Passive Index Good Style Analysis Draft and Redraft Statistics Statistics Archive Sentence editing Long Sentences Difficult Sentences Wordy Sentences

proofreading Spell-check Questionable Words Confused Words Misused Words Hyphenation Word Division Informal Writing Sexist Writing Miscellaneous Words customization User Added User Categories

 

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StyleWriter’s scores and ratings encourage clear writing

StyleWriter has three key scores and ratings shown at the bottom of the program's screen.

1. The Bog Index - an overall score of the clarity of your style.
2. The Average Sentence Length - an important readability measure.
3. The Passive Index - a measure of the most common writing problem.

Each score and rating becomes instantly updated as you edit your document.

When you edit with StyleWriter, you'll discover that StyleWriter shortens sentences and improves word choice making your writing style clear and understandable.

Delete advice that annoys you

Deleting advice from the program is easy. Anything that annoys you - perhaps because it has a different industry-specific meaning - you can easily remove.

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See a breakdown of your writing problems

Identify your writing habits in every document. The left-hand side of StyleWriter's Style Categories screen shows the style problems in document you're checking. You'll find this a great way to know if your style is passive and wordy, abstract or stale.

Use StyleWriter's summary of writing issues to identify your writing habits.

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StyleWriter graphs your writing style

StyleWriter graphs your style and sentence variety to give an instant view of your writing.

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On the left, we have StyleWriter’s graph showing good, clear, interesting and easy-to-read writing style. The right-hand graphs show the typical writing of most writers – dull, long-winded and difficult style.

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Keep track of your improved writing skills

StyleWriter's Statistical Archive lets you record the word count, bog index, style index, average sentence length and passive index of every document. StyleWriter records your scores when it first checks the document (the draft score) and when you finished editing (the redraft score). The Statistical Archive lets you measure the improvement you make to each document. By looking at the original draft score, you can see how your general writing standard improves.

Audit every document written with StyleWriter

Organizations can use this feature to audit all documents produced and to set quality control on the clarity of documents circulated internally or sent to customers.

 

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Add advice to StyleWriter

You can add advice to StyleWriter to increase the power and accuracy of the program. The more you use StyleWriter, the more your writing and editing skills improve. Learning the main techniques of good editors makes you think like an editor and you'll soon spot other ways to improve your writing.

For example, suppose you notice you are overusing the words 'provide', 'involve' and 'undertake', you can add them to StyleWriter and ask it to pop up some relevant advice. It's as easy as using search and replace on your word processor. But StyleWriter searches for everything you add and its 250,000 style and usage patterns and graded dictionary check every time you run the program.

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Make context-sensitive exceptions

You can make context-sensitive changes to StyleWriter's advice to fine-tune it to your own writing needs. For example, StyleWriter suggests replacing 'purchasing' with 'buying' to simplify your style. But what if your job title is 'Purchasing Manager'? You can make 'purchasing manager' an exception. Then every time StyleWriter checks a document it highlights all occurrences of 'purchasing' unless the next word is 'manager'.

Review the changes made to the program

StyleWriter records any changes you make to the program so you can review and reverse them. Most users delete or make exceptions to between 10 and 50 of StyleWriter's thousands of style and usage patterns. StyleWriter's Review Changed Patterns feature lets you view every change you've made. You can even reverse any change you’ve made.

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StyleWriter’s unique and revolutionary copy-editing software works just like a professional, human editor. It checks and advises you on your writing style based on your target audience and writing task.

The program checks a 10,000-word document in 12 seconds against a 200,000 graded wordlist and a 50,000-word and phrase style and usage checker. StyleWriter analyses and highlights:

• Words you can change or cut to simplify your style so your reader effortlessly understands your message.
• Long, complex and wordy sentences to help you trim the fat and write in a clear and concise style.
• Passive and hidden verbs which make writing tedious, long-winded and ambiguous.
• Sentence variety which makes writing more interesting and enjoyable to read.
• Questionable words such as spelling variants and errors that fool other proofreading tools.
• Jargon such as abbreviations and acronyms, difficult, unusual and unknown words and abstract phrases that confuse and turn off readers.

StyleWriter then highlights problems, measures and rates the readability and writing style and offers editing advice and graphs to show you where and how you can improve your draft document.

StyleWriter also finds and measures words and sentences that make the reader’s job easier and more enjoyable such as interesting verbs, nouns, names, conversational style, pronouns, direct questions and short sentences.

StyleWriter offers you professional advice to improve your writing skills.

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StyleWriter’s graded dictionary offers a unique way to find jargon in your writing. Highlights jargon phrases, difficult words and acronyms and abbreviations to help you write in a jargon-free style.

The only editing software to guarantee you write in a jargon-free style:

• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Jargon Phrases
• Difficult Words
• Unusual Words and Unknown Words

StyleWriter uses its graded dictionary and several style categories to highlight jargon in your writing.

ENLARGE

Most jargon consists of abbreviations and acronyms, jargon phrases and difficult words. StyleWriter comprehensively searches and highlights these problems in your writing.

 

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StyleWriter’s standard spellchecker has 200,000 words. It checks every word in your text to see if it is on the list. If it is not, StyleWriter highlights the possible error and looks up the correct spelling in Microsoft Word’s spellchecker.

However, conventional spellchecking technology often misses many contextual spelling errors. Here are some examples of ‘words’ accepted by Microsoft Word:

• the firm’s pubic image when promoting our products in the United Sates,
• which fag to fly when the Quean opens our new offices,
• the sprit of staff when asked to forego the end-of-season bonus, ad
• the meeting to asses the affect of new laws on corporate disclosure.

StyleWriter also has a revolutionary Smart-Spell™ technology – a way of finding errors missed by conventional spellcheckers. The program knows each word’s frequency of use and the probability of it being an error even if spelled correctly. The program’s Questionable category is a filter on the main spellchecker wordlist highlighting words that often fool other spelling checkers. The program’s other categories of Confused Words, Misused Words, Difficult Words, Unusual Words and Miscellaneous categories also find thousands of errors missed by conventional spelling checkers.

 

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Standard readability formulas are simplistic and easily fooled. They only measure sentence length and word length - usually measured by the number of characters. So a conventional readability formula considers following, tomorrow and Wednesday as difficult words but after, today and Monday as easy words.

StyleWriter solves this problem by using its graded dictionary and offers meaningful statistics and ratings you can use to become a better writer.

StyleWriter has three key scores and ratings shown at the bottom of the program's screen.

1. The Bog Index™ - an overall score of the clarity of your style.
2. The Average Sentence Length - an important readability measure.
3. The Passive Index™ - a measure of the most common writing problem.

When you edit with StyleWriter, you'll discover that the program shortens sentences and improves word choice making your writing style clear and understandable.

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StyleWriter is the only writing aid you can fully customize to your writing needs. Add, remove, ignore and make exceptions to editing advice. Add new categories or turn off existing categories to suit your writing needs. Organizations can computerize their existing house style rules.

 

Check for your own style rules and proofreading issues:

• Choose the issues to highlight
• Add advice to StyleWriter
• User-added capitalization check
• Different checks for different audiences or writing tasks
• Delete unwanted advice
• Review changes made to StyleWriter
• Add user-defined categories
• Corporate house style service
• International versions – American, British and Australian

Organizations can also use StyleWriter's with our Electronic Writing Course to train staff. StyleWriter, the plain English editor, backs up the training by showing you how to edit your writing into a model of clear English. The Electronic House Style means you can guarantee employees write dates, product names, numbers and so on consistently.

 

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Style, clarity and readability depend on both your writing task and your audience. Writing instructions for the public must be much easier to read than writing to a specialist audience with relevant expertise. Similarly, writing a good advertisement is different to writing a student essay.

StyleWriter lets you select from 20 writing tasks and three audience types. The program then adjusts its measure and other ratings to reflect the different task and audience selected.

 

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Software Features Comparison Chart

With many revolutionary features, StyleWriter 4 is the by far the most powerful and advanced writing aid software on the market.

 

"StyleWriter acts as a professional editor and will be of use to anyone in business or government who needs to write reports, proposals or press releases. For writing punchy, effective text look no further." - Good Software Guide

 

"Like having the Chicago Manual of Style at your fingertips. StyleWriter is undoubtedly useful for anyone who writes. It takes the hard slog out of editing and shows you stylistic faults you probably didn’t know you had." - The Manual

 

"StyleWriter especially impressed me in flagging only a handful of false errors that are common with grammar checkers. Its advice was intelligent, and it came across as a practical and effective aid to good clear writing." - PC Plus Magazine

 

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"StyleWriter transforms writing into clear, concise and readable style. It is so much more useful than a grammar checker and Version 4 offers even more writing, proofreading and editing expertise." - Federal Government Adviser on Clear Communication

 

"Editors charge about $50 an hour to polish writing. Yet StyleWriter does 80 per cent of the editor's work. I reckon I've saved the cost of the program by running it through just a few articles." - Freelance Journalist

 

"Using StyleWriter is a real eye-opener. It gives instant analysis and ratings for style, sentence length and passive verbs. My style was consistently rated poor until I started to follow the program's advice. Now my writing is consistently good and occasionally the program rates it as excellent." - Accountant Magazine

 

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"I sent my first book to Random House after using StyleWriter to edit it. They told me it was the first draft they had ever received that didn't need editing."
- Textbook Author

 

"I love my StyleWriter software. I've used it for two days and already see an improvement in my writing. Your software is perfect. I recommend it to anyone who is serious about improving their writing." - Editor Corporate Newsletter

 

"Thank you for not only the superb StyleWriter program, but also the excellent support. StyleWriter changes the way I write papers, and the results are impressive." - Student

 

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"I use StyleWriter most days when updating procedures with wide-ranging audiences. The readers notice the difference. Simpler, clearer and straight to the point."
- Document Controller

 

"I'm an editor and publisher and I have found StyleWriter to be such a time saver and an excellent tool. Iam addicted to StyleWriter. It is my secret weapon!"
- Editor & Publisher

 

"StyleWriter has improved my writing on key projects. It has also served as a confidence boost on the pieces that I’ve written. I plan to use StyleWriter in all my copywriting projects as well as magazine articles to help me focus on clear, concise writing." - Freelance Writer

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"What a wonderful program! It's like having a good friend sit next to you as you write, but who has the courage to give honest advice on your writing." - Webmaster

 

"Who can tell if my business plan would have succeeded without editing with StyleWriter? All I know is everyone who read it said it made a refreshing change to read such a clear and well-presented document." - Small Business Owner

 

"You would think that as a journalism instructor I would not need software to keep my writing simple and direct. I seldom write passively, but, alas, I have wandered into the murk of verbosity. StyleWriter delivered my comeuppance. In the beginning StyleWriter disheartened me, unmasking my waywardness. Then it became a tool, almost a friend. Now it is an opponent to defeat in advance. In short, StyleWriter has become a mentor, a teacher, and a friend." - University Professor

 

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"StyleWriter offers a lot. StyleWriter allows good writers to perfect their tool,
challenging lifelong improvement to write with elegance and sophistication. In a nonjudgmental way, StyleWriter reflects with knowledge one’s level as a writer and then points the way to write more simply, clearly and concretely. Even though I am a licensed educator of English and Language Arts, I find StyleWriter a helpful means to stay focused and polished. I really use StyleWriter; it's the greatest tool! " - Educator of English and Language Arts

 

"I'm taking English this semester and StyleWriter has been a life saver.
The best program I've ever used, worth every penny." - Student

 

"After two months using StyleWriter, I wish to congratulate you on this splendid
and useful application. Worth every penny I paid for it." - Engineer

 

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"As I edit, StyleWriter's analysis and ratings of my document change. There's no better encouragement to edit your draft than seeing the improvement in your own scores. I now constantly strive for three excellent ratings." - University Lecturer

 

"Once I followed StyleWriter's advice and switched passive verbs into active verbs,
my writing became shorter, clearer and less ambiguous. StyleWriter's advice on passive verbs alone is worth the price of the program." - Government Administrator

 

"I think StyleWriter a fantastic product. I have just issued a new health and safety manual that I checked and polished using StyleWriter. Staff are really impressed with it because it is so easy to understand and user-friendly." - Health and Safety Manager

 

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"There's more good advice in StyleWriter's help screens than on any $200 business writing course. The screens summarize the key points of the best writing techniques and give me the confidence to tackle any writing task." - Training Officer

 

"I am currently finishing my fourth published book. This latest one has more than 125,000 words and it has become more a matter of information management than art. StyleWriter has been the best single editing product I have ever used. I can't tell you how many hours it has saved me." - Novelist

 

"I absolutely love this program. I have used StyleWriter in all my writing since the first trial I bought. I just keep getting better. It is awesome. The more you use it the easier it is and the better your own writing becomes." - Technical Writer

 

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"I work as a senior marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company. StyleWriter showed us we're not very good - no we're dreadful - at communicating with our customers. Since using StyleWriter, I've gained the skill of writing clearly. It's like shining a searchlight through a sea of corporate fog." - Marketing Executive

 

"Looking back at the way I used to write press releases I now understand why editors didn't bother to publish them. StyleWriter shows me how to write in the style newspaper and magazine editors prefer. The result is more free exposure in the media." - Chief Executive Officer

 

"Your software has been a godsend to me and my staff. We are not professional writers but we write copy for brochures, ads and sales letters. We have seen our writing skills increase after installing and using StyleWriter." - Director Marketing & Sales

 

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